Defenestrate Them All: Canadian Politics 2021

Having gone to a few movies this past summer, I'd move those up the list. I don't think I went to one, out of about a dozen, where there were more than 5-10 people in the theatre; for half, there was me plus one other person or couple. (Sounds counterintuitive, I know--it's safe because everybody thinks it's dangerous.)

I would change almost everything about this plan. But I’m not in charge, and one of the best things I’ve done for my mental health during this pandemic has been absolving myself of the self-imposed responsibility to become an expert in infectious disease & public policy and come up with a BETTER PLAN that I have no ability to influence or implement.

Well said

In Huron-Perth, we start in the orange zone on Tuesday. Meaning I can sit in and drink coffee. Meaning I can read books again. (The two are close to inseparable for me.)

I pray this is it. Please. Please.

Newfoundland back in the covid game! What'd we miss? Do i wear two masks now?

ay fuck it's UK covid plus

The South African variant made it all the way to Abitibi-Témiscamingue, so yeah... nowhere is safe.

Just got to refresh on safeguards. We had mandatory masks indoors and that but...yup

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/variants-lifting-restrictions-second-opinion-1.5912760

A third lockdown would be so dispiriting. Not lifting this one for another two months would be too. No answer.

Took my book over to Tim Hortons tonight, expecting I'd be able to sit in--we reopened in orange, one active case. Still takeout only, with seemingly no sit-in imminent. I was surprised.

It was so nice to be able to go to a bookstore this afternoon. This lockdown was tough.

Oooooof: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-campus-free-speech-academic-freedom-legault-1.5917113

Grateful to this piece for alerting me to this though:

But, he said, the main threats to academic freedom involve corporations trying to suppress research, and beyond that, the way the government allots funding to universities in the province.

Because their funding is based on the number of students enrolled, he said, administrators are afraid of siding against students when disputes with faculty arise.

The groundwork for this system, he pointed out, was laid by Legault himself. As education minister in the late 1990s, he made university funding contingent on meeting certain performance indicators.

Good catch, yeah.

We'll have to see what they actually do but, tentatively, I tend to agree with Portugais that the problems Legault mentions are real but are far from the only, or the biggest, threats to academic freedom. (Incidentally, the one time I had a serious run-in wrt academic freedom and was required to accommodate a censorious student - at U0tt4wa no less - it was due to a complaint from a conservative Christian student. Cancel culture is not limited to radicals on one side of the aisle.) I'm not sure this is widely accepted btw:

It's widely accepted that scholars should be able to debate ideas without fear of repercussion from the powerful, or the popular.

Perhaps there's a necessary discussion to be had about threats to academic freedom in Canada. But as you and Portugais say, the scope goes beyond PC-gone-mad narratives and centring the n-word at the heart of the complaint is at best a strategic mistake, to put it mildly.

We especially can't have that conversation via this government, who tried to ban stores from saying "bonjour-hi" (and while they didn't pass a law, IME there has been a noticeable chilling effect on its use), passed Bill 21, perpetuates and seeks to expand the literal policing of language use, and currently will issue me a hefty fine if I walk outside after 8pm. Notably this govt more or less refuses to admit the mere presence of racism in Quebecois society. It's absurd or at best naive to take seriously the idea that the CAQ cares about academic freedom in any material sense, or they might have mentioned it before "academic freedom" became reduced to "having the right to articulate the n-word rather than use a common euphemism."

Also it's galling that they're accusing students of importing ideologies from the US, when this calculated distraction is directly copied from conservatives in US, ROCanadian, UK, and French culture war campaigns, right down to adopting the exact tactic of accusing people of importing foreign ideas. Which, hilariously, forms a kind of circle, since American conservatives have made Marcuse and Adorno the poster children of bad student ideology. I can't have a conversation about academic freedom when the other side (not you ofc Sund4r, I mean Legault) is blatantly insulting my intelligence.

How did Legault feel about Michael Potter, incidentally?: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.macleans.ca/news/canada/why-andrew-potter-lost-his-dream-job-at-mcgill/amp/

xp
I mean, am I just paranoid for assuming this is where Legault would like to end up?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/world/europe/france-universities-culture-wars.html

Stepping up its attacks on social science theories that it says threaten France, the French government announced this week that it would launch an investigation into academic research that it says feeds “Islamo-leftist’’ tendencies that “corrupt society.’’

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-premier-lashes-out-at-maclean-s-for-suggesting-province-is-in-state-of-serious-dysfunction-1.4034456

The head of the Coalition Avenir Québec, François Legault, called Potter's piece a "rag" based on "shortcuts."

