“"Of course, the best way to fight French “ethnocide” in the rest of Canada would be for French-speaking parents to send their children to French schools — and, if no such schools are available, to demand the creation of more. The reason that isn’t happening has nothing to do with any evil conspiracy to commit “ethnocide.” Rather, Canadian parents — English and French alike — are surveying Canada’s economic landscape, and realizing that few of the opportunities available to their children will come from Quebec, which persists as a have-not welfare state that survives largely on the basis of equalization handouts from Alberta.”
National Post, February 5, 2013
By Jonathon Kay
At the risk of giving helpful advice to Pauline Marois, I’d say she might take a lesson here. From the point of view of the rest of Canada, the biggest turn-off about Quebec separatism these days isn’t the fact that something like a quarter or a third of Quebecers want to leave Canada — it’s the sad, crabby, passive-aggressive nature of the whole project.
From the top of Mont-Tremblant to the boardwalk on Hallandale Beach, one of Quebec’s claims to “distinct” society status is its flair and joie-de-vivre. Instead, we get a bunch of sour-faced mandarins snooping through municipal newsletters and workplace bulletin boards for English phrases. Who wants to start a new country with a bunch of pouters and professional victims? Even Quebec’s own separatist cadres realize this is a problem: Witness the emergence of the Option Nationale, whose ads and messaging during the 2012 provincial election welcomed Anglophones, and deliberately emphasized the positive aspects of Quebec nation-building.
The latest outbreak of separatist grievance-mongering comes in the form of a new PQ-funded report that claims Ottawa is allowing Anglophone provinces to commit “soft ethnocide” on French speakers around the country. “We’re reminding people of the evolution of Canada when we systematically eliminated French at the start of the 20th century,” said the lead author this week.
What’s “ethnocide” you ask? It’s an obscure term, very occasionally seen in UN reports about Burundi and the hunter-gatherer tribes of the Amazon basin, and such. According to an online encyclopedia, it’s a term that came about during the Jewish holocaust: “The concept of ethnocide was created at the same time as the concept of genocide in 1944 in the United States by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-born lawyer. Ethnocide is a term that is an alternative to genocide according to Lemkin. The terms were created precisely in regard to the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis in the Second World War … For some, [the term now] is also used interchangeably with the term ‘cultural genocide.’ ”
Wow — cultural genocide. What monsters we Anglophones have become.
The reality, of course, is that the greatest act of “ethnocide” (if we are to use that term with a straight face in this context) was self-inflicted by Francophones during the Quiet Revolution. For it was during that period that almost all of the truly distinctive aspects of French-Canadian culture — including farm life, the cultural domination of the Catholic church, and French monolingualism — were swept away by secularism, urbanization, the consumer society, television, and the sexual revolution. And every single one of these latter cultural influences remains powerfully rooted (and even celebrated) in Quebec society to this day — meaning that the “ethnocide” of French Canada is proceeding right under Pauline Marois’ own nose. Ethnocidally speaking, she’s a regular Idi Amin.
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