Pardon our French
Ric Dolphin - Monday,28 November 2005
Western Standard
Negativity is a much maligned quality. From mom's "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything" dictum, through Spiro Agnew's "nattering nabobs of negativism," to the assorted election campaigns gone bad because--we are assured by the winners--they "went negative," nay-saying has taken its share of hits.
This undeserved denigration has been especially exacerbated in the last decade and a half by political correctness--otherwise known as liberalism--which has done its damnedest to camouflage every negative as a positive. This was not an instantaneous process but an erosion marked by a cloying prettification of the language. Pervert eventually begat "differently oriented." Criminal begat "offender." Crippled begat "handicapped" begat "disabled" begat "challenged" begat "differently abled" begat "special" (as in he's unable to walk because he's special).
The examples are numerous, but the general inclinations for PC-speak are the same. They may be to spare someone's feelings (e.g., she has incontinence issues; not, she fills her diapers hourly). They may be to advance a cause (e.g., lucky Fritz has two mommies; not, poor Fritz is being raised by a couple of lesbos). They may merely be cowardly--to avoid a confrontation (e.g., Quebec is a distinct society; not Quebec is a basket case).
In Canada, along with the "First Nations People" (née Indians), Quebec has been the archetypal beneficiary of political correctness. For about 40 years now, the mainstream media, politicians, the judiciary and academia have fallen all over themselves in a group indulgence of la belle pain dans le butt. It has become not just gauche, but bigoted to criticize a province that consistently elects governments and trade unions that take it down the road to what, in any real world, would be referred to as ruin.
With a provincial debt of $117 billion, an unemployment rate close to 10 per cent, the highest income taxes in North America, an addiction to social programs that far exceeds its means, a morbidly obese civil service, an ongoing exodus of the young and talented, and a pig-headed insistence on restricting its citizens to a language that otherwise would have disappeared from the continent years ago, Quebec should have succeeded Newfoundland as the butt of our national jokes.
That this hasn't happened has a lot to do with political correctness--handmaiden to all the liberationist movements that so entranced the people of the 1960s. In Canada, we didn't have blacks being lynched, but we did have those poor pea-soupers whose artistic and trade unionist inclinations were being trampled by Maurice Duplessis and his demon priests. Any port in a storm.
Former premier Jean Lesage's subsequent unionization of all things that breathed was the Quiet "Revolution." His citizens became, to borrow a book title of the day, the "White ******s of North America." The student hijinks of the FLQ, complete with Frantz Fanon impersonations, the blowing up of a statue of Queen Victoria and a couple of political murders, became our Kent State or Chicago Race Riots or something like that.
It was all so cool and so happening; so now. The séparatistes wore bandanas, sang angry folk songs, had hot-looking girlfiends. Who but a fuddy-duddy could resist? And no ambitious politician in the late sixties or seventies could afford to be a fuddy-duddy. Thus the separatist movement begat the Parti Québécois, which started to talk referendum and, like magic, the Liberal government in Ottawa became Quebec's bitch.
Affirmative action programs to make francophones the majority in the federal civil service? You got it. French language radio and TV in Calgary and Nunavut? What's a few tens of millions? Equalization transfers to support $5-a-day day care, $900-a-year university tuitions and the other countless wonders of Quebec's welfare state du berceau á la tombe? Pas de problème. A party in Parliament dedicated to the separation of Quebec? Hey, why didn't we think of that?
There was a lot of blather in the press tied to the 10th anniversary of the Oct. 30, 1995, Quebec referendum in which separatism, or at least "sovereignty-association," was avoided by less than one per cent of the vote: near disaster averted, separatist sentiments on the rebound, how clear is the clarity bill, blah, blah, blah. The blather was followed by the release of part one of the Gomery report, which reiterated and encapsulated what we had learned during the Gomery inquiry: Liberals spending money on their pimps in Quebec under the pretext of warding off separatism; Gomery revelations hurting the federalist cause in Quebec. Ho-hum.
