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A Montreal Drive-By

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Greene Ave at what is now Boul. de Maisonneuve, circa 1905
Greene Ave at what is now Boul. de Maisonneuve, circa 1905

So here’s the scene.

I’m standing with a friend while she waits for her lift on Greene Avenue in Westmount a few days back. We’re across from the entrance to Westmount Square, about half way between Saint Catherine’s and de Maisonneuve. As we’re chatting we notice a jaunty little tune is coming from somewhere. I figure it’s outdoor speakers at the new Cinq Saisons epicerie just up the way, but it’s getting louder.

We look up the annoyingly empty avenue and see a brilliant light coming our way and into focus.

It’s a rented U-haul pickup truck with a boom-box strapped to the hood and a gigantic menorah protruding from the flat in the rear, all lit up with lightbulbs.

As it rolled to a stop next to us, we saw two young Hasidic men in the cab, smiling from ear to ear.

They rolled down the window and wished us a Happy Hanukkah.

We smiled and returned the sentiment. And then they drove off, just like that.

A Montreal Drive-By…

***

I suppose some might be offended by such a thing, though this certainly wasn’t the case for either of us, regardless of the fact that neither of us are Jewish. Who cares? It was, fundamentally, an expression of good wishes between strangers. It is human to want another to feel good on a day that’s significant to them. How is it any different from wishing someone a happy birthday, or anniversary?

I’m not a Christian, but I won’t take offence if someone wishes me a Merry Christmas. And simple common sense and politesse dictates one return the sentiment as you receive it. I’m not going out of my way to respond with a Happy Holidays to a Merry Christmas, that’s just silly.

Some people in this province, in this city, would take a great offence at the scene I witnessed. I fear some would have responded angrily. Perhaps there’s a reason they were cruising down a deserted Greene Avenue instead of Pie-IX or Parthenais. Regardless, though it may have been an ‘ostentatious display’ of a religion, it caused no harm whatsoever. Contextually, it made sense (inasmuch as it was an appreciably quirky occurrence), it was the last day of Hanukkah.

It was nice. It was pleasant. It’s a story to tell.

And as you might imagine, it brought my mind back to thinking about the broad implications of the proposed (and inappropriately named) Charter of Quebec Values, let alone what it actually says about the society we live in. Bill 60 is nothing but an attempt by the separatists to re-cast Québec society in their image, and according to their often incoherent set of values.

It is an act to institutionalize racism. What would Madiba have thought of this? The great institutions of the province, and of this city in particular, are lining up to defy the law in its entirety.

Perhaps even more importantly, the mayors of Montreal and Québec City, Denis Coderre and Régis Labeaume, are indicating a rapprochement of sorts, and both seem to be asking for ‘special status’ vis-a-vis the proposed legislation, in addition to a general devolution of powers from the provincial government to the province’s two largest cities. This is a particularly interesting political development – a bloc against the PQ representing the interests of about 2.3 million Québécois – and two cities where the majority of the population is opposed to the divisive and thoroughly unnecessary charter. I’m in total agreement with Jack Jedwab; when Premiere Marois says there’s a majority of Québécois who support the charter, she is only referring to Francophones. As far as she’s concerned, the Anglophone and Allophone populations aren’t ‘real Québécois’ anyways.

It’s vile, disgusting, scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel nationalist-populist politics. Gutter politics, the foulest of the foul.

The péquistes, inasmuch as the people of Québec (all of us), need to realize this fundamental point:

Neither the French language nor French Canadian culture is in any way, shape or from threatened. There are ten million French Canadians living in North America and seven million living in Canada, the overwhelming majority of whom live in Québec. The Franco-Québécois community is growing and has been growing ever since the colonial period of the 17th and 18th centuries. There are more French-speaking people in Canada than there have ever been before, but by contrast, the Anglophone community of Québec is shrinking and has shrunk considerably. There are fewer Anglophones in Québec than there were forty years ago, and of those who’ve stayed, they largely learned how to speak French and got better integrated into Québec society.

