6. Over the Wall

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A full pint of beer sails majestically through the air. The large glass turns and twists mid-flight with a subtle sort of majesty, as though in deference to its superbly judged trajectory; most of the precious liquid somehow remains within. The glass having been launched from a great distance, you are afforded ample time to marvel and wonder at this startlingly beautiful spectacle: a missile has been launched, yes, but it’s a missile, surely, of warmth and camaraderie not anger and bile; this rocket after all brings beer to its target, not insult or injury! At the apex of her course she starts her descent and some of the sweet, bubbly foam begins to spill, making from the air a little river on the ground. How you wish you could slow time down right at such a moment, slow down the second by a factor of ten, enjoy unhurried and in comfort this in-progress, soon to finish, never to be repeated work of drink and art! You can’t hang a bar fight in the Louvre: a salvo such as this is either appreciated in all its glory, or is simply missed. The glass is losing altitude now and it’s a moment for Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake waltz to fade in, come loud, and soothe down to Earth the progress of this benignly proffered gift... gently and generously and decently down to a smash on the bar, the glass explodes into pieces and its target, the barman, drenched in beer, leaps like a gazelle over the bar and dives over at the violent, abusive drunkard who has hurled this glass in retribution for nought. He grabs the drunkard’s neck and a fight of great intensity erupts. You’ve seen bar fights before. We all have. But this is different in an intangible way that is not so easy to describe. It’s not so much the blows that are struck that give this conflict its particular, cultured sort of bitterness; rather it’s the expressions of deep Gallic hatred and rage they scream in each other’s faces as they grip and stagger like mating pandas. The crowd steps in and separates the parties, soothing the barman and restraining the drunk, pleading for peace but loving the war. The intervention works. Order is restored. The thug will now be ejected, you presume. But... what is this? The barman is shaking his hand. And now they’re embracing! A peck on the cheek, classically Française, and the barman serves him a drink! The violent hoodlum is being served another drink, and you can only stand there, gawping, in confusion and amazement. Catherine is mortified. William is appalled. Horrified. Dumbstruck. Such expressiveness, such openness and rawness of emotion! Violence and shouting and punching and screaming. Kicking in public then kissing to boot. Loathing one minute, love-making the next. A whirling tornado of human passions; conflict and co-existence in less than half a minute. What to make of it all? Restrained, decently-mannered Canada this most certainly is not! Except that Canada this indisputably is: the other Canada, separate of the mind and utterly distinct, the other founding party of the federation; the other half of a rocky, unstable union that some way and somehow has prevailed for a century and a half.

As you travel East from Ontario, the engine room and capital of the dominant Anglo side, you are welcomed to this other place with a psychological jolt and an actual, physical bump. The road signs in French and very deliberately only in French serve notice politely but very firmly that what you’ve just crossed into is not merely another province or region or political jurisdiction, but something deeper – something in a way far more closed and private. Even if one were ignorant of the strong nationalist tendencies prevalent here in the mainly French-speaking province of Quebec, the sensation felt by an English speaker as they cross the boundary would be that of deep but somewhat daunted interest. It is rather like being a guest for the first time in the house of a stranger: that feeling of being welcome to visit, of course welcome to visit – but certainly not welcome to stay. The subtle change in ambiance you experience at the provincial border is accentuated by a physical dimension: the welcoming bang, bump and rollick delivered by the province’s road network, away from the major freeways an unending nightmare of lethal potholes and cheaply done surface repairs. The signposted suave of la lange française bestriding a crumbling, near second-world transportation infrastructure. It seems in a way to sum up the dichotomy of this place, Quebec, indeed one of the many dichotomies of Quebec: culturally sophisticated and economically backward; Canada being a Canada it could not possibly be elsewhere.

The cynical view of Quebec has the province down as little more than Canada’s trophy wife – paraded around international society to give the frankly rather colourless businessman a glamour and allure he could never otherwise have, the spouse for her part enjoying a standard of living she could never hope to attain by herself. Culturally this metaphor certainly holds. Economically it is more complicated – Quebec contributes a fifth of Canada’s GDP but this with almost a quarter of the nation’s population. For years Quebec has been classified by Ottawa as a “have not province” – that is to say one of the poorer regions of the nation, requiring a certain amount of redistributed aid from the wealthier provinces in order to maintain a respectably Canadian quality of life. But such facts and figures are seen as barely relevant in “la belle province”. The great power of nationalist fervour is not easily bought off with toys and trinkets, and – ranging a political spectrum from outright separatism to vaguer demands for greater autonomy – Quebec’s sense of difference, of distinctiveness and of nationhood burns bright in the souls of her majority.

Most of the world doesn’t know that Canada was French before it was British. French settlement in the North-East corner of the Americas began in the 1500s and accelerated in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The vast, combined French colonies of Nouvelle-France (New France) gave formal expression to French ambitions in North America. But England was present in force with a line of successful and prosperous colonies developing rapidly along the continent’s East coast, to the South of modern day Canada. North America provided a bountiful new platform on which the perennial rivalries of old Europe could be played out; Britain and France fought for control of eastern North America between 1754 and 1763. France’s commitment to her possessions, especially in the frozen North, had always wavered; it now shuddered to the point of collapse in the face of a British military superiority born, almost uniquely for a major power at that time, of domestic political unity and comparative social harmony. The seminal moment in Canada’s pre-history is the 1759 Battle of the Plains of Abraham, when a British force under General James Wolfe secured a decisive victory over the French at Quebec City, ensuring, in time, that the French of the Saint Lawrence would live under the Protestant King of England and the British Union Flag. Louis XV signed the Northern part of New France away to Great Britain in the treaty that ended the conflict; the territory he ceded extended into modern day Southern Ontario and deep into what is now the American Mid-West – areas far removed from the Saint Lawrence river and which had no significant French population to speak of.

After and partly in response to the American Revolution in her colonies further South, Britain divided her new colony into Upper Canada (now Ontario), populated mainly by Anglo-Scottish Protestant loyalists; and Lower Canada with its French-speaking majority whose loyalty to Britain was questionable to say the very least, and who had to be placated with numerous scraps of autonomy such as protection for the Roman Catholic faith and a French-based legal code for civil disputes. Lower Canada became Quebec, the modern Canadian province, when Canada was officially created in 1867.

The tense relationship Quebec would come to have with the rest of Canada was born of the ethnic and related socio-economic divisions the province actually hosted within its own borders. It had a relatively small “English” (English-speaking Canadian) minority, largely Montreal based, which while heavily outnumbered by the French in the province nonetheless managed to exert near total dominance over the province’s economy, owning the bulk of its businesses and resources and largely relegating the French down to the level of “factory worker” under the “English boss”. While countless English speakers also strived and struggled away in the working class and below, for the French majority their lowly status fired a sense of ethnic-based grievance the effects of which remain in evidence to this day. I have asked several Quebecois about, for example, the extraordinary and excessive strength of the trade union movement in their province; they almost all put it down to the fact that, in economic terms, their forefathers were “oppressed” by the Anglo elite of business and finance. While the extent to which such “oppression” was real versus imagined will be endlessly debated, the reasons for the glaring economic under-performance of the French must have been numerous and very complex. Suffice to say in great generalisation that the all controlling Roman Catholic Church, with its aversion to scientific rigour and material advancement, did not provide the Quebecois with a solid basis for the development of enquiring, ambitious mindsets. For the greater part of Quebec province’s early history, the bourgeois element of her French majority restricted itself to the old disciplines of medicine, politics and the law. Business, and with it control of the economy and therefore by extension of the province as a whole, was even in French Quebec left to the despised English. Under Anglo stewardship Quebec’s largest city, Montreal, grew into Canada’s economic capital and powerhouse, against which even Toronto to the West stood in a very distant second place.

World War brought with it the spectre of conscription, a mandate vehemently and at times violently opposed by many Quebecois for whom Britain (in 1914) and Canada (in 1939) were alien causes at best, and causes certainly not worth dying for. The conscription crises in Quebec threatened to spill over into civil conflict and provided English Canadians with a first, stark illustration of their young dominion’s inherent disunity. The great Canadian fissure began to widen post-1950 as Quebec nationalism surged on a wave of secularism, social progress and material advancement. The seminal year in Quebec’s – and indeed Canada’s – modern history is 1976, when the separatist Parti Quebecois for the first time secured victory in a Quebec general election. They had run on a platform of national independence for the province, and once in power held a referendum to that effect in 1980. While their pro-independence motion was defeated two to one, the primacy of the “national question” in Quebec politics was secured. Ever since then a cloud of doubt has hung over Quebec’s future within Canada; that, and the host of laws nationalist governments brought in to defend the retreating French language spurred a large-scale migration of Quebec Anglos – and their businesses – down Highway 401 into Ontario. By 1980 Toronto had replaced Montreal as Canada’s largest and most economically important city. Quebec’s relative economic decline has only served to enflame the very separatism which caused it in the first place, widening the cracks in the federation to the point of absolute split. In 1995 a second referendum on the province’s future saw the nationalists defeated again, but this time by the very thinnest of margins. Truly is Canada today a bifurcated nation, an England and a France of sorts, living unhappily under the same thin roof. A comparatively amicable separation but no official divorce, at least not yet; Canada is a marriage with two bedrooms presenting a façade of civilized semi-unity to the outside world. It is quite normal for either English or francophone Canadians to live an entire lifetime in their own country and have throughout little to no contact with people from the other community.

