The Quebec government's new anti-racism ads turned out to be less than inclusive for one half of the Two Solitudes.
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Maybe we should just let it go.
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Perhaps it’s making a mountain out of a molehill. After all, it’s not an existential threat to rights or services (and Lord knows there are enough of those these days). Plus the government quickly corrected course.
Still, there’s something telling about the latest misunderstanding between the Two Solitudes that can’t merely be swept under the rug.
In case you missed it, the Quebec government unveiled a new ad campaign to fight racism this week.
In both languages, the public service announcement asks: “In Quebec, a group of young Black people gathered in a park at nightfall are called?”
In French, the answer is: “des amis québécois.” The ad then cuts to a cluster of smiling, laughing people of colour sitting on a park bench at sunset, concluding with: “Put an end to prejudice.”
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Much ink could be spilled about the effectiveness of the messaging and whether it will go very far in combatting racism in a province that is still in denial about its subtler, systemic forms. But it’s the English version that has raised the most eyebrows. It just answers the provocative question: “friends,” before cutting to the tagline.
Was something lost in translation? Or was the subliminal message that anglophones aren’t Quebecers? In the current climate of rising language tensions, it was a question that everyone from journalists to opposition MNAs to the Quebec Community Groups Network, an umbrella organization for English-speakers, wondered about on social media.
The explanation was equally revealing. According to Benoît Charette, the minister in charge of the fight against racism, it wasn’t meant as a slight toward English speaking Quebecers. However, his spokesperson noted, the term “ Québecois” has a different connotation in English than in French.
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So a call was made somewhere in the process of producing the segments not to use the word Quebecer in the English version. And, however unintentional, a campaign to promote inclusiveness turned out to be exclusionary … toward anglophones.
Much has already been made of this irony. It quickly became clear the missing word was going to overshadow the goal of the ad campaign, which is to fight stereotypes.
Even French-language commentators rushed to the defence of English-speaking Quebecers — which is reassuring. And Christopher Skeete, the parliamentary secretary on anglophone affairs called the lapse “unacceptable .” The capsules were quickly withdrawn. They will be recut so that anglophones are identified as Quebecers in English, too.
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The quick fix suggests good faith on the part of the government. But what does it say that anglos were left out in the first place?
Either someone in the upper echelons of the Quebec cabinet and bureaucracy doesn’t think of anglophones as Quebecers — or they assume English-speakers don’t think of themselves that way. Both mindsets are troubling, especially given the whole point of the ads was to challenge biases and the broaden the general public’s idea of who qualifies as a Quebecer.
It’s all the harder to swallow given the swell of pride Premier François Legault is trying to instil in Quebecers (or at least some of us), with the creation of new cultural institutions and a new culture course in schools. Both are designed to strengthen the sense of the national identity, history and language.
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Who is all this aimed at, though? Who belongs? Legault has stated he considers anglophones to be part of the Quebec nation. But there are times it doesn’t feel as if he means it.
There are days when English-speaking Quebecers or their institutions are used as a convenient foil for political gain or to rally the nationalist troops. There are moments when the concerns of anglophones are treated like an irritant or an afterthought. There are also times when the powers that be take actions that run contrary to the interests of the English-speaking community or other minority groups, such as recent laws that seek to enshrine collective rights over individual ones.
In this context, is it better to be ignored instead? Not really. It’s a painful reminder of where anglophones stand in the eyes of some of our fellow Quebecers — somewhere between a spoiled minority and angryphones who always have an axe to grind. No matter how much French we learn, how much we participate in Quebec society, this kind of thing leaves the impression we don’t count when it comes down to it.
Perhaps we’re reading too much into one word missing that will soon be added to a public awareness campaign. But sometimes what goes unsaid speaks volumes.
ahanes@postmedia.com
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