And as to the immigrants, the first generation Québécois, they too have learned French, and are integrating into our society at their own pace. They’re of a naturally independent disposition, as are the Anglophones of the province, and they’ve formed bonds in their combined efforts to integrate into the broader society and culture.

And as you might imagine, nothing burns the ass of a dyed-in-the-wool separatist more than realizing the fundamental raison-d’etre for their political existence simply no longer exists.

There was once much less integration. There was once serious racial strife. There were once abuses and institutionalized racism of a different kind. There was ecclesiastical and existential oppression, there were (and still are) class struggles.

But people evolve and things change.

René Lévesque never wanted a political party. He wanted the PQ to be a simple political movement, uniting all Québécois in an effort to solidify greater provincial autonomy and bring the provinces and federal government together to re-negotiate the constitution. What he got, he did not expect. Lévesque believed things would not change, but Trudeau proved not only that things could change for the better, but further, that the independent and progressive mentality of Québec could ultimately be integrated into Canada as a whole. That’s why he won. Lévesque didn’t anticipate Trudeau would succeed in repatriating the constitution, ratifying it without Lévesque’s personal endorsement, and then further develop the Charter. Lévesque strengthened Canadian federalism inasmuch as he pushed a serious cultural reformation in Québec, one that would have the (again) unintended consequence of making Anglophones and Allophones better integrated in Québec society.

This is why we’re now dealing with Bill 60, a proposed law that would have been laughed out of any other self-respecting legislative body.

The péquistes know there’s nothing more that can be done on the language front – there’s no threat. This is why Bill 14 was dropped entirely.

So now it’s culture and this idiotic idea that hijabs, yarmulkes and turbans are somehow threats to the stability, sanctity and perhaps even vitality of Québec’s culture and society. Bill 60 is more punitive than Bill 101, and has the potential to put many more people out of work. Crucial people too – doctors, teachers, nurses, early-childhood education specialists and all manner of social and civil-sector workers. Middle class jobs, with good benefits, denied to those who dare to wear a religious symbol, regardless of how subtle and harmless it may be.

There is fear, easily-stoked, of a Muslim invasion, of foreigners fundamentally changing who we are. There’s no empirical evidence, there never is when the PQ asserts a danger, just rhetoric bordering on hate speech and the kind of easy panic you associate with poorly educated backwoods types and siege-mentality suburbanites.

Well to hell with them.

Let the fearful be afraid, let the ignorant remain in the cave.

I’m hopeful the entente cordiale between the mayors Coderre and Lebeaume leads to something really meaningful. They have the power to either make the bill completely unpopular and impossible to make into law, or, barring that, gain the special status our cities’ deserve.

***

I’m reading The Watch That Ends the Night, an impossibly brilliant book by the late, great Hugh MacLennan. In it, he describes Montreal in the early 1950s as follows:

‘In the West End are the old English families, and in the East End there are the old French families. And in between them a no man’s land of international people with international concerns. They occupy the centre of the city, and don’t have much to do with either of the other communities.’

There’s still a lot of truth here, though I would argue that in the last sixty years, the biggest thing to change is that the cosmopolitan middle ground has extended quite a bit in all directions away from the centre of the city, and at least on this island, the French and English camps that really were once two solitudes have integrated, at the very least, into the cosmopolitan aesthetic so popularized by those living in the ‘no man’s land’. And none of this has made us any less culturally whole, nor any less socially distinct.

We are what we are, as we are and have always been, so why are our politicians trying to forcibly change us?

I hope we’ve got some fight in us left, this bill cannot pass.

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How to Beat Bill 60

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Excellent retro shot of the Jewish General Hospital before it began it's multi-phase expansion - I'm guessing 1984
Excellent retro shot of the Jewish General Hospital before it began it’s multi-phase expansion – I’m guessing 1984

Defy it.