Today there are eight million people in Quebec, of whom less than one million count English as their maternal or primary language. The rest live through French, a variant baffling and incomprehensible to visitors from Paris, but French nonetheless with all the cultural, behavioural and psychological differences that a separate language entails. Tribal division can certainly exist within the framework of a common vernacular, but a separate tongue will sharpen and formalize a sense of mutual estrangement – if it didn’t create that estrangement in the first place. Within North America Canada’s French are but seven out of three hundred and fifty million, the rest either English speaking or – in the case of immigrants – in the process of becoming English speaking. Huddling in the North-East corner of the Anglophone colossus, watching as the strength of English grows unceasingly, the trepidation of the Quebecois people grows with every passing day. Their great fear is that their fate could come to be that of their ethno-linguistic cousins in Louisiana, where the once vibrant French language was long ago reduced to the weekend hobby-horse of a fringe minority. Not surprisingly, the Quebecois can be defensive at best on matters of culture, identity and politics. Language, inevitably, is a highly sensitive issue in the province, not just in the political sphere but in day to day interactions as well. In consequence Quebec is by far the most interesting place on the continent for a unilingual English-speaker to live in, but (acknowledging the Anglo minority actually native to the province) very few are willing to make a permanent move. Likewise the number of Quebecois resident in other parts of Canada is minimal. In six years living and working in Toronto I met a grand total of one French-speaking Quebecker in the city, and almost as soon as we had been introduced he was at pains to point out – unprompted – that he was living in Toronto solely to be with his girlfriend. He would never dream, he implied, of living in the city had not his partner been offered a job there. This person was not merely the only Quebecois resident of Toronto I ever came across – I personally never even encountered a French-speaking tourist visiting the city from Quebec. Bad luck on my part I suppose, or perhaps just the relative cultural sterility of Ontario keeping the visitors at bay. But shortly after my arrival in Canada one of my first roommates – himself a bilingual Anglo-Quebecker – appraised me of one interesting manifestation of the great Canadian schism: that while Torontonians would regularly flock to Montreal for its presumed joie de vivre and acknowledged superiority of party-scene, it was rare for French-speakers to make the reverse trip.

“They’d rather not travel into English Canada,” he mused, “They think they’ll be sucked into the English vortex. Converted!”

He added that even those Quebecois who were fluent in or at least comfortable with English have demonstrated a strong “cultural resistance” to putting their skill into practice. In this respect they are similar to their distant relatives back in France, who have festered a quiet kind of muttering, shrugging, eye-rolling Anglophobia ever since Agincourt. But in Quebec, and specifically in Montreal, the Anglo-French divide is not understated with such comparative civility. Let us come to the province’s largest city, where I lived for a time, since it is in this city that virtually all of the province’s native-English speakers live, and in consequence forms the tremulous fault-line of Quebec’s and indeed Canada’s English-French divide. It is here that the culture clash degenerates down to the day to day level of spite, petty altercation, explosive row and even on occasion physical violence. In other parts of the province the situation is different: there the sheer lack of resident English speakers eliminates the prospect of inter-communal discord. Indeed in overwhelmingly French towns like Rouyn-Noranda, Trois-Rivières and especially the provincial capital and Francophone bastion of Quebec City overheard English is invariably assumed to be the work of a tourist, and is as such usually welcome as a source of potential revenue. Where the French culture feels unthreatened there’s clearly no need for overt, personalised ethnic defensiveness. But on the Island of Montreal this relative toleration struggles to assert itself. This contested, Manhattan-like landmass in the middle of the Saint Lawrence flow hosts the city of the same name along with several lesser municipalities. This is the epicentre of Canada’s founding ethnic conflict – the unending litany of Anglo-French mutual bafflement that the Canadian nation has never been without, though in saying that we can in truth go further: Canada could simply not be Canada without its birthmark schism, any more than Al Capone could have been Al Capone without Prohibition. The geography of the island’s linguistic divide is the first thing to note. West of a line in downtown Montreal historically demarked by Boulevard St Laurent, out to Westmount, Dorval, Point-Claire and beyond is generally seen as Anglo territory. Modern population shifts and large-scale immigration have between them complicated the geography of the region’s language demographics, but to this day it remains the case that the “West Island” (of Montreal) is almost a sobriquet for Anglo-Quebeckers and their unwavering, Liberal-supporting[1] federalist outlook and knee-jerk antipathy to separatism and the Parti Quebecois. For the most part it is unfair to accuse them of having an underlying disdain for the French language and Quebecois culture. Many of them are bilingual and often use French on a day to day basis. But their determination to retain their Anglo heritage is undimmed, as are their strident demands for “language rights” as a perhaps-oppressed, perhaps-not linguistic minority in the continent’s only non-English speaking jurisdiction. Their chief practical grievance centres around the Quebec-government’s controversial so-called “language laws” which to varying degrees enforce the use of the French language in the workplace and in commerce, most famously through mandates requiring that in shop-front signs and displays the French language must predominate – even if the business in question is Anglo owned and operated and serves an exclusively Anglo clientele. Where “foreign” languages (for which read English) are used in advertisements or shop-front inducements, there are strict stipulations requiring that the lettering be no more than half the size of the lettering used in the mandatory accompanying French. The Office québécois de la langue française – a agency of the provincial government – is charged with enforcing these laws, and warning and ultimately fining any offenders found by the army of inspectors it employs to roam the streets looking for illicit or illicitly-sized English. In just about every provincial governmental office and agency branch throughout the province, posters proclaiming “Au Quebec, nous parlons FRANÇAIS!” (“In Quebec, we speak French!”) are fixed on the walls and close to the entrances. Immigrants and Anglos, the unstated part of the message goes, had better get with the French-language program if they wish to remain; the latter group, present in this part of the world for centuries, take the admonition – and the language fines – very personally indeed.

East of St Laurent is overwhelmingly French. Here a different, deeper and more pernicious set of grievances lurk amid the day to day bustle and smile of Quebec life. Aside from the underlying defensiveness of the French-speaking minority in Canada, which we shall explore at length, there is here a more urgent, even more visceral concern: that on this the island of Montreal, the beating heart of the province, they the Quebecois are being slowly driven out. They are being driven off-island – so the theory goes – by property prices, English, and an unspoken alliance of the two; that soon the day will come when they will find themselves in a minority on the island of Montreal, site of their envisioned nation’s major city.[i] The primary basis of this concern is the fact that in the nominally neutral downtown area of Montreal the English language is perceived, rightly or wrongly, to have taken over at the sales-tills in the shops and department stores; and among the staff in the bars, cafes and restaurants – not to mention in the workplace offices and cubicles of banking, finance and especially information technology. Among the Quebecois, complaints about the language laws not being enforced strictly enough – or not being enforced at all – are heard frequently. Rumours of Francophones being unable to get service in French on their downtown shopping sprees surface every so often to poke the smouldering embers.

Moving to Montreal, you gradually become familiar with the region’s subtle geolinguistic makeup, and associated rules of etiquette. After two months living in the city I had developed the requisite instincts. Francophone complaints about the health of their language in the central business district struck me as being justified: I found myself automatically speaking English to the shop staff along Rue Sainte Catherine, Crescent Street, Peel Street and even along the border on Saint Laurent Boulevard; the responses would invariably come in English with neither complaint nor disgruntlement. In Westmount where I would travel to visit my dentist and barber, I recall one day, after six months, being surprised and (to my shame) actually irritated at a newly-hired hairdresser’s stuttering, half-fluent command of English. Conversely, where I lived in (or “on”) the so-named “Plateau” area East of Saint Laurent and North-East of downtown, I learned very quickly to be respectful of the province’s official tongue. With severely limited abilities en francais – my high-school knowledge of the language having gradually faded over the preceding eighteen years – my tactic was to begin any social or commercial transaction with one or two of my few well-practiced phrases at which point, all going well, my childlike diction and ghastly, cat-sickening accent would move the conversation in a more English direction – failing which there was always sign language. I noted to my disappointment that humble efforts in French were almost never appreciated by the local Quebecois; then again I noticed also that the absence of humble effort on the part of any Anglo was appreciated even less, as evidenced for example by the cut-glass laser glare and menacing, robotic “Do. Not. Under. Stand.” with which the petite blonde cashier at my local bakery would reward indelicate visitors from Ontario or the United States. Claims to not understand English, sometimes true, sometimes not, were a standard though far from typical defence-mechanism for patriotic French-speakers: a more passive and widespread form of language aggression would, in my experience, take the form of your local counterpart simply refusing point-blank to switch to English even with plentiful evidence to suggest that they could easily do so if they wished. A female employee at my local library, for instance, could often be heard in English sweet-talking her Anglophone lover from a desk phone. But it seemed that in person she would have sold her mother for a glass of Ontario ice-wine rather than exchange so much as a hello or a thank-you in the hated English tongue. The library’s lending and borrowing policies she would explain to you in French, and only in French – and too bad if you didn’t understand a word.