But interrupting the proceedings mid-same old, same old came a brief, bracing whiff of political incorrectness from no other than the former PQ leader, former federal Tory, and former hubby to the hot Californian stewardess Audrey Best. Lucien Bouchard, now a 66-year-old lawyer, was the star name on a manifesto produced by a dozen business people, academicians and media worthies entitled, "A Clear-Eyed Vision of Quebec." The tract called on Quebec to stop pissing away money, pay down its debt, reduce taxes, curb unions and claw its way out of the sad economic and demographic hole it has descended into in the past 30 years. In short: take responsibility. And, oh yeah, the paper also pointed out that separatism might not be the panacea the majority of francophones think it is.
Ol' Pegleg, one might recall, was the man who presided over the province from 1996 to 2001, when debt as a percentage of GDP increased from 45 per cent to 54 per cent. He is the self-same fellow who once said that separation would be the "magic wand" to eliminate economic problems by directing tax from Ottawa to Quebec City.
The manifesto sounded more like Liberal Leader Jean Charest in his post-election salad days when he still dared speak of "re-engineering" the province (before the public sector unions forced his retreat into waffledom and the usual dodge of throwing more cash at health care). Bouchard and his co-manifestians even referred to the unions as "fossils of the 20th century." They compared the enervating status quo in present-day Quebec to the "grande noirceur" (the great darkness). This phrase has a special resonance among those of the white ****** school of Quebec thought. It was coined in Refus Global (total refusal), the seminal 1948 manifesto by a cadre of anarchist artists that attacked Duplessis and the priests, and whose noodlings were the seed from which the Quiet Revolution and all the rest of it would sprout.
In other words, Bouchard's manifesto was great stuff, but not the kind that most Quebecers care to hear. Polls showed the majority did not like the sound of such notions as raising university tuitions, bringing hydro rates to realistic levels or otherwise curbing the outlandish social spending that is viewed as a birthright by the citizenry. Who needs such negativity? Like a loud fart at a cocktail party, Bouchard's manifesto raised a few eyebrows, but will doubtless be lost to the inevitability of Quebec's decline.
The PQ is poised to choose either the doughty former finance minister Pauline Marois, 56, or the more photogenic former environment minister André Boisclair, 39--a homosexual who admits to having used cocaine while in office--as its new leader on Nov. 15. (A poll showed more than 70 per cent of respondents didn't mind either of Boisclair's deviations. How cool is that?) The way the polls have been for the past couple of years--the latest has 50 per cent support for the PQ, 30 for Jean Charest's Liberals--odds are good the separatists will be returned to power in 2007.
We can then expect another referendum, lots more Liberal-sponsored hand-wringing, and the unseemly spectacle of Conservative Leader Stephen Harper or his successor hopelessly striving for support in Quebec. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même vielle merde.
I suppose I should offer the obligatory paean to the beauty of the Quebec countryside, the cosmopolitan nature of Montreal, the charms of Quebec City, the captivating qualities of the national character and those funky bistros. All true enough, but beside the point. Quebec is a nice place to visit, but it is a foreign country--as anyone who has crossed the border from Ontario can attest, and as more than half of the Francophonie keep on trying to drum into our thick skulls.
In 1995 and the years after, hundreds of millions of our dollars were spent on waving the Maple Leaf in a province that laughs with Gallic disdain at such glee-club antics. The sponsorship scandal and its corruption only validated the disdain, and will be exploited by the PQ and the Bloc to virtually extirpate Liberals from the province's next election.
The franco-phoneys of the PC brain trust in Ottawa and Toronto insist that we must continue with the charade; that the loss of Quebec would be tantamount to the breakup of Canada. They should get over it. If the country cannot survive without a foreign, costly province that doesn't really want to be a part of the federation other than for the money it can extort from the rest, then the country doesn't deserve to survive.
It is time for opposition leaders to stop trying to learn French and to stop pretending. It is time to admit the emperor has no clothes. It is time to jettison the political correctness and embrace the negative reality. It is time to wish Quebec au revoirê, bon voyage and bonne chance.
