2000-05-30
Dear Diary:

����It's very odd living in a place you love but where you feel that you are not wanted.

����I am white, of Anglo-Saxon stock, English speaking, born Protestant ... so in a lot of Canada I would be considered pretty white bread and never face discrimination.

����But I live in Quebec, where the current government would very much like to wipe out public use of my language and by inference get rid of me and my kind.

����Le Qu�bec au Qu�becois, don'tcha know?

����I was born in Ontario, but the previous seven generations of my family were born in Quebec. We were pioneers of the Ottawa Valley and if you get an old Quebec map and look in the region of the infamous Meech Lake, you will find there once was a little village that bore my surname. No accident that, that's the place where my first Canadian ancestor lived.

����But for Quebec nationalists there is but one kind of famille-souche (old stock) and if your surname is Anglo, honey, that don't be you. You can be pur laine, but I guess pur tweed doesn't count, eh.

����Yet, if you look at a map of this province, you'll see an amazing number of English place names because a huge area of Quebec (think the Eastern Townships, the Chateaugay Valley, the Ottawa Valley, parts of the Gasp�) were all opened with the blood, sweat and tears of English speaking folks.

����It's one of those dirty little secrets of Quebec history that's currently being ignored.

����The government uses subtle changes to gradually rewrite history. There was a place just north of Granby called Abbottsford because the Abbott family lived there and you could ford the Yamaska River at their place. Our third Canadian prime minister, (the first born in Canada) Sir John Joseph Caldwell Abbott, comes from this family of clergymen.

����But if you look up Abbottsford in a gazeteer, you won't find it anymore because it's been francisized to St. Paul d'Abbottsford. Knowlton (named after the first family who settled there) is now officially Lac Brome ... and on it goes.

����Paul and I were good little Anglos, we put our daughter into the French school system and so she's neither fish nor fowl, an anglophone who grew up immersed in another culture. Not that we were made to feel welcome for that.

����I remember our first parent's meeting at her public school, when a nationalist parent got up and denounced the fact that Jess' Grade One class was more than half English speaking kids.

����She fumed that these kids were sucking up the resources, that French-speaking students were being held back because of the language problems of these maudites anglais.

����Suzanne, Jess' teacher, told her that nine of the top ten students in the class were anglophone. I wanted to make a big thhhppppptttt sound but I did the politically correct thing and kept quiet. It almost killed me, though, petty person that I can be.

����Our current provincial government is dedicated to pulling Quebec out of the Canadian federation, of creating a separate country of this province.

����They are making it more and more clear that there is not room for the English language (and by extension the people who speak it) in this new country.

����I live in a very bilingual section of the province, mostly the language/culture wars feel far off. But now the government is trying to amalgamate the township where I live with another community. It says when it does it will strip them both of their bilingual status, and they will no longer be able to provide us with service in English.

����It's very odd living in a place you love but where you feel that you are not wanted.

����The CROP people, the big polling company, called us over the weekend. They're doing a poll about how Quebec's English-speaking minority sees its future here. The questions were detailed and hard hitting and I've been in a funk ever since because frankly the future doesn't look that good.

����What if the government wins a referendum, if a majority of Qu�becois vote to leave Canada?

����They lost the last one by a miniscule margin, it was so close I can hardly breathe when I think about it. At the end of the night Paul told me no matter what he would stay here. I told him that if I had to make a choice, I would choose to live under the Maple Leaf and not the Fleur-de-Lis ... and the silence after that was a long one, indeed.

����We joke about it now. I tease him that we can have dual citizenship. He and Jess can get their Canadian passports through me because although they were both born in Quebec, hey I was born in Ontario, The Holy Land. I can get a Quebec passport because of my marriage.

����About 225 years ago a man named Joshua Losee sat in his farm in New York state faced with a similar dilemma. He chose to leave everything behind and come into Quebec, not 20 miles from where I live now, so he could live under the flag under which he had been born and not the star spangled banner.

����Eventually, his daughter Gertrude met my ancestor Benjamin and here I am, eight generations later, wondering what I will do if I must choose a flag.

����Plus que �a change, eh.

--Marn

Old Drivel - New Drivel


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