Periodically, some language horror-story will surface in the English-language media in Montreal, outlining a more serious scenario where service in English has allegedly been denied to some Anglo-Quebecker by an arm of the provincial government – perhaps the taxation authorities, in hospitals, or even in some cases by paramedics or police officers even in emergency situations. When this kind of story breaks the English talk shows and radio call-ins will be flooded by irate Canadians regaling their own similar indignities as suffered at the hands of a Quebecois bureaucracy they will depict as knee-jerk, tetchy if not outright bigoted on the language issue, and staffed overwhelmingly by bearded, Anglo-hating Quebecois Marxists and fascistic, foreboding French-bureaucrat henchwomen. But through all their complaining and sniping about intolerance for English in Quebec – indeed, much more broadly, as we stand back and peruse the entire, unending litany of English-Canadians’ griping and moralising at their nation’s odd-man province, with its bizarre language rules, maddening linguistic-defensiveness to at times nakedly anti-Canadian stance and sentiment, there runs throughout a common theme. It is that in Canada, just as elsewhere, the native speakers of English do not come close to comprehending the sheer power of the armoury they deploy whenever they open their mouths. What they cannot possibly see is that the struggle for supremacy between English and French on the streets of Montreal is not merely an ongoing arm-wrestle between language A and language B – two more or less equal contenders struggling to assert their dominance in the field of interpersonal communication. It is a fight between a language, French, and something much more powerful – something that in truth can really only be referred to as a force: the English language, in point of fact one of the greatest and most powerful psychological forces ever born of human civilisation. English, you must understand, is not merely a vocabulary and set of grammar rules sitting there inert, waiting to be learned like German or Dutch. Rather it is an active, conquering, globalising, mind-invading, culture-obliterating power that demands complete attention and requires absolute conformity, by no standard just a mere “language” in the traditional sense, and it is subconscious knowledge of this truth that ahead of all else fuels the fires of Quebec separatism and ethnic-French cultural protectionism. It is simply not possible to discuss the Canadian divide without an examination of the English language, and it’s much unremarked-upon effects.

In a 1998 interview with Morley Safer of CBS’s 60 Minutes news magazine, Quebec’s then Minister of Culture and Communications Louise Beaudoin defended her government’s controversial language policies.

“There has to be a common language in a country!” she implored, bouncing up and down in her patriotic insistence, “and so its French or English. Well, I think that when you're eighty-two percent of the population, the majority wants it to be French.”[ii]

Madame Beaudoin was of course correct, a single agreed and accepted vernacular is self-evidently essential to the smooth functioning of a society – indeed arguably to the society’s very existence as a cohesive entity. It is striking how often those states lacking a language which succeeds in being at least predominant have suffered varying degrees of unpleasant fate: one thinks of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union among other examples; over the decades India has seen explosions of bloody internecine rage which in many cases might have been soothed by universality of Hindi; Ukraine with a large Russian-speaking minority has had its problems; even prosperous, seemingly stable Belgium has since the dawn of the century seemed, at times, close to an angry divorce along ethno-linguistic lines. Switzerland seems to do well, granted the alpine confederation may be considered an exception to the general rule: there does need to be a common language in a country. But the point that Madame Beaudoin like so many others will insist on missing is that the era of the “country” as we have understood the term for centuries is coming to an end. The concept of the nation as an insular, aloof society with private customs, its own language and a closed economy has been fast unravelling ever since Stanley met Livingstone in darkest Africa. The Treaty of Rome pressed down hard on the pedal and globalisation – the steady degradation and ultimate disappearance of the nation state – has charged forward with a rate of acceleration increasing in proportion to the movement’s own progress. Whether she knows it or not Madame Beaudoin’s “country” is the World; it certainly does need and is getting a common language the identity of which, alas for her and her Quebecois compatriots – along with countless other groups – has long since been beyond doubt. In terms of its unrivalled ability to blanket the globe the English language has not quite acquired the pervasiveness of thin air... yet, but it is not far off. We approach the point where the inability to breathe the substance will cease to be a mere disadvantage and will become an actual, physical disability. Courtesy of our globalising economic situation the realities faced by the non-speakers of the English language grow starker by the day: learn it to the point of near-fluency, or destine yourself to a life of ever constricting economic opportunity and deepening social isolation. The how and the why of the English language’s march to its preeminent global position would make for a thesis far beyond the scope of this work; suffice to say that the growth, expansion and relative success of the British Empire and latterly the economic and military prowess of the United States, and the fact of both occurring in their turn during periods of unprecedented industrial and technological progress not least in the fields of travel and communications, have between them been the obvious historical and geopolitical factors. I personally suspect that there are further, deeper reasons – quasi-physiological reasons: comparative directness of diction combined with phonic variety; succinctness and relative efficiency of sentence construction; clarity and breadth of overall intonation and consequent certainty and projected-confidence of delivery – all of these factors play a role in the language’s attraction and allure to non- or partial-speakers, and must combine to give among them the English language a perceived intellectual authority – in other words a raw power that rival vernaculars cannot easily hope to match.[2]

True or not, instead of speculating further on the reasons for the success of English let us attempt to place ourselves in the shoes of a non-speaker – preferably a young, twenty- or thirty-something professional for whom knowledge of English is increasingly a prerequisite for career advancement and financial security. Let us wonder what must it be like to have this tremendous force breathing down your neck, demanding your personal attention and acquiescence and threatening increasingly unpleasant consequences if you fail to comply. Let those of us born into English imagine waking up tomorrow morning to discover that, say, Russian had overnight become the world’s de facto lingua franca, an absolute necessity for international business and travel, utterly dominant in global popular culture, the major language of international publishing, being the medium of most of the world’s major rolling news networks and accounting for the vast bulk of content on the Internet. Could you further imagine a situation where fluency in Russian was a prerequisite for employment in any number of fields and with any number of employers – even if you lived in a non-Russian speaking country and the job’s responsibilities did not actually involve dealing with Russian speakers? (Such is frequently the case with English). Could you imagine that as the years passed and the scope and rapidity of advanced communications continued to grow, the strength of this foreign language – the already tremendous imperative of this force – would continue to expand and expand again with it? That the point would gradually be reached where an inability to speak Russian would be to all intents and purposes, in a large number of situations, an inability to speak at all? Even discounting such an undeniably long-term view let us consider how would it feel to have tourists from Moscow or St. Petersburg approach you today on the streets of your own town in your own country, ask you for directions in Russian and then react with surprise, bemusement and even contempt when you are unable to comprehend and answer. How would this feel in a scenario where Russian was the world’s preeminent language? Extremely degrading I would imagine: a forced admission of personal weakness and failure; standing exposed in public as wanting and inept in one of humankind’s fundamental skills. Under such circumstances you would of course have no choice but to learn Russian, and as a matter of fact the element of compulsion – the sheer fact of you being forced – would greatly boost the pace of your progress towards bi- or multi-lingualism. In this respect the unyielding power of the language would in itself be a good thing, though in a very Machiavellian way – rather like teaching people how to swim by pushing them into the deep end of a shark pool. While highly effective in the end the pressures and terrors brought to bear would hardly make for a thoroughly humane experience.

This above stated fantasy is of course the growing reality faced by non-English speakers the world over. We are still far from the stage where the language is a de facto global mandate – at this stage the majority (just about) of the human race can still lead a full and even prosperous life without English – but the onward trend has long since been set in stone. Already the middle classes of the expanding new giants like Brazil and the India are in no doubt that they must join their continental European counterparts in attaining a solid command of English. China is a more nuanced case: its economy threatens to be vast enough to have hundreds of millions functioning happily away in Mandarin and Cantonese far beyond the deadline, though her large expatriate population is almost universally schooled in English and the language is also widely spoken in the economically critical Hong Kong SAR. Over roughly two years working with and among Japanese people I personally witnessed the great pressures placed upon many of their younger generation to gain proficiency – one young Japanese counterpart in particular stressing over and over: “I must learn English! Must! Father say very important! Must!” He never passed up an opportunity to practice with me. Another even younger colleague I met in Tokyo also comes to mind: somewhat unusually among his immediate peers he had not a word of the language and moreover seemed petrified of even trying. He could not even be induced to say “good morning” or even “hello”. Whenever one of our inter-company meetings broke into the international tongue he would visibly shrink and retreat into a quiet, nervous little shell, looking for all the world as though he longed for the dreaded, hateful foreign monster – the English language – to skulk back into the cave from whence it had come. On one occasion his superior publicly upbraided him for his linguistic weakness, a rebuke delivered in Japanese and obediently translated for me by the departmental secretary. I could discern a phantom band of sweat suffocating the poor boy’s forehead, invisible to the naked eye but somehow definitely there, quickening his breath and narrowing his eyes with still more worry. Try as we may those of us who are native or fluent speakers of English cannot conceive of the language as an external thing, as the international aggressor that it is, marshalling its troops at other people’s borders; them the soon to be conquered already in no doubt about their fate, knowing even now that all resistance is futile and that before long they must submit to the new regime. It a force utterly beyond their own power, trumpeting to them the fact that communication within the species, the most innate facet of their existence outside of breathing, is to be newly dictated in form and substance by somebody else.