Ric Dolphin - Monday,28 November 2005
Western Standard
Negativity is a much maligned quality. From mom's "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything" dictum, through Spiro Agnew's "nattering nabobs of negativism," to the assorted election campaigns gone bad because--we are assured by the winners--they "went negative," nay-saying has taken its share of hits.
This undeserved denigration has been especially exacerbated in the last decade and a half by political correctness--otherwise known as liberalism--which has done its damnedest to camouflage every negative as a positive. This was not an instantaneous process but an erosion marked by a cloying prettification of the language. Pervert eventually begat "differently oriented." Criminal begat "offender." Crippled begat "handicapped" begat "disabled" begat "challenged" begat "differently abled" begat "special" (as in he's unable to walk because he's special).
The examples are numerous, but the general inclinations for PC-speak are the same. They may be to spare someone's feelings (e.g., she has incontinence issues; not, she fills her diapers hourly). They may be to advance a cause (e.g., lucky Fritz has two mommies; not, poor Fritz is being raised by a couple of lesbos). They may merely be cowardly--to avoid a confrontation (e.g., Quebec is a distinct society; not Quebec is a basket case).
In Canada, along with the "First Nations People" (née Indians), Quebec has been the archetypal beneficiary of political correctness. For about 40 years now, the mainstream media, politicians, the judiciary and academia have fallen all over themselves in a group indulgence of la belle pain dans le butt. It has become not just gauche, but bigoted to criticize a province that consistently elects governments and trade unions that take it down the road to what, in any real world, would be referred to as ruin.
With a provincial debt of $117 billion, an unemployment rate close to 10 per cent, the highest income taxes in North America, an addiction to social programs that far exceeds its means, a morbidly obese civil service, an ongoing exodus of the young and talented, and a pig-headed insistence on restricting its citizens to a language that otherwise would have disappeared from the continent years ago, Quebec should have succeeded Newfoundland as the butt of our national jokes.
That this hasn't happened has a lot to do with political correctness--handmaiden to all the liberationist movements that so entranced the people of the 1960s. In Canada, we didn't have blacks being lynched, but we did have those poor pea-soupers whose artistic and trade unionist inclinations were being trampled by Maurice Duplessis and his demon priests. Any port in a storm.
Former premier Jean Lesage's subsequent unionization of all things that breathed was the Quiet "Revolution." His citizens became, to borrow a book title of the day, the "White ******s of North America." The student hijinks of the FLQ, complete with Frantz Fanon impersonations, the blowing up of a statue of Queen Victoria and a couple of political murders, became our Kent State or Chicago Race Riots or something like that.
It was all so cool and so happening; so now. The séparatistes wore bandanas, sang angry folk songs, had hot-looking girlfiends. Who but a fuddy-duddy could resist? And no ambitious politician in the late sixties or seventies could afford to be a fuddy-duddy. Thus the separatist movement begat the Parti Québécois, which started to talk referendum and, like magic, the Liberal government in Ottawa became Quebec's bitch.
Affirmative action programs to make francophones the majority in the federal civil service? You got it. French language radio and TV in Calgary and Nunavut? What's a few tens of millions? Equalization transfers to support $5-a-day day care, $900-a-year university tuitions and the other countless wonders of Quebec's welfare state du berceau á la tombe? Pas de problème. A party in Parliament dedicated to the separation of Quebec? Hey, why didn't we think of that?
There was a lot of blather in the press tied to the 10th anniversary of the Oct. 30, 1995, Quebec referendum in which separatism, or at least "sovereignty-association," was avoided by less than one per cent of the vote: near disaster averted, separatist sentiments on the rebound, how clear is the clarity bill, blah, blah, blah. The blather was followed by the release of part one of the Gomery report, which reiterated and encapsulated what we had learned during the Gomery inquiry: Liberals spending money on their pimps in Quebec under the pretext of warding off separatism; Gomery revelations hurting the federalist cause in Quebec. Ho-hum.