With extreme prejudice…

A tip of the hat is owed to Dr. Lawrence Rosenberg, head of the prestigious Montreal Jewish General Hospital, for firing the opening salvo in the people’s defiance of Bill 60, the proposed charter on state secularism in Québec.

Among other things the bill stipulates all public-sector employees would be banned from ‘ostentatious displays of religion’ including wearing a yarmulke, hijab or turban while on the job. The ubiquitous displays of Catholicism in every conceivable aspect of daily life in Québec gets to stay as these are deemed to be of ‘historical and cultural value’, though apparently, the historical and cultural value of our ethno-cultural minorities constitute some kind of threat to middle-class, mainstream Québécois society. This means the large glow-in-the-dark cross atop Mount Royal, inasmuch as the crucifix behind the speaker’s chair in the National Assembly, will not be removed, but some Sikh surgeon will have to remove his turban if he wants to keep his job.

I’m an atheist, a socialist and a progressive. But I’m also a libertarian, though not in any contemporary American sense. I believe an individual ought to be free from religious persecution, insofar as their religious practice neither harms themselves, their relations or their community, nor places an inconvenience on the society at large. This thought is not my own – from my understanding this is the law of the land. Freedom from religious persecution is in the Charter of Rights and Responsibilities.

The Canadian Charter of Values.

I’m with Tom Mulcair on this one, the proposed Bill-60 is nothing but politically-motivated, state-sponsored discrimination.

I believe an argument can be made in which it is in the state’s interest to propose a dress code in the public service, especially in the domains of health and education. Certain religious garments, such as the niqab or burqa, would present an inconvenience to the public interest – the face is covered, and it’s as simple as that. These kinds of face coverings present an unnecessary communication barrier; it’s completely impractical throughout the entirety of the public service.

But let’s put this aside for a moment and ask ourselves a question – is it even worth formalizing such an objection of these particular garments? How many Muslim Québécoises who wear these particular garments are actually applying to the provincial civil service each year? Do we have to make fundamental alterations to our province’s legal and political foundations or can this simply be an edit to some kind of internal HR manual?

It reminds me of Herouxville passing laws against women being stoned to death or burned with acid. It was an amazingly insane instance of unencumbered small-town ‘multi-culturalism panic’.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but is this not already covered by the Criminal Code? Do we not have laws against murder and assault? And do we not already have a secular judiciary, one that is blind to religious consideration so as to liberate the state from such an incumbrance?

pauline-marois

This kind of panicky, irrational fear was unfortunately poorly articulated by none other than Québec uber-vedette Celine Dion. As Jack Jedwab of the Association for Canadian Studies points out, her concerns that she thinks justifies the charter’s implementation are ludicrous – no one’s taking down any goddam Christmas trees. Ms. Dion’s comments are a perfect representation of the kind of misguided thinking that has become troublingly prevalent amongst an a swath of the Québécois middle-class (though it’s by no means a Québec phenomenon; you could make the argument that Québec is following France’s example too closely, and that both share similarities with a host of xenophobic laws passed throughout the United States in the past decade).

The bill is hypocritical to the core and is, in essence, a method by which the PQ can sew its values into the provincial political fabric at a moment when a referendum is out of the question and the grip on power tenuous at best. The PQ knows it has an election somewhere on the horizon and as long as its economic record remains what it is – which is shitty – the Québec Liberals have a real shot at regaining power at some point in the next six months. Since the Marois government can’t do much else it is going into a perpetual campaign mode, and Bill 60 is their attempt to shore up their political base. They’ve spun it every which way – it’s pro-women, it’s modernizing – but it’s also, fundamentally, unfair and its unnecessary, punitive implications are too large to ignore.