Under the circumstances you must say they are taking it very well. English, after all, is a benign aggressor. It is ruthless and all-conquering no doubt, but in a very well intentioned way. It simply seeks to ease the passage of foreign cultures into the globalized future already unfolding before our eyes. For the most part the continentals of Europe (including the French and especially French youth) have set themselves in placid acceptance of their linguistic fate. Indeed some like the Germans and the Scandinavians seem to be positively relishing the challenge, and with a Stockholm-syndrome like enjoyment of the new order they learn English to the point where they read, write and speak it better than most people in Britain or North America. In India proficiency in English is increasingly seen as not merely vital to a successful career, but as an actual status symbol – a sign of social rank and advancement that promises to further undermine the constrictions of the already weakened caste system. Many in Japan view the language similarly; to be an English teacher there is to be in many cases treated badly by one’s employer but almost always to be viewed with respect and appreciation by the local community. Even the most insular and fiercely patriotic of foreigners covet English, regarding it as you might regard a set of the keys to a newly-discovered safe just dropped into your palm. What will the safe contain when unlocked? Perhaps nothing. Then again, perhaps your world will be opened up to hitherto unreachable or even unimaginable possibilities. Either way those keys tingle with promise and mystery. A newly acquired ability in English must feel that way to a non-native speaker. Previously, access to the higher floors was sternly closed off. Now, doors previously shut tight may – just may – start to open. Few forces can offer human beings hope the way the English language can, and hope is the fuel of the human spirit. I’m a native English speaker. If you are reading this you’re at least a proficient speaker. English speaker by birth or English speaker by training, either way what you have received is an absolutely tremendous gift and please don’t ever forget it: into your own hands the first, last and forever language of the World, in time the only formulation of thought and pattern of speech to count; and in the end the last to survive.

And then we come back to Quebec. Quebec, where the view of English is so very different because the perspective from which it comes is so utterly unique. The Quebecois stand on the very front line of the World’s undeclared language war. Unlike the other language-groups further back in the ranks they are close enough to know that it is a war, and unlike them the Quebecois also know something of the true nature of English. They see the eyes of English over a narrowing strip of no man’s land and observe with growing alarm the large number of enemy Anglo agents already in their midst. Three hundred and fifty million American and Canadian English speakers on their very doorstep, and even, increasingly, inside their home. They know that this is a force that will not be content merely to be mankind’s intermediary – the accepted language of use when the Botswanan businessman meets his Kazakh counterpart, or the agreed medium of air-traffic control, the high-seas, networked computing and multinational space travel. They know that English is born to permeate, that it will not rest until every last settlement and homestead from Beijing to Bogota is under its command; that it has not only the ability but the will to become not just the global language of human interaction but the only language of human interaction – and furthermore not just between disparate ethnic and cultural groups but also within those groups, certainly not soon, but quite possibly by the half-way point of the twenty-second century. In their heart of hearts the Quebecois know that ultimately French is not safe back on the streets of Paris much less than in their own latter day colony in North America. They appreciate furthermore, to an extent that few others do, that language and culture are almost synonymous. The one is the product of the other and vice-versa, and if the former goes into decline then the latter must invariably follow. Accepting a working definition of “culture” as the set of social and behavioural norms and expectations within a given society, I must once again must bring our Japanese friends into the discussion since in their society the link between language on the one hand and “culture” or behaviour on the other, is so very marked. A friend and I happened to fall into conversation with two young Japanese women in a restaurant in Toronto. It transpired that one, who lived in Yokohama, was visiting the other – her friend – who had moved to Canada some years earlier, and it was the behaviour of this second person that had interested me. In speaking Japanese to her visitor her physical mannerisms were precisely those assimilated from birth, obeying the curious marriage of rapidity and subtlety mandated by a combination of the Japanese language itself and Japanese social norms: the short but darting hand and head motions used while making a point; the very slight, deferential nods, tilts and bows when listening to one. This complex protocol, employed entirely subconsciously, instantly gave way to a languid, slower-speaking Canadian whine (a term I use neutrally in this context) whenever she was addressing us. During those moments of interspersed small-talk between our tables her body language would instantly transition over to the relaxed, physically expressive, hand-spreading form required by North American social interplay, enforcing a pace of language that allows for far more time to pause and think than its demanding, high-paced Japanese counterpart. (How this additional time is actually used is another matter!) The point is this: that in switching to English this woman was not just changing to a separate vocabulary and set of grammar rules, she was employing a level of concentration and pace of mental activity drastically different from those born of the culture in which she had been raised, with all the physiological and – crucially – psychological impacts entailed. In point of fact when addressing my friend and I in North American English she became, to all intents and purposes, a different person: slower speaking, slower thinking, less formal, more relaxed mentally and more at ease physically. She had different manners, a different mindset, a newly defined way of treating and regarding other people and quite possibly also a separate and distinct worldview. In many respects to be bilingual is to have two personalities, or at least to have two inner voices and separate consciousnesses: perhaps to be a content, stable, well liked and well respected paranoid schizophrenic. Thus do the form, construction and delivery of language not merely speak to ease and convenience of communication, they are inherent to personality and, crucially, to the types of personality prevalent within the culture to which a given vernacular is indigenous. When the pillar of language starts to crumble, the belief systems, behaviours and personality types bestriding atop of it must similarly be threatened. To lose your language is to lose part of your mind; it must have all the dislocating horror of a lobotomy. And so who in all honestly can really blame the Quebecois of Canada from being somewhat defensive, being as they are slowly but surely being driven into the Atlantic by the English-language juggernaut? And defensive they most certainly are – as unilingual Anglophone visitors and residents alike can testify. While the rest of the world strives and scrambles in night-class language courses, this, Quebec, is the only place on Earth where the English language is seen as a threat.

Ironically, my very first experience of Canadian Anglo-French pettiness actually occurred soon after I had moved to Toronto, Ontario – entirely English-speaking and a world away from the language wars of Montreal. I dialled my bank’s toll-free phone number to make some routine enquiries about my account. As is always the case when phoning a major corporation in Canada, I was offered a choice between pressing ‘1’ to be served in English or ‘2’ to be helped in French. Pressing ‘1’ – or at least thinking I had pressed ‘1’ – I waited patiently for three or four minutes on hold while my call was being queued. Then a heavy, female French-Canadian accent breathed down the line:

“Hello Bonjour,” the woman snorted, then without waiting for a reply she trotted out what sounded like a standard greeting to the Bank’s call centre – but being stated entirely in French left me somewhat confused.

“Er, sorry...” I said hesitantly, “I thought this was the English line?”

“Yes sure it is!” she snapped, her accent getting heavier and more halting as her ire jumped into life: “Why you think I say ‘hello’ eh?”

“Oh sorry, there was just a lot of French in there too!” I spoke jovially, trying and failing to calm her down.

“Ok good!” she roared, “so it’s against the law to speak French now, goodbye goodbye!”

She hung up before I had a chance to protest. Whether the call was being recorded for training purposes I did not know and she did not care. The bank’s call centre was obviously located somewhere in the depths of Quebec, the predominantly French speaking province of Canada, a mysterious place I had then not yet visited but had heard a great deal of.

This incident was very minor in itself and would have left my mind completely had not something very similar happened ten years later, soon after I had actually moved to Quebec. Ringing the downtown Montreal office of a well known accounting firm, my call was picked up almost instantly by a sweet-sounding young receptionist.

“Bonjour!” she said cheerfully. Inevitably she followed this up with what again sounded like a standard receptionist’s greeting to the offices of her employer. She came across as polite in a particularly warm and relaxed way, quite unlike the frosty sterility I had come to expect from her Anglo Canadian cousins. Instinctively I began to wonder what she must look like. But on this occasion I had not been afforded the luxury of automated routing to an English language service. I would have to speak to her, in English, directly.

“Bonjour madame. Er, parlez-vous Anglais?”