But interrupting the proceedings mid-same old, same old came a brief, bracing whiff of political incorrectness from no other than the former PQ leader, former federal Tory, and former hubby to the hot Californian stewardess Audrey Best. Lucien Bouchard, now a 66-year-old lawyer, was the star name on a manifesto produced by a dozen business people, academicians and media worthies entitled, "A Clear-Eyed Vision of Quebec." The tract called on Quebec to stop pissing away money, pay down its debt, reduce taxes, curb unions and claw its way out of the sad economic and demographic hole it has descended into in the past 30 years. In short: take responsibility. And, oh yeah, the paper also pointed out that separatism might not be the panacea the majority of francophones think it is.
Ol' Pegleg, one might recall, was the man who presided over the province from 1996 to 2001, when debt as a percentage of GDP increased from 45 per cent to 54 per cent. He is the self-same fellow who once said that separation would be the "magic wand" to eliminate economic problems by directing tax from Ottawa to Quebec City.
The manifesto sounded more like Liberal Leader Jean Charest in his post-election salad days when he still dared speak of "re-engineering" the province (before the public sector unions forced his retreat into waffledom and the usual dodge of throwing more cash at health care). Bouchard and his co-manifestians even referred to the unions as "fossils of the 20th century." They compared the enervating status quo in present-day Quebec to the "grande noirceur" (the great darkness). This phrase has a special resonance among those of the white ****** school of Quebec thought. It was coined in Refus Global (total refusal), the seminal 1948 manifesto by a cadre of anarchist artists that attacked Duplessis and the priests, and whose noodlings were the seed from which the Quiet Revolution and all the rest of it would sprout.
In other words, Bouchard's manifesto was great stuff, but not the kind that most Quebecers care to hear. Polls showed the majority did not like the sound of such notions as raising university tuitions, bringing hydro rates to realistic levels or otherwise curbing the outlandish social spending that is viewed as a birthright by the citizenry. Who needs such negativity? Like a loud fart at a cocktail party, Bouchard's manifesto raised a few eyebrows, but will doubtless be lost to the inevitability of Quebec's decline.
The PQ is poised to choose either the doughty former finance minister Pauline Marois, 56, or the more photogenic former environment minister André Boisclair, 39--a homosexual who admits to having used cocaine while in office--as its new leader on Nov. 15. (A poll showed more than 70 per cent of respondents didn't mind either of Boisclair's deviations. How cool is that?) The way the polls have been for the past couple of years--the latest has 50 per cent support for the PQ, 30 for Jean Charest's Liberals--odds are good the separatists will be returned to power in 2007.
We can then expect another referendum, lots more Liberal-sponsored hand-wringing, and the unseemly spectacle of Conservative Leader Stephen Harper or his successor hopelessly striving for support in Quebec. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même vielle merde.
I suppose I should offer the obligatory paean to the beauty of the Quebec countryside, the cosmopolitan nature of Montreal, the charms of Quebec City, the captivating qualities of the national character and those funky bistros. All true enough, but beside the point. Quebec is a nice place to visit, but it is a foreign country--as anyone who has crossed the border from Ontario can attest, and as more than half of the Francophonie keep on trying to drum into our thick skulls.
In 1995 and the years after, hundreds of millions of our dollars were spent on waving the Maple Leaf in a province that laughs with Gallic disdain at such glee-club antics. The sponsorship scandal and its corruption only validated the disdain, and will be exploited by the PQ and the Bloc to virtually extirpate Liberals from the province's next election.
The franco-phoneys of the PC brain trust in Ottawa and Toronto insist that we must continue with the charade; that the loss of Quebec would be tantamount to the breakup of Canada. They should get over it. If the country cannot survive without a foreign, costly province that doesn't really want to be a part of the federation other than for the money it can extort from the rest, then the country doesn't deserve to survive.
It is time for opposition leaders to stop trying to learn French and to stop pretending. It is time to admit the emperor has no clothes. It is time to jettison the political correctness and embrace the negative reality. It is time to wish Quebec au revoirê, bon voyage and bonne chance.
Comment