The grim reality is that if this bill goes into law, a great many people, almost all of whom live and work in the Greater Montreal region, are suddenly going to find themselves in a position in which they have to choose between their jobs and their faith; religious minorities will be officially persecuted in the province of Québec. And who will bare the brunt of this new legislation? Why women of course; thousands of working moms who live in Montreal. Here’s a fantastic argument by Anne-France Goldwater as to why this so-called charter of values is a blatant attack on working first-generation Québécoises, a state-sponsored attempt to deny recent-immigrants access to the lucrative pool of civil service and public sector jobs.

In Québec’s political context Montreal is a prize and power base for one party and a liability, an inconvenience for another. Multiculturalism works in Montreal, and I would argue it evolves into a special kind of interculturalism all on its own, without government interference. But this flies in the face of the PQ stands for, and their vision of Québec. The PQ views itself as Québec incarnate, in much the same way that Tea Party Republicans view themselves as ‘real Americans’, and both are using the same fundamental tactic to achieve diverse goals – they define terms and tone first. The PQ has been doing this for years; Bill 101 established that there was a threat to the French language and culture in Québec and the bill was the response to it. Today it’s a fundamental component of our laws and most accept that this is the case, regardless that current statistical and demographic information is telling us the complete opposite.

This is Bill 101 2.0

Much like its linguistic forebear, Bill 60 places economic and socio-political limitations on minority populations. It is a ghettoization measure, and may result, much like the ‘Anglo Exodus’ of a generation ago, in a minority exodus of a kind.

So how do we, the free-thinking, address such Draconian laws?

We must defy them.

Director General of the hospital, Dr. Lawrence Rosenberg put it best “Since the bill is inherently prejudicial, there is no point in taking advantage of any clause that would grant us temporary, short-term relief” when referring to five-year implementation delays specifically designed for institutions such as the Jewish.

He went on to say that if the bill ever becomes law, the hospital will simply ignore it outright.

Right on.

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A few things since I’ve been gone…

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Boxes - Taylor C. Noakes, Spring 2013

So I should start off by saying that yes, there has been a flu bug going around, and I caught it and have been bed-bound since Friday night. The most walking around I’ve done since then was to walk from my GP’s office to the Queen Elizabeth Health Centre, a walk which I’d normally thoroughly enjoy, though today it damn near almost killed me.

Turns out I caught some kind of a bronchial infection along with the flu, and thus have been coughing like a TB case. The unintended consequence was that I’ve stopped smoking, and can now smell much, much better than I have in many, many years.

As to the Queen E, it’s an excellent facility. Though it used to be a nearly full service community hospital, it got the ax (along with the Reddy Memorial – today’s YMCA hostel near Cabot Square – and another hospital that escapes me at the moment) back in the 1990s when the government was dealing with major budget cuts to health and education (sound familiar?) Today it’s rundown and in dire need of some reno work, but basically serves as an enhanced CLSC with a wide variety of diagnostic and community health services offered. I wish them luck. I can imagine Westmount-adjacent former hospitals named after an old Brit are in the crosshairs of some PQ gov’t hack.

That said, there was one lady in the radiology dept. who clearly did not like her job and wanted you to know it. The kind of person who doesn’t say hi or even make eye contact with people, but who sternly says ‘read the sign’ before you have a chance to say hello yourself. This same person is also the kind of individual who casually ignores a person standing in front of her for five minutes. Was it not obvious I had a simple question to ask?

Perhaps she was having a bad day, but I don’t really give a shit. There are days when we all hate our jobs – it doesn’t give anyone the right to be a grade-A prick.

And for the record, this woman was a WASP.

Every single other person I encountered, from the lady at the info desk to the guys in the canteen, the various radiologists and X-ray technicians – all were delightful, warm, open, sincerely nice, comforting people. Many of them would be described as ‘visible minorities’. The Indian guy in the lab coat brought me the funnies after I had jokingly enquired about the quality of magazines in the waiting room. By contrast, the other white person I encountered got nervous when he heard me coughing, strolled over and tossed me a face mask without saying a word. Rude. I’m not contagious; least he could have done is asked if I was okay.

Fucking white people – always bringing me down.