Now “do you speak English” is not the sort of question to be blurted out unthinkingly in the province of Quebec, and taking the precaution of actually asking it in French may not prevent the all the old hackles from being raised. After all even the most ignorant Anglo-Canadian hockey lout can manage “parlez-vous Anglais?” – though most don’t bother to try even that. In the best case response-scenario your French-speaking counterpart will be fully bilingual, preferably through a Anglo-French Canadian mixed marriage, and will be only too happy to accommodate you. Then there are those Francophones who have learned English fluently, usually through their elementary and high-school training, and are more or less happy to speak it if asked. But both of these groups are outnumbered by those Quebecois for whom the mere mention of the word “English” flares up a range of negative, near-primal emotions. Clearly it will stoke the fires of defensive, knee-jerk nationalism in those for whom a separate nation of Quebec is the only hope of preserving their French language and culture. But away from these obvious political connotations, indeed even among French speakers who favour union with Canada, being asked about your English language abilities is in a deep, visceral way to be challenged about your intellectual capacity and social status. On an English dominated continent it is almost to be challenged about your very sense of self-worth. We’ve mentioned the power and importance of the English language, but only briefly and indirectly alluded to its inherent arrogance. The arrogance of English is something extraordinary and is as a very concept quite unique. Every native English speaker without exception is guilty; whether you hail from England, Canada, the U.S., Scotland, Ireland or New Zealand you carry the haughtiness of English in your heart whether you know it or not. The moment you step off a plane in Mongolia or Tajikistan your instinctive expectation – I emphasize instinctive expectation – is that more or less everyone around you has at least some command of English. Logically speaking this preconception is of course mindless. It is irrational, unreasonable, bottomlessly stupid but undoubtedly there. Not a single Anglophone the world over is immune to it; this is not a behavioural trait ascribable to individuals as such but rather is virtually a characteristic of the language itself. English is the only language to have developed its own personality trait. The power of the language is such that it has learned to think and act in a manner of its own, despite being, as a mere language, a non-cognizant entity – little more than a glorified abstraction! Woe betide those who even now still underestimate the strength and greed of English and you its speakers, and no matter what you are saying or how you are saying it, the instant you open your mouth in a far flung place to order a drink or to ask for directions you are in effect performing a simulcast – in other words you are saying something else in parallel, far beneath your breath but loudly and clearly nonetheless. You are saying: “I’m speaking English to you now since I am clever, worldly, rich and sophisticated. I presume and in fact demand you will understand and respond to me accordingly, and I will be absolutely flabbergasted if you do not.” But even before you have finished your verbal request it is quite clear that your chosen target – the man you stopped on the street – doesn’t understand you. Aloud you apologize gently and politely in one form or another and move quickly on. But the damage has been done. The moment it became clear that English was not going to be the medium of the conversation your non-verbalized undercurrent rolled its eyes and stood there staring, amazed and appalled: “What do you mean you can’t speak English?” it shrieked, “In this day and age? Don’t you know this is the twenty-first century? You mean to tell me you’ve been speaking Tajik your entire life? What is the matter with you man!?” This, like it or not, is fairly representative of the language’s built-in, unspoken sense of superiority. This is how the English language behaves itself when it’s in somebody else’s home. And in the linguistic pressure cooker of Quebec where Francophone and Anglophone alike stare down the barrel of a just-cocked shotgun, where the imperious flame of English dances and dallies with the dynamite of cowered, cornered ethnic-French nationalism, explosions of hatred and loathing are never far away.

“Bonjour madame. Er, parlez-vous Anglais?”

The “er” was quite deliberate, my attempt to make the request sound as hesitant as possible and thereby mild, unthreatening and apologetic. If you can’t speak French in Quebec, you had better be apologetic. Hence the effort to add a touch of diplomatic nicety into my question. I needn’t have bothered. The first syllable of “anglais” was hardly out of my mouth when a torrent of rage rushed into my ear.

“What!?” she screamed in English, and then instantly: “Not now you know I’m very busy call back later!”

These words she squawked out at top speed in a strong and very indignant French sounding accent, with a rasping edge added to reflect the knee-jerked nature of her anger. It was as though I had just stepped on her toes or spilled hot coffee down her shirt. Gone was the gentle, cultured Quebecois girl speaking the soothing allure of the language of love. In her place was an uncouth yob roaring the language of conquest and hate, enraged because she’d been dared to speak the language of conquest and hate. The instantaneous nature of the alteration was explosive, a steroid-enhanced Jekyll to Hyde transition that was actually quite frightening in its ferocity. I sat there, phone pressed to my ear, temporarily speechless as I tried to make sense of the terrorist outrage to which I was being subjected. After a slight pause she repeated her strange command:

“NOT NOW I’m busy call back lat-er!”

Her anger was still growing and there was now an unmistakable note of menace creeping in her voice. Busy? How can a receptionist be too “busy” to answer and route a telephone call? She hadn’t sounded in the least bit flustered in her initial French greeting. In fact she’d sounded positively delighted to hear from me! This was the shortest-lived beautiful friendship in history.

“CALL BACK LATER!”

I hung up quickly lest my mobile phone explode in my hand. Her choice of words was strange and clearly down to her limited experience en Anglais: it was abundantly clear that despite what she was saying I was most certainly not welcome to call back later. For all this girl had known I could have been a financial god-send to her employer, offering significant accounting work perhaps on a corporate contract, with high commissions and the prospect of a long-term, productive and lucrative relationship. It mattered not a jot. The young French-speaking receptionist neither knew nor cared for anything about me save that I was one of them: one of the dreaded Anglos rendered unwelcome in her province by her own brand of patriotism, a force far beyond the ability of money to buy.

I accuse English of conquest and hate. Well, compared to French or other Latin-based languages this statement holds in a way. I’ve mentioned English’s innate intolerance for its imprudent non-speakers. The more subtle point here is that English through its aforementioned relative bluntness of diction and consequent harshness of intonation does lend itself to a more aggressive, expansionist mindset. Its brutal utilitarianism succeeds not only in a practical, day-to-day sense but also as a purely psychological force: imagine British warlords like Kitchener or Wellington barnstorming through foreign lands with the roaring rhetoric of, say, Italian driving them forward. The truth is that hate is simply more powerful than love – or at the very least it is much harder working. While French the language of love sprawls forever on the couch in steamy-eyed self-adoration, English each morning staggers out of bed scruffy, hung-over, sick and enraged – and determined to make somebody somewhere pay. Try picturing an international shouting match between an Englishman and a Frenchman, each using their own vernacular. It’s no contest. Through a force of personality shaped in large part by natural brutality of his language the Englishman has become almost physically incapable of not getting his own way. Conversely the effete wine-sampling and verbal love-making of French is just not conducive to heavy industry, brutalist architecture, cold utilitarianism, pursuit of truth and hand-to-hand fighting – that is to say, to the world in which we must all live. This is the disconcerting bottom line for the Quebecois patriot: should the entire rest of the world disappear tomorrow and leave his province of Quebec alone on this Earth, the fact is that seven million French speakers would still end up feeling threatened by the million or so Anglos in their midst. Even with a seven to one material disadvantage English would just not know when to stay quiet, stop talking and go to bed! It would regain its composure in a second and continue its onward march up the Island of Montreal having secured its final victory over the downtown core; converting, zombie-like, one Francophone victim at a time until the French bastion of the East Island has fallen. From there, with this huge enemy base parked in its midriff, the rest of the province would be vulnerable. It is a point the fervent French nationalists of Quebec realise, but realise only subconsciously and which they are therefore incapable of facing and countering: that the question of language in Quebec is not just a simple numbers game of who speaks what and where, it is that of one language being inherently more powerful than another. In our own day to day reality this aspect of English is hidden by the in-your-face manifestations of its global scope and reach. But at a deeper level it is there, letting the language’s rivals know that even as our presently constructed Western civilisation gives way to the giants of China and the Subcontinent, English will thrive in new homes even as Britain and America fade into history. In their heart of hearts the Quebecois know this about English. They know if you dropped a random Scotsman into the middle of the Punjab the whole state would be jabbering English in forty years – and that in the final, final analysis even a free-born nation of Quebec cannot, in the end, save their separate culture. Quebec’s sense of loss and defeat is already palpable. It is the final ingredient fuelling the fears in and of Canada’s slowly disappearing Belle Province.

For all the challenges the future will hold, Quebec today stands defiant against the de-culturalization of humanity. While it is beyond dispute that globalism and its effect, globalisation, will ultimately prove to be good things – helping our self-defeating species to eliminate the more artificial among its many divisions, it is still somewhat disheartening to watch the unthinking and even slavish adoption of the new order by numerous national groups. Tribal identity is fundamental to our nature, and the ease with which some peoples are moving away from it is vaguely troubling. It is almost as if they are becoming in a way self-dehumanised in the face of new realities. Why is it that the German, Danish, Icelandic and Indian peoples will leap at any opportunity to speak English to anyone? Are they not even remotely troubled by the tremendous cultural upheaval a world language entails? By contrast the response of the Quebecois is the entirely rational and human one: prickly, defensive and protective; you’re on their patch now and if you can’t speak their language then you’d better learn it, and fast! They will accommodate an outsider – who wouldn’t? – but they will not bend over backwards and debase themselves in the process. Deep down they know that ultimately the game is up but in the meantime they’re in the business of apologising to nobody for being a people, a real people, separate, distinct and themselves in the Anglosphere’s brave new world of global banal. Authentic patriotism of their kind, with its roots in land, language, tradition and religion is an increasingly rare bird these days. For most of the rest of us – certainly in the First World – national pride has long since been reduced to the Olympics medal board, the international soccer match and the accompanying bouts of brainless flag-flaunting. You do see Quebec’s famous blue and white Fleurdelisé standard being flown from government buildings and at political rallies in the province, but solid patriotism does not have the same reliance on bunting and ribbons than its less-substantive variants do, and as you drive along her highways and stroll through her streets the one thing that strikes you about Quebec’s flag and the province’s other “national” symbols is their surprising lack of ubiquity.

