From: thood@corvus.matrox.com (Thomas Hood)
Newsgroups: can.politics
Subject: L'invention d'une minorite
Date: 7 Sep 92 07:45:40 GMT
Organization: Matrox Ltd.

The book is called "L'invention d'une minorite: Les Anglo-Quebecois."

In her introduction, Josee Legault sets the stage (the quotations
are my unauthorized translations from the French):

    Shorn of their prestigious status of "conquerors", those
    whom we now call "Anglo-Quebecois" are now reduced to 
    lamenting their fate in the pages of the New Yorker.
    [...] It is [this minority], and its recent political
    discourse, that will be considered in the present work.

There follows a treatment of Canadian history and a depiction of
Quebec anglophones which is the opposite of flattering.  It is,
as she implies, a reply to Mordecai Richler's, "O Canada, O Quebec."

Richler's book was a hatchet job on Quebec: totally one-sided and
hostile, lacking in all novelty, only superficially humorous,
worthless to the community he portrays as innocent victims.

Legault, amazingly, outdoes him.  Whereas Richler satisfied himself
with the observation that Quebec is "disconcertingly tribal", Legault
is more ambitious in her analysis.  She says, 

   We have preferred a qualitative approach to allow a better
   analysis and comprehension of the inner workings and the
   logic of the dominant anglo-quebecois discourse of the last
   two decades and to better illustrate how it has sort of
   "invented" a minority that does not even exist in the
   consciousness of anglophones.  This approach will bring out
   the main themes and their evolution.  Still, we make no
   claim to being scientific, such a thing being impossible
   in this context.  Too often the appeal to complex techniques
   or apparently rigorous methodoligies causes us to lose sight
   of the starting point, born of the meeting of two
   subjectivities.

She thus warns us before she invites her reader to prejudge as she does,
dispenses with facts, quotes out of context, and clads her "reply" in a
pseudo-scientific, clinical writing style that emphasizes her
implication that English Quebecers are beneath contempt, worthy
only of detached study, as specimens.  Her thesis is simple: that
anglophones are a pathetic impotent minority yearning to become
(again) a dominant majority, and conducting a cynical campaign to
achieve just that.

Remember the word "dominate" because you will hear it again and
again, sprinkled through paragraphs also garnished with italics,
quotation "marks" and (sic)s to lend bias to her subjective,
unrigorous "main themes:"  the unimaginativeness, duplicity,
arrogant stubbornness, dishonesty, cynicism and all-round badness
of Quebec anglophones.  Read it yourself if you want the details.

What interest me are the gems of her analysis.  They are these:

1) The anglophones have only reacted to events: Bill 22, the
   election of the P.Q., Bill 101, and Bill 178
2) They employ a neo-liberal rights rhetoric to disguise a defense
   of collective rights.
3) They have refused to be minorized as is required to normalize
   the sociological situation of Quebec.  They already have too
   many rights, and they are demanding infinitely more.
4) Their discourse has recently radicalized.  This is a dishonest
   and cynical pressure tactic that is only abetted by liberal
   francophones.

None of them is new.  She may have borrowed all of them from
the 1980 book, "The English Fact in Quebec," which was also critical
of anglophone Quebecers, but not single-mindedly so.  (Legault
teaches at UQAM, the worst university in the country.)

Far from merely describing, she aims to discredit.  She discredits
claims for protection of collective rights by denying that there
is such a thing as the anglophone minority of Quebec: it is
indistinguishable from the body of anglophones spread over the
continent north of Mexico.  And insofar as it exists, it is evil.
She discredits claims of individual rights by saying they are just
a front for collective rights, which are not owing to a bunch of
dominators.  She discredits Reed Scowen's recommendation that
anglophones take their fate into their own hands, cease their
supplications, and assert themselves and their culture individually,
by saying that he is not serving anglophones well by encouraging
them to deny their fate as internal immigrants in a society defined
exclusively by the French majority.  She discredits anglophones'
claims to have accepted the predominance of French by saying that
they refuse the imposition of that predominance (cf: demands for 
permission to post bilingual signs).  She discounts anglophones'
claims to have learned French by pointing out that the older 40% 
are still unilingual.

She describes a radicalization that has taken place due to the
intervention of cynical manipulators like Reed Scowen and Charles
Taylor, which will require further action to reassert French dominance.
Legault blames the P.Q. for adopting an adversarial approach (shock
treatment) instead of pursuing a social contract in which the justification
for each measure would have been spelled out and limits -- fundamental
rights -- defined.  Instead, the anglophones also settled into an
adversarial posture, adopting a view of themselves as a mistreated
minority. She seems to approach the verge of an admission that anglophones
have cause to complain, but she soon retreats onto safe ground.

She says that they speak of "oppression" when that is not the reality:
they culpabilize francophones and auto-victimize themselves. The sign law
only imposes what is normal, and in any case, anglophones have only
themselves and a weak unprincipled premier to blame for the excesses of
the law -- not francophones.  Anyhow, it's too late to change now.

   The francophones who went into the streets of Montreal to
   demand that Robert Bourassa not touch Bill 101 understood
   perfectly well [that the return to bilingual signage would be
   a symbol of the return of linguistic equality and an important
   step in the anglophones battle to escape minority status], and
   they knew how much the francization of signage had helped
   them to become aware of their status as a majority. [...]
   Let us not deceive ourselves: all compromise on the question
   has appeared impossible since the first whining about
   Law 101, and finally Law 178 has provided to the anglophone
   spokesmen a fine scarecrow to parade before the English
   Canadian and American media. [p.177]

To permit equality is to be conquered. - p.23
Equality is domination. - p.111

--

I think you have also been reading this book recently, Frederic.

--
Thomas Hood                                                    thood@matrox.com
Montreal