While obviously I have not read this new book you are writing, I suspect it may and indeed I hope it will present facts and arguments that will, at the very least, encourage a national debate on the Quebec situation.
It seems to me that for far too long, the fate of Canada, the issue of national unity, has been left solely in the hands of one group of people, those who live in Quebec.
Hopefully your new book will, among other things, convince some of us that the time has come for all Canadians, not just Quebecers, to decide whether our relationship should continue as is, be modified, or perhaps even severed.
I am sure you are aware that in 2014 Canada must decide whether to renew the so called “equalization program” which benefits Quebec disproportionately. I suspect that if sufficient numbers of Canadians began to rebel over this incredible welfare scheme, that at the very least we could convince the government to either scrap the program entirely or implement policies that would force Quebec to stop draining the rest of the country and stand on its own two feet.
There is no reason whatsoever that Quebec should be a “have not” province given the James Bay Hydro Electric project and the incredible oil and gas resources they have recently discovered.
We need a national debate on whether we wish to continue pumping billions of dollars into Quebec with nothing but headaches as our reward! Hopefully Lowell, your new book will help launch just such a debate.
James Harrison, Vancouver, BC
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE CONVERSION
I said earlier that I awoke one morning to discover that I had come full circle from being a staunch supporter of Canadian unity to someone who believes it might be better for all concerned if Quebec were to leave. The fact is, of course that such a metamorphosis doesn’t occur overnight. Unlike the Biblical account of Paul’s travels, my conversion didn’t occur on the road to Damascus, but began instead on a river cruise through countries once crushed by the weight of the “Iron Curtain”.
The graphic evidence of the desperate struggle for freedom and independence that confronted us in Budapest was heart wrenching but in some strange way, at least for me, uplifting. Here was a city, a country, a people who suffered terribly at the hands of the Nazis, the Communists, the Fascists and the traitors in their midst. They were tortured, murdered and exiled by the tens of thousands but never gave up their dream, their fight to be free; to govern themselves.
Evidence of the horrors inflicted confronted us around almost every corner in downtown Budapest, but it wasn’t until we entered the “Great Synagogue” that some of the affection and respect I had always had for the Quebecois began to slip away.
The synagogue (the largest in Europe) sits at the edge of what was once the few blocks of Budapest that served as the Jewish Ghetto into which were jammed some 70,000 Jews during the Nazi occupation. Of the between eight and ten thousand who died in the Ghetto (most of the rest were shipped to concentration camps) two thousand are buried in a mass gravesite (now a memorial) at the side of the synagogue.
At the rear of the building is a very moving metal sculpture of a willow tree whose leaves bear the names of all who died in the ghetto. Donated by movie actor Tony Curtis in memory of his Hungarian father the “willow tree” shares space with another memorial honouring 240 non-Jewish Hungarians who risked their lives to rescue Jews from the “death camps”. One of those honored is Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who, by preparing special protective passports, is believed to have saved the lives of thousands.
As I bent down for a closer look at the memorials, an elderly man who was standing quietly nearby, cap in hand, turned to me and said, “So here we find the very worst that mankind is capable of,” and pointed to the gravesite. Then nodding slightly in the direction of the Wallenberg memorial, “and the very best!”
It set me to thinking.
Nothing compares to the fate of European Jews under the Nazis, but as I left the “Great Synagogue” I couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps Quebec Anglos could understand, better than most, the kind of discrimination and hatred that herded innocents into ghettos.
Of course the separatists and their camp followers didn’t force anyone into a ghetto and they certainly didn’t herd anyone into railcars on their way to death camps. But, and I know this will upset many of you, we cannot escape the fact that some 280,000 Anglos, along with another 80,000 Allophones were essentially herded out of the province in the face of extremely discriminatory, harassing and often hateful government edicts and actions.
Some may have left for other reasons, but there can be no doubt that in the overwhelming majority of cases, while not compelled to pin yellow stars to their jackets, people left the province because, as members of a very small minority, they were singled out, discriminated against, harassed and humiliated, not because of their religion, but because of their mother tongue!
Hitler wanted all Jews gone from Europe and set out to kill them all. Pauline Marois, just as with separatists before her, doesn’t want Anglos dead, just not around where she has to see them or deal with them in Quebec.
Of course their methods are different, so too the motivation, but in the end both the separatists and the Nazis had and have one similar goal. No more Jews in Europe. No more Anglos in Quebec.
A harsh assessment? Yes. Unfair? Some will say so. But honestly, can there by any doubt that Hitler wanted to rid Europe of Jewry? Can there be any doubt that Pauline Marois and sadly many of her followers want to rid Quebec of anyone whose mother tongue is not French?
In the end it may very well turn out that Ms Marois will be more successful in her efforts than Hitler was with his.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting the discrimination and repression that drove more than a quarter million people out of Quebec are in any way, shape or form comparable to the fate of Jews during the Holocaust. In fact you would be hard pressed to search history and find anything more evil than what the Nazis did to the Jews under Hitler and his henchmen.
But the visit to the “Great Synagogue ” and similar examples of man’s inhumanity to man that confronted us during our stay in Budapest drove home to me the realization that the difference between the Nazi’s treatment of the Jews and Quebec’s treatment of Anglos is really only a matter of degree.
Hitler and his henchmen wanted all Jews dead and set about to kill them . The Separatists want Anglos out of their province and set about to accomplish just that, not with guns and whips, but with pernicious laws and regulations and yes open, sometimes even legislated, bigotry!
So there can be no misunderstanding, I repeat, there is no comparison between the suffering imposed by the Holocaust and that which prompted the exodus of Anglos from Quebec, but what happened to the Anglos and continues to happen is nonetheless a result of government policies, that blatantly discriminate against a small minority on the basis of language.
Make no mistake, Quebec official treatment of Anglos is far from benign and has never really been properly exposed for the mean-spiritedness and outright bigotry that drives it.
Perhaps even worse, just as in Nazi Germany, much of the Quebec population turns a blind eye to what is glaringly evident to anyone who cares to see.
Sadly, there will be no memorials to Quebecers who fought against the injustice of it all!
What we experienced in the next two days in Budapest convinced me even more than it’s bloody well time Quebec stops its cultural strangulation of Anglos, stops harassing