Or JJ McCullough xps: https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/canada/quebec-legislature-votes-to-condemn-article-that-bashed-province-as-racist-1.3276962

well remembered, the hypocrisy is suffocating

Very much agree with you, rob, there is every reason to be suspicious of this government's motives.

I don't find talk of 'language policing' useful, however. Bill 101 exists for a reason, and I wish anglophones would fully understand the privilege of being a native speaker of an international lingua franca. Francophones are far likelier to learn English than the opposite – because English means cultural and economic power – and this results in alienating scenarios such as my wife, a native French speaker with a limited command of English, having to bumble her way through conversations with anglophones who have never made the slightest effort to accommodate her. In Quebec. So it's important to note that the 'language policing' has a history and it's there to ensure that this tiny redoubt of French speakers is able to maintain its difference on an overwhelmingly anglophone continent.

The fact that French almost never makes its way onto this thread is also quite telling, but so it goes.

Point well taken, pomenitul, and ftr I'm not against Bill 101, and I do try to be humble about being an immigrant to this country and culture (not always successfully of course). To make my point with hopefully more grace: I would like to think that in the QC context, nuanced sensitivity about the politics and cultural implications of language would be heightened and suitably complex, not reduced to "free speech" platitudes that are applied with suspicious selectivity.

The fact that French almost never makes its way onto this thread is also quite telling, but so it goes.

ah but you see we have a separate province for such things ;)

I would like to think that in the QC context, nuanced sensitivity about the politics and cultural implications of language would be heightened and suitably complex, not reduced to "free speech" platitudes that are applied with suspicious selectivity.

Alas, papa Legault – whose vocabulary is about as limited as Trump's btw – is incapable of complex discourse. The fact that he's bound to walk the next election is nightmarish and I can only take comfort in knowing that the majority of Montrealers didn't vote for this shit.

And lol, it's true, ILX enacted the separatist dream when the province itself could not.

One more thing: the panic around 'bonjour-hi' was utterly moronic and, I think, yet another way of winning non-Montrealers' hearts, as though it were necessary to begin with.

the bonjour-hi thing really bummed me out (I used to mention the phrase to Americans as an example of how Montreal could be a welcoming and courteous place), but then we got the gift of "bonjour-ho" so maybe it's a wash?

It was adopted by a 112-0 margin.

guess they struck a nerve, lol

Alas, papa Legault – whose vocabulary is about as limited as Trump's btw – is incapable of complex discourse. The fact that he's bound to walk the next election is nightmarish and I can only take comfort in knowing that the majority of Montrealers didn't vote for this shit.

Ontario obviously blows but man I really do not miss trying to figure out if it's even possible to ever unfuck QC politics

Francophones are conditioned to expect French bashing from anglophones so it's hard to take such criticism seriously even when it is justified – it's a Boy Who Cried Wolf-type scenario. The general lack of mea culpas on English Canada's part regarding Quebec's schizophrenic condition is also a problem. It seems to me that anglophones tend to assume that francophones were equal partners throughout the entirety of Canada's history whereas ime francophones tend to overstate the ills that they suffered (Pierre Vallières's famous 1968 essay, whose title I'll let you google, is a perfect encapsulation of this). From my perspective as an allophone, the truth is somewhere in the middle…

(xp)

Basically the Hundred Years' War never ended and expanded to the so-called New World is what I'm saying.

On that note, also in today's news: https://ottawacitizen.com/news/politics/liberals-proposed-language-reforms-seek-equality-of-english-and-french-in-canada

no way is that lady 42 years old

Good. Overhauling immersion teaching methods would probably help as well. Everyone I know who's ever tried it is still unable to hold a basic conversation in French although most of that boils down to working in a 100% anglophone setting and having a 100% anglophone partner who also works in a 100% anglophone setting. The classic Montreal rule also applies: 'when nine bilinguals work with one monolingual anglophone, English prevails ten times out of ten'. No one would ever dare do this in France, and you know what? Anglophones who've lived in Paris for a while usually emerge with decent French skills, and they're all the happier for it. Win-win!

*emerge from it

(I can hold a conversation in French.)

You most certainly can! I forgot you'd done French immersion, but then again, you've gone much further than that, which makes a huge difference.