And on that note – the one group of blancs I despise the most, PQ sympathizers and separatists, are going above and beyond to make immigrants feel as unwelcome as possible these days.

I hate the PQ with every fibre of my being, and here’s why:

At the top it’s all philosophical, academic, serene discussions and musings about the complexities of cultural integration and Québec’s future in North America. But at the bottom, the foundation that props up the PQ elite is composed of some of the most backwards buck-toothed hillbilly scum this province has ever produced. They are the 49% of adult Québécois who lack basic literacy skills. These are the people who take it upon themselves to fight the PQ’s battles ‘on the front lines’.

Whether it’s STM employees: example 1, example 2, example 3

Or just your average schmuck riding the bus…

Or some schmuck at the mall…

Or the thousands of primary and secondary teachers in the CSDM system who teach in immigrant-heavy public schools on the island of Montreal, and who half-ass it because they know they can get away with it. Just about every single immigrant I’ve ever known or ever met who attended a French language public school has at least one story of a teacher who did nothing to hide their absolute disdain for the people he or she was teaching. This point was echoed rather masterfully by local comedic super star Sugar Sammy, who recounted how his high school history teacher was little more than a PQ propaganda machine, and promptly gave up on his students the day after the 95 Referendum.

It’s not just sad, it’s tragic this is what we’ve allowed our province to become.

The news today is that violence against Muslim women in this province has risen considerably since the institutionalized racism charter was first proposed.

The violence, as always, is being committed by the little people down at the bottom. The PQ can claim they only intend for reasonable discussion, and can appeal to the public for calm, but they know goddam well this happens every time. Their rhetoric primes people, stupid, stupid people, for hate, and they win elections because of it.

As an aside, the pharmacist who helped me out with my prescription wore a hijab. She spoke both English and French fluently and was friendly, helpful, warm – exactly the kind of person you want to deal with when you feel like you’re on death’s door. She didn’t try to convert me, we didn’t discuss religion and she seemed pretty damn well integrated into our society from my vantage point (and brief exchange of words).

As a pur-laine Québécois (which I am and have the documents to prove) I can tell you first hand I didn’t feel socio-culturally threatened in the least.

I felt cared for.

I have never felt cared for by the PQ.

The sooner we erase this clown college from our collective memory the better. The single greatest threat to Québec is the Parti Québécois. Whatever good that may have come from the premiership of René Lévesque (and I would argue strongly that he did good things for our province and our people), has now been completely undone by the ruthlessly regressive, fundamentally racist party that now idolizes him as patron saint.

Frankly, if mon oncle René were alive to see this, he’d disavow the party entirely.

End of rant…

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Pensées sur la rentrée

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Clouds over Saint Henri - Summer 2013
Clouds over Saint Henri – Summer 2013

It’s official, Montréal’s exceptionally large student population is now safely locked away in their classrooms and lecture halls, allowing old people to once again return to our city’s streets, public spaces and transit systems, confident in their knowledge they won’t be subjected to anything too shocking from the young folk for many dreary months.

Fall announced itself over the long weekend in an odd manner: Saturday was humid with low, thick clouds, breaking in the afternoon. Sunday was a reminder of some of the really beautiful (yet unfortunately few) sunny summer days where all manner of colour explode all around you. And Monday, well, by Monday the party was over – fall was back with a vengeance. It was an odd day of alternating mugginess and fresh river breezes, clouds rolling all day with small breaks to show the azure skies behind. By dinner time the rains that held off all day soaked the city through and through, and then the clouds broke again, before returning with thunderclaps and lightning dancing across the night sky. And today the smell of poplar leaves lingering in my nostrils… autumn; the dynamic flourish of life before death.

What a town to live in. Today I got giddy thinking about walking through the forest on the mountain five or six weeks from now on a sunny day when the leaves look like an artist’s impression of fire in stained glass. Orange, yellow, red and green on a blue background.

What a pallet!

