Le Canada?: Connais Pas …

Le Canada? Connais Pas ... My English-Canadian students know less about Quebecois than they do about Palestinians. While visiting Laval last summer, I discovered that Quebecois students know less about English Canada than they do about Zaire. Despite media attention, in Ontario this is partly due to a lack of information in the culture at large and in the secondary school system in particular. My students tell me that in high school Quebec history is mentioned briefly in connection with Canadian history, the conscription crisis presented with little insight as the exception to a general rule. And resources are still a problem: recent NFB films about Ontarois, produced by and for the francoOntarian community that desperately needs them as an educational tool, seem not to have had enough budget for the dubbing or subtitling that would allow all Ontario schoolchildren access to these films as a matter of course. More significantly, the early 1970s breast-beating fascination with matters Quebecois amongst the intelligentsia and the artistic community (witness Gail Scott's scathingly honest anatomy of the anglophone new left of Montreal in her novel Heroine) is now passe. Instead my students initially give vent to a perceived ideological conflict between the desire to understand the origins ofQuebec nationalism and, for example, the desire to understand the equally vital issue ofaboriginal land claims. Yet it is crucial that we examine our complicity in separating these interrelated issues. Witness Margaret Atwood's satirical dystopian fable ofuptown chic in a recent issue of This Magazine - Mr. America contests, in a future pacifist state, feature the white warrior in body paint as first prize. Brian Fawcett's Cambodia uses postmodern rather than science fictional experimentation to underscore the large part played by the media in our current cultural amnesia - repression, notjust depression , is for him the order ofthe day, confirmed for me by recent media coverage of the GulfWar. A similarly surreal sense ofdeja-vu surrounds the Allaire Report and the media's response to the Quebec Liberal party's fairly explicit platform of sovereignty-association. The past year witnessed some of the most provocative publications from and about Quebec to emerge for some time, not least of which is the Allaire Report. Christian Dufour's The Canadian Challenge/Le Deft Quebecois and Philip Resnick's Letters to a Quebecois Friend, not without problems in perspective, quickly became available in English paperback translation. Two more obscure but equally important texts, Georges Sioui's Pourune autohistoire amerindienne and Andre Laurendeau's Journal tenu pendant la Commission royale d'enquete sur le bilinguisme et le biculturalisme , probably will not be available in translation, if at all, for some time. All address denial - the ubiquitous repression ofdeep-seated fear, loss, guilt, and anger inherited from past conflicts between weaker and stronger forces in our history. Resnick gives voice to the sense of betrayal currently felt by his generation of English-Canadian nationalists influenced by George Grant, aware of our ambivalence towards American cultural and economic dynamism, and unhappy about but sympathetic to Quebec autonomy as a human rights issue and as part ofa global process of decolonization. The bulk ofhis argument, that the new Quebec nationalism Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 25, No. 4 (Hiver 1990-91 Winter) 3 has taken the problematic form ofeconomic liberalism, gains yet more bitterness in the wake ofthe Free Trade pact, given English Canada's past reliance on Quebec as the leaven for "la difference" protecting Canada from the empire to the south. Wishing to explain English Canada to Quebec, he argues for the political role which federalism has played in consolidating English-Canadian nationalism, always tenuous in the face ofregional and continental centrifugal and centripetal forces, while recognizing that Quebec nationalism implies primary allegiance to another state. He perceives Quebec's apparently colossal indifference to English Canada as symptomatic of Quebecois people's selfishness, playing out a secret desire to venge themselves for English Canada's own past indifference or injustice. His is also a critique of neoconservativism , which he views as a potential threat to both entities: "In the absence of a world polity, national boundaries will continue to provide the basis for communitarian endeavors, and for promoting progressive over...