If you take a walk through the Plateau neighbourhood you will begin to see what I mean when I refer to patriotism as something measurable in terms of authenticity or lack thereof. This beautiful residential area is one of those bastions of Canada’s New France made all the more proud and defiant by its sheer proximity to enemy territory: increasingly English downtown Montreal is a mere twenty minute walk to the South and East. “Le Plateau” as it is affectionately known to locals is itself a large area and is best exemplified by the streets in the blocks East of rue Saint-Denis and North of Rue Cherrier. As you walk along any of them, the stretch of Rue Saint-André just above Cherrier for example, you get a feel for something of the nature of solid, bricks and mortar nationhood, an almost visceral sensation impossible to encounter anywhere else in Canada. Saint-André like countless other streets in the area forms a straight but narrow throughway accommodating a single lane of traffic and flanked on either side by rows of low-lying triplex and duplex housing, interspersed with the occasional modest apartment block. The character of most of these buildings and thus of the neighbourhood as a whole, though in its current state dating back not far into only the nineteenth century, is so palpably Old World – or at least is so palpably a successful attempt to recreate the Old World – that at times you need to remind yourself what side of the Atlantic you’re on. This is the part of Montreal that feels like Paris, notwithstanding the fact that visitors from France invariably find the comparison baffling and wholly misplaced. The stonemasonry is in traditional style, sometimes comprising those large-cut, massive grey blocks that evoke a sterner, more austere and more Catholic age. Many of the properties have continental-European style elevated porches and street-facing balconies for the upper and middle apartments. But most of all it is the wrought-iron external staircases that give the neighbourhood its timeless character. Sometimes spiralling, sometimes straight, either way they provide direct street-access for the higher apartments via steps that are so narrow, and angled so steeply that in the midst of an ice-caked Montreal winter you can take your life into your hands descending from them. I noticed throughout the Plateau that several of these decorative staircases terminated right at the edge of very narrow sidewalks, guaranteeing that any slip and fall from the upper steps would conveniently tumble you out onto the street and into the path of oncoming traffic. Basic safety considerations would, you would think, outlaw the design and force modifications to existing constructions – and elsewhere in Canada this is very likely what would have happened. But in Quebec, safety and practicality must frequently bow to culture and the aesthetic, as indeed they must in a society emphasizing the warmth of a common culture over the sterility and indifference of the self.

Whatever title or label they give to this architectural style, the point is that had this neighbourhood existed in Toronto, Calgary or Vancouver it could not possibly have survived the post-war wrecking ball and the ignorance and oafishness of the modernisers. In those places such distinctive dwellings would have long since made way for gaudy condominiums or uninspiring office blocks. But in Quebec and because of Quebec their future is secure: where individual units have fallen beyond repair they are replaced by brand new constructions following the same tried and trusted style. This appreciation of beauty and comprehension of the importance of form are utterly unknown on the wrong side of the Ottawa. Only in Quebec do they understand the centrality of living space to communal identity. After all, what else nowadays distinguishes a civilisation if not the physical infrastructure it produces – the manifestation of that civilisation that you can actually see with your own eyes, that you touch and feel and move and exist in? The Quebecois understand, at least to a degree, that if their province ceases to look distinct than it will of course have gone a long way towards ceasing to be distinct – a point which should go without saying but for a great many people in a great many places quite clearly does not. It is a point that, for example, those English Canadians battling to dream up spurious distinctions between their own country and the United States would have done well to bear in mind over the decades. This is what it means to be patriotic! This is what defines a country. Not flags and songs and pointless public holidays; but the genius and inspiration of produced, utilitarian beauty infused with the sweat of hard, proud, physical endeavour.

Quebec, being French, is Catholic, and therefore almost by definition post-Catholic; a post-Catholic society just like the rest of the Western World’s once devoutly papist nations. The Quebecois call a “Quiet Revolution” the era in the 1950s and 1960s when the dominance of the Catholic Church collapsed amid a wider “awakening” of French-based popular culture and the move to join the social liberalisation that was by then engulfing most of the First World. And yet, in the decades since, the residue of Rome has remained, and at times and in ways has remained quite openly and quite nosily. To this day as you stroll through the Plateau at noon or at six pm (or am!) on Rue Rachel close to Saint-Denis, the Angelus will start to belt and roar from the tower and spire of Saint-Jean-Baptiste church, the clanging of the bells imploring to prayer the distinctly un-catholic socialists, students, tree-huggers and gay-rights activists of modern Quebec, all shrugging languidly along in the streets down below. To them, the people born and raised here, the bells of the Angelus are pure background noise – no more noticeable or noteworthy than the police sirens or bus engines of the busy city. The chime of the church-bells can be heard many blocks away and even there they seem to have a power of amplification that defies their actual volume. There is a great and proud defiance in the case of this angelus rendition at least. It suggests that the Catholic identity, still strong among the aged and the infirm, is a sort of Quebec within a Quebec battling against great odds to defend the no longer defensible, almost swamped by modish modernity just as the Quebecois themselves begin to succumb to the English tide. But before that, and still with a long way to go, this sound and all the others – the French voices, the cheerful bicycle bells, the impatient Latin honking – merge with the sights, not least the building styles; then the petite corner restaurants and the waft of the exiled street-smokers, the smell of the food, even the thick blanket of fresh winter snow and its crunch underfoot all combine with great force to tell you that even here, deep into one of the conformist, skyscrapered metropolises of modern North America, you have found your way into somewhere special: a place, a world and a people utterly and proudly apart.

The Plateau de Mont Royal is far from unique in Quebec – I don’t want to create an impression that it stands as an oasis of decency in a mass of otherwise uncouth ugliness. There certainly is ugliness in Montreal and in other parts of the province, but even in some of her grimmer and grimier post-industrial towns like Trois-Rivieres, there are bright flashes of decency and improvement in the town halls and some of the newer apartments – flashes far less frequently seen in the deadbeat, dead-end vistas of small-town English Canada. Many are familiar with Ville de Quebec, the province’s capital city three hours north of Montreal and home to a meticulously maintained eighteenth-century walled city – North America’s only surviving such fortification outside of Mexico, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There, the year-round flow of tourist dollars ensures that that standards of cleanliness, appearance and repair are maintained to the very highest levels. And so we need to focus on a better if ostensibly mundane illustration of the extent to which the Quebecois are invested in the province they call a country. The illustration is superior through the fact of its being comparative, and it can be witnessed in quite startling technicolor when you undertake the hundred kilometre trip from Timmins, Ontario over the border to Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec. These two remote mining towns, located towards the far Northern extremity of their respective provinces’ highway systems, are places few Canadians of any stripe would ever deign to visit. Mining communities in Canada are seen as being synonymous with nine month winters, roughneck bar brawls and bumpkin curling tournaments – the sort of places the comfortable complacents of the bedroom belt would give their right arms to avoid having to visit. Even a small amount of time spent in Timmins will, in all honesty, seem to confirm these effete prejudices. I will dwell only briefly on the frightful appearance of this hideous town; suffice to say that it stands as a smaller, dirtier, more desolate and even more dispiriting and ramshackle cousin of Winnipeg, Canada’s urban scar. The immediate point to note here is the complete and absolute absence of pride in this place and countless others like it potted along the Calgary-Ottawa and Ottawa-Windsor corridors. That visitors to Timmins will come away aghast and appalled at its disjointed, run down strip-mall of a main street; its grubby, hovelish little hotels, prostitute-governed nightlife and tasteless, disinterested restaurants is something the residents of this overgrown, sub-arctic armpit have obviously not stopped to consider for a second. Given Timmins’ remoteness of location we may, out of charity, surmise that even in this era of cheap and ubiquitous air travel many of her sons and daughters have yet to get around to seeing the outside world, and are under the impression that everywhere else looks more or less like their own flea-bitten locale. Or – worse – they accept without thought the self congratulatory propaganda of superficial Canadian nationalism, and genuinely do believe that people in Europe and the United States live amidst even worse jerry-built squalor and hopelessness. It strikes me that a lack of communal pride – which is what is under discussion here – cannot be easily separated from the question of individual pride and self-worth, and that the unforgivable state of Timmins, Ontario must indeed say something about the people, and moreover the kind of people, who choose to live in such a place. That, perhaps, is a subject for another day. For now let us climb into our car after a mercifully brief overnight stay, and drive East out of town on our way towards the Quebec border. As we reach the outskirts of Timmins we are surprised to see one or two fairly-opulent properties lining the highway. In other places the wealthy direct their power and resources into municipal improvement and worthwhile public works – but obviously not here. As we approach the provincial line towards the next stop on our voyage we are braced for more dispiriting mine town gaudiness – only this time through the added smog of a foreign language.