In any event, no more chromatic deviations, on to the task at hand.

Our schools kinda suck.

Granted in absolute terms we’re doing just fine, but on a national and provincial level our public schools have a lot of problems we’re not addressing. The drop-out rate in the public French sector is embarrassingly high. Some schools sit half empty while other burst at the seams, and in some cases these schools are within a block of each another. Street gang infiltration is a surprising and serious problem inasmuch as the casual disrespect shown towards inner-city students by the local police force (who all too often assume any group of three or more non-white adolescents constitutes a street gang). And if all that wasn’t enough some of these schools are stuffed full of asbestos or have had water infiltration for so many years toxic mould is sprouting in the air ducts.

The people deserve better. The kids deserve better. We shouldn’t have to pay a fortune to send our kids to private schools, the public sector must provide. After all, it’s one of the things our taxes pay for, and we pay a lot in taxes. There’s absolutely no legitimate reason our schools and public schooling system should fail the way it does, causing social problems, furthering the class rift, costing what it does without producing the results we want. The denigration of the public education system further impoverishes the middle class and drives suburban flight. There’s no pride in having to pay for your child’s education – it’s a failure of the state we live in.

I’m astounded we don’t demand better.

Perhaps we inadvertently lost sight of things, but a cursory examination of the local public education system offers some glaring examples of how and why local public schooling seems to be on the decline.

The fundamental problem is the near total lack of efficiency. Multiple boards, multiple unions, unnecessary duplication, inefficient space usage, poor maintenance, no standardization, – the list goes on and on.

Segregation, in my opinion, is the source of what ails and may ultimately severely damage our local public education system. The PQ’s decision to eliminate religious school boards in the late 1990s was a move in the right direction and a move towards greater efficiency and a positive reinforcement of state secularism. Montréal should take this a step further and unite all the school boards operating on-island into a single city-administered department of education. Ending segregation may save us a lot of money.

Imagine an end to linguistic segregation in Montréal public schools – I can’t think of a better way to integrate immigrants into our society than by demonstrating our own ability to integrate the minorités-majoritaires. Think about it. We send the kids of the people we want to integrate into our society to the overcrowded and underfunded French public sector, which in this city is losing Franco-Québécois enrolment to the private sector, while Anglophone schools with French Immersion and International Baccalaureate programs sit half empty. It’s insane; if there was just one board student distribution would be more even – no empty schools, no over-crowding. Integrating the school boards cut could busing budgets since students would simply go to the school nearest their home, rather than being shipped halfway across the city. Everything would be streamlined – from text book selection to resource allocation to cafeteria services, providing the potential for major savings as new areas of efficiency are exploited.

One island, one school department, but ultimately two languages.

This is the fundamental compromise – this new arrangement would require the integration of English and French school boards, their teachers and respective staff. It would mean all Montreal children would be taught the same regardless of what language they speak at home, and thus, the language of instruction and internal communication for this new island-wide education department must be officially French.

But not absolutely French. A good compromise cuts both ways.

If the English boards were to accept a French education department for the whole island, the French boards would have to accept a degree of bilingualism in public education for all Montreal children. I’d argue 30% of class time ought to be in English and 70% in French from kindergarten all the way to grade 11. This mix will, in my opinion, would thoroughly guarantee the survival of the French language and culture in Montréal while simultaneously providing a foundation of English-language instruction necessary for life in Canada. I’m pretty sure the end result would be a greater appreciation of both languages by all Montrealers, regardless of mother tongue or cultural background.

There are many reasons we should head in this direction – we’ll save money, get more bang for our collective buck, better ensure social cohesion and create the winning conditions for a local public education renaissance. We have all the social and economic reasons to pursue this, and yet, we’re incredibly cynical.

I’ve been told this could/would/should never happen.

That disappoints me.

I think Montrealers ought to have a greater say in how our children are educated, and ending segregation in our public schools, regardless of whatever the current provincial government may say, is the right way forward for our city.