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I grew up in French-speaking Quebec through the controversial 1960s and '70s. In 1967, at the opening of Expo '67, French President Charles DeGaulle shouted 'Vive Quebec Libre' into the streets of Montreal and created a major wave in not only Quebec, but throughout the country. The October Crisis soon followed - the kidnapping of diplomat James Cross and the kidnapping and murder of government minister Pierre Laporte by the Front du Liberation de Quebec (FLQ), a radical group fighting for independence from the rest of Canada. The hijacking of an airplane by the same group soon followed at the Montreal Airport. Big events in those days. The result was Canadian troops and tanks on the streets of Montreal and throughout Canada. But why would French Quebecers want to separate from Canada?
Joseph Quesnel, a Nova Scotia-based policy analyst, says: 'The larger question of why French Canada is sensitive about ... attacks requires a look at Canadian history. Although the Quebec Act of 1774 allowed French Catholics to preserve their language, religion and culture, it didn’t take long for anglophone Protestant settlers to say they wished French Canadians would disappear.' This attitude did not and has not changed for hundreds of years; the animosity between French and English may be sublimated, but it certainly hasn't gone away.
Not race, not color, not sex, not religion in Quebec - but language. In Quebec, prejudice wasn't the glaring hatred of the black and white struggle south of the border, the enforced separation of water-fountain and restaurant between peoples, but a murkier, less distinct understanding of privilege, a pervasive awareness that I, as an English person in Quebec, was somehow superior to my French counterpart. Anglophone attitudes were passed down for hundreds of years and reflected by the fact that using French in the courts or in schools up until the 1960s, was often illegal.
Whatever the prejudice, the blight of inequality and intolerance that has been inherited from generation to generation through hundreds of years of ignorance and fear of other is not going to disappear because of social injustice lawsuits, social change or enforced legislation. It's always too late because hateful views have already been passed down, once again, to our children's children's children.