Happily, we could not be more wrong. Rouyn-Noranda is a bumpy thirty minute drive beyond the “Bienvenue au Quebec” greeting posted by the side of road where Ontario Highway 101 becomes Route Nationale 388. (Note the portentous and nationalistic use of the word “nationale” for what is, of course, actually a provincial road). Notwithstanding the appalling state of the roadway on the Quebec side of the border, you can’t help noticing some hopeful signs as you arrive on the outskirts of town: somewhat strangely, for starters, the gas stations seem perceptibly cleaner and more modern. The houses alongside the route, while on average smaller, have fresher licks of paint and better tended gardens. The local drivers completely defy the stereotypes of their province by being courteous and patient, and helpful to confused visitors; at first glance the backwoods of Quebec trump the boondocks of elsewhere through sheer quality of inhabitant. The small commercial centre of the town turns out to be a startling improvement on the shanty-towns of Northern Ontario: clean, compact and eminently walkable; narrower, cosier streets lined with a noticeably higher standard of food, clothing, hunting and outdoor-pursuit outlet. In marked contrast to the factory-farm food diners of Timmins the cafes and eateries of Rouyn-Noranda, I found, warranted two extra stars with their high-standard food offerings and individualistic decor. The hotel I had booked in resigned expectation of another far-North fleapit turned out to be city-sophisticated with its fashionably furnished lobby and spotlessly maintained rooms. At the local bar I could hold what, in all frankness, I could not possibly have held in Timmins: a civilised conversation with intelligent, informed and worldly people. I could drink micro-brewed beer – one of the hallmarks of self-styled cultural advancement in our age. I could, in search of take-out coffee the next morning, be struck anew by the town centre’s relative cohesion and have it occur to me then, suddenly, that what had really bothered me about Timmins had been its dreadful, appalling spaciousness! Spaciousness as something ugly and negative, rather than expansive and life-enhancing. Only in Canada! Between one tatty, nondescript outlet mall and the next, between the low-grade supermarket and the redneck restaurant over the street, there would lay crumbling, potholed wildernesses of unused tarmac, weed-colonised wasteground and – bizarrely – isolated, interspersed building, tank or shack; the main hotel, pride of the city, alone and aloof in the non-existent skyline, fronting its prettiest facade onto the main street and the world: that of its hideously constructed indoor car-park, gobbling the whole layout of the first three floors. The spaciousness of Timmins: bafflement at aesthetic and dread of community; sheer, ugly, cantankerous, ice-murdered, weather-beaten, energy-sapped disinterest in one’s fellow men. But Rouyn-Noranda? An hour down the highway, of the very same country and an utterly alien, French-language society, the polar opposite: a manifestation not merely of copper mining and economic imperative, but of a viable and living, functioning society: the foundation block of true nationhood. And that is the over-arching point. A street-by-shop comparison of these two utterly different places must entail superficiality and even be irrelevant to a large extent, but for the underlying theme: respect for one’s general living space, by which I mean concern for one’s local community and, by extension, love of one’s own country. Patriotism, the polar opposite of wanton communal squalor. In Quebec they have this care, in English Canada they don’t. That a nation does not exist by default alone, that populations must in fact earn the privilege of calling a land their birthright is something that most people, not least those who already have a country to call their own, readily overlook. A stroll through Rouyn-Noranda, the province’s pleasant surprise; through the compact splendour of the world-famous Quebec City; through the Plateau de Mont Royal with its apartments old and new alike conforming to a prevailing culture; even a walk through the comparative industrial dull of Trois-Rivieres will all serve to convince you that if nothing else Quebec does deserve to be a country – a fully fledged nation state while the concept has some life; and that the Quebecois, who care, have done more to deserve this prize than English-Canadians, who don’t, ever did.

I suspect that a certain, subconscious self-knowledge of unearned nationhood among English Canadians is one of the major bugbears fuelling Anglo-French rivalry in Canada, a rivalry which – like all negative behaviours Canadian – is usually kept wrapped under a blanket of self-serving sanctimony. When it does pop out of the box its manifestations run a gauntlet from the merely interesting to the truly strange. Can you, for example, name another country where a large crowd will boo and catcall during their own national anthem despite having sung the words of that same anthem with pride and gusto only seconds earlier? I have not misstated that scenario and you may need to read it again to get it clear in your mind – when issues of national identity are raised on Canadian soil, all things become possible. Now the defensive posture of the cornered, outnumbered French is easy to explain and understand. Less comprehensible is the spite and moaning that other Canadians bring to the relationship: the bouts of muttering, eye-rolling exasperation and anti-French, anti-Quebec grumbling whenever some issue pertinent to French-Canadian culture or Quebec’s constitutional position comes to the fore. Sit among a coterie of Anglos in Ontario or Alberta whenever any such matter is aired on the nightly news. Listen to the grumbling responses and observe the accompanying disgusted, incredulous body-language: “Damn French”, “whining again”, “they’re not like us”, “not real Canadians”, “bleeding us dry”, “they’re all racist”, “they hate us, man”, “they never shut up”, “they’re like forever whining”, “we should let ‘em separate”, “yeah let ‘em go” and so on and so forth. It is unclear precisely how or why the sofa-languishing equilibrium of Torontonians or Calgarians should feel itself threatened by a TV report on, say, the latest controversy over the language of instruction in Quebec’s public education system. Quite obviously it shouldn’t – so why all the self-righteousness and faux superiority, all the sobbing and sighing I personally witnessed among English-Canadians – I witnessed without fail among English-Canadians whenever “the whole Quebec thing” would come up in conversation? Mere exasperation with the province’s perennial identity struggle provides an explanation, but only in part; the particular contempt invariably seen speaks, it seems to me, to baser underlying emotions, and first and foremost among them good old-fashioned jealousy – in fact one of the most easily fanned jealousies of them all: the hatred of the culturally rootless for the patriotically settled. It is an envy, it is worth noting, that economic superiority cannot compensate for: though the Timmins-to-Rouyn Noranda run would certainly give you the opposite impression, overall English Canadians are well ahead of the Quebecois in terms of per capita income and overall standard of living, but this fails to give them an edge in the trans-Canada game of tribal one-upmanship. The unabashed, unrestrained patriotism of Quebec jars with English Canadians; in their heart of hearts they hate it the way any wilful failure hates a striving success – as drug addicts hate the sober and as gamblers hate the responsible. The cultural and societal vacuum that is Ontario and the West of Canada is indeed wilful: the product of universal individual selfishness, an unformulated national ideal and an unnecessary Southern border. Thus can’t Anglo-Canadians bear to see true pride flying its standard in their very own yard.

The phenomenon of Canadians jeering their own national anthem can in theory occur at any time under circumstances similar to those I am about to describe, though most of the time the shackles of Canadian politeness will prevail and O Canada will be heard and sung respectfully. Not, however, on the occasion of my watching a CFL football game being beamed live from a major city in Western Canada.[3] It was the Grey Cup game, the season climax and Canada’s answer to the American Super Bowl. As is naturally the case in the ceremonies ahead of a major event such as this, the national anthem was performed by guest singers on the pitch, as thousands of spectators sang along with pride. So far, so good... until, that is, an unwelcome guest, la langue française, decided to gatecrash the party. Since the Montreal Alouettes were one of the teams contesting the final, the organisers had decided that the national anthem ceremony should be conducted partly in French. It seemed like the right thing to do: a national sporting occasion, in an officially bilingual country, one of the team’s contesting being from a French-speaking city. Who could object? Well, a great many people it would seem: the instant a French-language line of the anthem came down the microphone and over the loudspeaker, a roar of disapproval emanated from the mainly local crowd of Western Canadians.

Now at the best of times the spectacle of people collectively “boo-ing” is disconcerting to anyone who even remotely values the idea and force of thought. Developed, socialised human beings, standing there hands in pockets as they make a noise identical to that of a herd of lowing cattle is one proof among many that we are not as distantly removed from the animal kingdom as we all like to pretend. If directed, collective cognition is a prerequisite of civilisation – and it is; if it can be switched off in an instant like a television set or a light switch and if such reversion to grunt-squawk intellect is easy for our species and getting easier by the day, then we should accept forthwith that cave dwelling, pack hunting, herb foraging and carcass-scavenging reside in our sometime future as well as in our distant past. The sort of angry mob thoughtlessness as aired by Western Canadians that day is always unsettling on its own terms, but when directed inward as it was then – directed at one’s own country, one’s own tribe for want of a better term – it takes on a particularly grotesque quality. Purported patriots sneering at their own national anthem is horrible and creepily comic all at once. Watching the live coverage of this episode from Toronto, and noting the somewhat embarrassed silence of the Canadian TV commentators as all this unfolded, it occurred to me that the instantly reactive, knee-jerk nature of the cat-calling bestowed a peculiar type of power onto the crowd’s behaviour. The mob did not need to consider for so much as a second before mooing and braying as the anthem started – it was one of those illuminating moments where the subconscious trumps the conscious, and deeply buried emotions stand exposed. In a collective setting it’s akin to a temporary quashing of the societal immune system – with the result that society’s hidden viruses spring out into the open. Didn’t these people entirely comprehend what they were doing, and moreover the implications of what they were doing? Perhaps... and perhaps not, to be charitable either way; from my standpoint, then that of a neutral observer, such viscerally expressed disdain for all things French, for a large and central component of the country itself, a language and a culture without which this nation could simply not be, spoke volumes about the inherently anti-Canadian nature of Canada, and is there another nation on Earth against which such a criticism could possibly be levelled? Earlier I referred to Canada as the disparate scraps of the American revolution. Who, watching ordinary Western-Canadians showing such disdain for a fifth of their own countrymen, could possibly disagree? I turned to my Ontario-born, Toronto-raised flatmates and raised my eyebrows. Canadians jeering as O Canada plays? My friends shuffled uncomfortably on their respective sofas.

“Out West, they hate the French,” shrugged one; nothing about the crowd’s reaction struck him as unusual in the least. Another provided a more nuanced rationale:

“When the French whine, the Feds[4] listen and usually give them what they want. When the West whines, no-one gives a damn. That’s the reason for all the anger out there.”