Re: Legault and 'free speech' on campuses. In France, the minister of higher ed has recently requested an inquiry into the supposed 'islamo-gauchisme' – the French equivalent of 'postmodern marxism' – that is 'plaguing' French universities, so the CAQ's response is tepid stuff in comparison. Polls show that 6/10 French people believe this to be a very real problem. 🤦

At one point Pom I’m going to ask what else the ROC can do to help Quebec. The federal government re-wrote the consitution and Levesque wanted to use it as bargaining tool, they had not one but two referendums on the souveraineté question (thats a lot even per western standards), Quebec has control over parts of immigration, most of education and most of culture, civil law needs to be represented on the supreme court, so does the french language, etc etc.

The same way I am not going to care the slightest if a Thai immigrant doesn’t care about Quebec culture that has just ignored him/her for many generations, I fail to see how anglo-canadians would in the slightest be interested in a culture in which Quebec made it a sacrament to ignore them at best, hate them at worst.

I wish the maritimes, or FNIM, or heck even ~~poor people~~ had even a quarter of Quebec’s attention and power over canadian affairs (I write this passing Sir Georges-Etienne Cartier statue).

But mostlg I am just so tired of people in Quebec using their history to shield themselves against accusations of racism. By any historical or geographical metric, Quebec has had it pretty good.

I'm at the point where I actually think sovereignty would be a good thing, as it would clarify matters. No sense in staying together for the kids if you hate each other's guts. Except, of course, the divorce never came to fruition, as you rightly point out, and so the marital farce continues. Quebec brought this on itself, yes – twice.

I am just so tired of people in Quebec using their history to shield themselves against accusations of racism

100% with you on this.

Imagine massively contributing to one of the largest colonial experiments in history and claiming to be a victim of colonialism, and using that to silence actual victims of colonialism.

That's a bit simplistic, don't you think?

I think that’s the M.O of conservatism in Quebec. I don’t think it represents the entire Quebec population/culture, thank god, we have an incredible amount of open minded people here.

French Canadians did have a rough time of it for two centuries, and that deserves to be underscored (see, for instance, the openly racist Durham Report followed by the Act of Union 1840 and the oppression of francophone proles at the hands of capitalist anglophone elites up until the 1970s, which occurred along ethnic and religious lines, not to mention the legacy of 'speak white'). Does this compare to the suffering endured by other, primarily visible minorities in this country? Absolutely not, no. But I don't think we can pretend it never happened, which is the most common anglophone stance ime.

The way history is exploited by Quebec conservatives is disgusting, however, and does greatly undermine the credibility of such arguments. It doesn't have to be like this, though, which is probably a naïve belief on my part.

For me, French immersion was effective in making French feel like a burden and a requirement, and not very effective in conveying the joy of speaking a second language. When French is the language of school, you kind of want to get away from it as much as possible. I had to find my own motivation later in life to (re)learn the French I know.

That's also something that, perhaps understandably, doesn't seem to enter into language policy. From the way that language policies are framed, enforced, and fought over, you wouldn't necessarily recognize that languages are amazing and we should want to be multilingual for its own sake.

yeah I think that concept is really hard for children to understand, which is unfortunate because they are at the best age to pick up a second language

I hear you on that.

As a freshly arrived immigrant kid, picking up French was easy because both my parents already spoke it and my mother tongue is a Romance language. I had no linguistic preference up until my teens, at which point English struck me as so much cooler in every way, if only because it felt transgressive in a chiefly francophone context. The music I listened to, the films and TV shows I watched, the video games I played, the awesome shit I saw on the internet were all in (mostly American) English and, increasingly, my friends were anglophones as well. The one exception was reading and writing, which I found more pleasant in French.

After high school, I decided to go to an anglophone college, and I continued down that path for a good while, since I also opted for an anglophone university. Halfway through my BA, however, I began taking classes in French again because I felt like something was missing – anglophone perspectives had become a bit too monolithic in my worldview, incidentally crowding out Romanian as well. I moved to France for my MA, and that reconciled me with francophone culture for good, since it forced me to live and think entirely in French, with almost no exceptions. For me, at least (and this ties into what you were saying, jmm), French is a source of diversity, just as I value English and Romanian for providing me with equally different takes on the world, which aren't always reconcilable. I like being able to juggle between them, even though this has also been a source of alienation at times in that I often feel the need to defend whichever culture is being dissed by the other camp.

For me, French immersion was effective in making French feel like a burden and a requirement, and not very effective in conveying the joy of speaking a second language. When French is the language of school, you kind of want to get away from it as much as possible.

this was absolutely my experience going to an Acadian school for elementary!

If French isn't your mother tongue and both your parents aren't francophones and you have access to English, the latter will win out every time. Sometimes even when all the aforementioned conditions are met. We're all intuitively drawn to the idiom of privilege.

yup. having only one francophone parent did not suffice.