He was alluding to yet another manifestation of the Canadian condition: “Western Alienation”, the blanket term used for the sense of isolation from the  Eastern political and economic power-base felt to varying degrees and at different times by people in the four westernmost provinces, a disenfranchisement born of the fact that for most of Canadian history their combined populations have been lower than that of Ontario alone. In bald electoral terms there simply hasn’t been enough Westerners to warrant listening to, though by the turn of the new century the problem was being in large part alleviated by energy-based economic booms in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Perhaps petty envy at Quebecois’ renowned organisation of agitation went some way to explaining the Westerner’s ire: in Canada the French do get noticed when they complain, and so complain they do! But overall I felt inclined to disregard my flatmate’s excuse making: if the cause of “Western alienation” has fundamentally been one of perceived political exclusion, then logically speaking the carping of the West should be directed at domineering English Ontario rather than sclerotic, internally-divided  Quebec. The gut reaction of the mob that day pointed, it seemed to me, to deeper and darker emotions: the human species’ uncured stomach-ulcers of tribe, caste, group and the gang; the age-old indignation at them for the crime of not being us.

Obnoxious and depressing as anthem-booing episodes undoubtedly are, the actions of the football crowd that day seem positively enlightened when another, outright bizarre syndrome of the Canada’s Anglo-French schism is considered. Let us begin by accepting that when a menace stalks the land, frightening the populace and disturbing the peace, a people will be made united in the goal of its defeat or resolution. Any kind of national menace – large-scale rioting or a sudden crime wave, an epidemic, the threat of war, even the effects of economic collapse can serve to unite a people, and as they survey the aftermath or brace for impact they know, as individuals, that they do not stand alone. But a phantom menace, alas, presents an entirely different order of challenge: through the sheer bad manners of not actually existing it can move men to paroxysms of spluttering and indignation. There is a spectre that manages to both literally and metaphorically haunt Anglo-French relations in Canada. In the absence of any name official or otherwise I will simply refer to it as “car smashing”. Throughout all my years living in different parts of the country I did not on a single occasion encounter or even hear of a case of English-French or French-English car smashing; it is a problem that like a ghost inspires fear largely through the act of being unreal. The only situation resembling an instance of this “problem” that comes to mind would be Montreal hockey fans rioting in their own city following the Montreal Canadiens’ Stanley Cup win in 1993. A large number of vehicles were overturned or otherwise vandalised, but this was down to the over-exuberance of a drunken sports mob and was not as in the behaviour I seek to describe motivated by ethnic animosity. In general terms it comes down to this: a “French” car (i.e. one with Quebec license plates) parked on the street in any other province, or an “English” car (i.e. one with plates from any other province) parked on the street in Quebec will in either case almost certainly be smashed and thrashed on sight by an violent mob of enraged local bigots. I have heard this fear expressed in numerous ways, by various people of either background on enough occasions to have long since recognised it as a neurosis, and a uniquely Canadian neurosis at that. It was first explained to me in great earnestness by an educated, bookish Quebecois colleague in Toronto – the man who had insisted he was only living on Anglo soil to be with his girlfriend. At an office lunch one day he told me of the deep concern he had had with a bureaucratic delay getting his Quebec-licensed car re-registered in Ontario.

“As a result I was having to park it with great care on the street,” he recalled in his precise, accented English. Puzzled, I asked him why.

“They would have smashed it.”

They? Smashed?

“Yes. When the people see the Quebec plates on the car, they will smash the windows.”

Precisely who “the people” were was left unexplained. Toronto is a far from perfect city, but random mob hooliganism is not, nor has it ever been, among its problems. In fact street-crime of just about any variety in Toronto is, in relative terms, almost unheard of: in many years living in the city I, for example, would frequently go out leaving my front door unlocked. Yet the notion that the mere sight of the word “Quebec” in small print on a car’s rear license plate would trigger instantaneous crowd violence much as a detonator explodes a bomb was one that died hard for this staid, otherwise sensible and thoughtful man. He was distinguished by the fact that he made this outlandish claim in a calm, matter-of-fact voice: the spluttering indignation I mentioned is by far the more common platform upon which this fantasy is expressed. A conversation I overheard between two men at a well known Montreal delicatessen ran more or less thus:

Local Francophone man: “Yeah so tomorrow I drive to Peterborough. Got some business.”

Elderly American friend: “Peterborough? Is that close to here?”

“Not so much, it’s down in Ontario. Three-four hours maybe. I hire the car of course.”

“You’re renting a car, huh? But you have a vehicle of your own, don’t you?”

“Yeah but I don’t take that out of the province.”

The American was bemused.

“Really? Why not?” he frowned.

Instantly the Montrealer banged his fist on the counter and, red faced, roared:

“BECAUSE THEY SMASH THE CAR, THAT’S WHY! SMASH IT UP! YOU KNOW THEY HATE THE FRENCH OVER THERE!”

The poor American – so far as I could tell harmless old gent from Vermont, was startled by the ferocity of this statement and the personalised manner in which his friend’s rage had been directed at himself, of all people. He had touched a raw nerve, indeed! It was as though he was being charged with subliminally plotting to theoretically arrange an imaginary car-smashing in an obscure part of Canada the very next day. How does one respond to an accusation of such psychological complexity? He just fell slightly back in his chair and regarded his friend in dazed bewilderment. The Montrealer for his part turned his attention back to his hot-meat sandwich, and chewing a slice of ham very quietly and very grimly reiterated his own point back to himself:

"Ontario. Hating the French over there. Smash it up."

The car-smashing prejudice is even stronger among the Anglos, and I am forced to confess my own wilting before the wave of paranoia: before dropping my car off for a service at the East Island garage I used when living in Montreal, I would always make a point of tuning my radio to a French speaking station. The prospect of Quebecois mechanics discovering the Anglo lineage of my vehicle filled me with a certain unease. How stupid it all seems now! Years earlier in advance of my first ever road trip from Toronto to Montreal I was advised in no uncertain terms to find underground parking rather than park on the street, my Ontario license plate being apparently certain, again, to move otherwise pleasant francophone Canadians into rages of fascist violence. When English Canadians advised me thus, it was always with the unmistakable undercurrent of racialist stereotyping – the notion that such behaviour is just to be expected from those fiery, emotional French types with their quick Latin tempers and unending, ungrateful grievances. In fact the entire picture of Quebec painted for me by Torontonians and others before I had ever set foot in the province seems in retrospect to have been one large, surreal fiction constructed on what “the French” are “really like”: Quebec as a province of vandalised property and hockey-stick murders; buxom women of separatist ferocity and loose morality; their shrugging, pitiful, wine-sipping husbands and enraged, car-smashing hoodlum boyfriends; of Canada-hating zealots, rioting students, striking trade-unionists, corrupt politicians and dangerous drivers all packed whining and howling and brawling into a drunken pot of semi-cultured humanity not a single, solitary one among whom has done a day of work their entire, idle, complaining French lives. What are we to make of this picture? Can there be such a thing as smoke without fire? Yes is the answer, when the smoke drifts through the fogs of misunderstanding and prejudice. Which is not to deny that there may be some very small truths beneath: on the specific question of car-smashing, for instance, I do not for one instant suggest that such an outrage has never happened. Undoubtedly in the aftermath of an NHL play-off between (nominally) French Montreal and one of the English teams, with emotions heightened and alcohol flowing, idiocy has prevailed and some windscreens have been cracked. But the expressions of fear I have encountered on this topic are so utterly disproportionate as to absolutely warrant the label of fantasy. Indeed as a fantasy it seems to stand as an index into the endless merry-go-round of loveless copulation and bitter recrimination that marks the English-French dalliance of Canada. In the absence of car-smashing some other device would be needed to fuel the self-serving mutual dependence of these respective squalid nationalisms. What is Quebec separatism without the hated Anglo colossus threatening to gobble the French and their language up? Absolutely nothing: a soldier without an enemy; a warrior without a war. What would be the Maple Leaf – the Canadian federation – with its Quebec heart ripped out and French heritage gone? Even more of a toadying American satellite than it is now, with its Atlantic coastline isolated and a fifth of its income gone. Canadians need not just the fact of their marriage, but moreover all the spites, hates and fights of the relationship to justify to themselves their own respective failings – indeed their own very existences. These two Canadian solitudes form identities founded almost totally on the existence of rivals: not just each other, but also the dreaded Americans – perhaps the only topic the two sides can find some agreement on. Identities based in large part on bland mutual estrangement at best, and pettiness to crackpot paranoia at worst: whether cultures such as these actually deserve to thrive and propagate is a point I doubt a single Canadian, of either stripe, has ever stopped to consider.

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[1] Quebec Liberal Party / Parti libéral du Québec. Provincial political party, not to be confused with the federal Liberal Party of Canada – an entirely separate organisation

[2] Present sentence clearly not indicative!

[3] Canadian Football League. To the untrained eye identical to American football.

[4] Federal political parties and politicians in Ottawa, and Federal Government departments

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[i] PQ urges francophones to stay in Montreal, CBC News Montreal, Aug 29^th 2012 (http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/pq-urges-francophones-to-stay-in-montreal-1.1136397, retrieved 1^st May 2014)

[ii] War of Words, CBS 60 Minutes, 8^th February 1998

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