THE OLD DAYS (1955)
Bidoux
Quebec Now - Chapter 13 : The Minorities
By Miriam Chapin
FRENCH CANADIAN friend of mine remarks, "Les Anglais, they do the
damnedest things. Who but an English Canadian would think of naming the
new Quebec school for naval cadets after d'Iberville, and then
dedicating it on Trafalgar Day? After all, even if d'Iberville was born
in Montreal, he was a commander in the French navy, and that's the day
it suffered its worst defeat in all history."
Whereat [sic] the English Canadian with me snaps, "Well, you French do
pick the damnedest things to get sore at." And we part in mutual
irritation.
It is out of such incidents that some of the illfeeling between English
and French arises. The French Canadians live in history, drilled to
remember all that has made them what they are; and alas, every
grievance. The English Canadians live in the present and fail to
comprehend how much of the present is tied up with the past. Yet it must
be said that since the clashes. of wartime, when perhaps. both sides
were appalled at the chasm that was opening in the nation, English
Canadians have put forth a far greater effort than ever before to
understand. Some of it is condescending, some of it blunders, but a lot
of it adds up to a realization on both sides that the effort is
necessary and should reach its goal.
About a fifth of Quebec is English-speaking. It holds the economic
power. Les Anglais who speak French fluently are exceptional; those who
speak it perfectly are so rare as to be notable. (Among them must be
noted the Rt. Hon. Vincent Massey, Governor-General of Canada.) In
Montreal, English Canadians live in their own towns, encysted within the
great French city, diving into it each morning to earn their bread and
Scotch, returning at night to the lawns and pure-bred dogs, the
tree-lined streets and bridge-tables of Suburbia. French and English, or
rather Scots, have lived side by side for 300 years without knowing each
other, and have now arrived at a reasonably comfortable co-existence by
remaining as ignorant as possible of each other's thoughts. Every aspect
of life in Montreal is dual, religion, art (to a lesser extent than
most), literature, business, pleasure, sport, sex. It is surprising that
enough unity is obtained to carry on the city's business. Outside
Montreal the English are settled in the Eastern Townships, and in little
groups in a few industrial towns.
When I first came to Montreal to live, I thought the French Canadians
were absurd when they said with emotion, "We are a conquered people."
Then I heard an English Canadian business man who employed a hundred
French workmen say, "Oh sure, they're all right if you know how to
handle 'em. And we do-after all, we conquered 'em, didn't we?"
So, slowly, slowly, with rude and angry words from French Canadians who
thought that because I speak English I must be intriguing to take
advantage of them in some way, with contemptuous words from English
Canadians and Americans who said disdainfully that they "didn't like"
French Canadians and weren't interested in their politics or their
outlook, I began to realize that les Anglais are strangers in the land,
strangers who own the industry, who hold the best jobs, who control the
government, who think they are being democratic if they bestow an
occasional pat on a French artist, or take a wealthy French Canadian on
some committee or board of directors.
Westmount is a city inside Montreal like a kangaroo's baby. It has its
own postal service, police force, regulations, street-cleaning. A woman
can live her whole life there and never speak a word of French, come in
contact with no French Canadian except janitor, tram conductor, store
clerk. She can say, as I overheard one, "Poor Sally, she can't find an
apartment. She heard of one down in St. Louis Square, but of course only
French people live there." So might a Princess Radziwill have spoken of
the ghetto. She can dine at the Ritz, at the height of the conscription
crisis, and as the French waiter's steady hand sets her soup before her,
say as I heard one woman in 1944, "They ought to come down here from
Ontario and just clean out the French, the lot of them. They're all
yellow."
Les dames de Westmount, as their charwomen call them, lead busy lives.
Their charity boards relieve any itch of discomfort they may feel over
the contrast between their circumstances and that of their neighbours in
St. Henri, so near below the tracks. They say, "But those people know
how to get along on their wages." The Red Cross, the I.O.D.E., the
Grenfell Mission, the hairdresser, dinner for the boss and his wife, or
for Cousin Jim and that friend of Andy's-all these obligations leave
little time to think. The husbands are the bank managers, the engineers,
the brokers, down through the hierarchy. They have their clubs, the St.
James, Mt. Stephen and the rest, the Royal St. Lawrence Yacht Club, and
then for the lower echelons, Rotary, Kiwanis and the like. Summer homes
are in the mountains; for the very rich, there is Nassau. The older
families, those who have not surrendered and moved to apartments, live
on the short streets running up Mont Royal from Sherbrooke St., though
most of the towered monstrosities built by railway millionaires have
lapsed into use as schools or even rooming-houses.
Life in the middle-class English community of Montreal goes on much like
that of Toronto, or a medium-sized American city, except for a certain
sense of beleaguerment. It is the same feeling, in minor degree, that
besets Atlanta and Singapore, the feeling of being invisibly hemmed in
by an alien and unfriendly kind. There is more emphasis on church
attendance than in an American city, more army life, more formal social
occasions. The great balls of St. Andrew's and the rest are horrendous
bores, mitigated only by the gathering of previously alerted cliques in
upstairs rooms where the liquor can flow freely, and by the thought of
the Dior gowns to be described in next morning's Gazette.
But among the young the routine is breaking down. The skiing week-end
elbows aside the family dinner, the big houses are demolished to save
taxes. The boys' schools with their "forms" and their Greek, have to
prepare for Americanized colleges. Cricket is almost unknown; Canadian
football (twelve on a side) draws the crowds. More and more girls go to
college as a matter of course, not contenting themselves with the
finishing school, though more of them will make a formal debut than in
any American city. Most English Montreal girls are good looking, in
tweeds and sweaters, with shining hair. They lack, however, that touch
of vividness that once in a while makes a French jeune fille a thing of
exquisite loveliness. Boys and girls grow up hardly knowing they are in
a French city, unless they come up against some regulation which
surprises them, like, the ten-year-old who swam in the Lachine Canal
with only trunks, and emerged to find his companions had run away, while
a policeman pointed a revolver at his skinny little chest, bawling him
out for exposing his lascivious form.
The Molsons and the Dawes (beer), the Gordons (textile), the Muirs and
Gardners (banks), the Morgans and the Birks ("in trade"), the Allans,
the Drummonds and all their kin make up the leadership of English
Montreal. They run the hospitals (and beware lest any socialized
medicine raise its head); they run McGill, the turret on the bastion of
their fortress; they run the Welfare Council; they run the Museum of
Fine Arts, Montreal's art gallery. Sometimes there is rebellion. In 1952
the trustees fired the director of the gallery, over loud protests.
There was schism in the ranks. He had, in five years, opened up the
place for one evening a week with no admission charge, rejected pictures
by their favourite portraitist, even put up as "picture of the week", a
sketch by that Communist, Picasso. But he stayed fired. The Museum needs
more money; it gets only a pittance from either City or Province, and
isn't likely to get more until it gives some share in control to French
Canadians.
Sidney Dawes, who ran the Canadian Olympic Committee from his Montreal
office, with some seemingly arbitrary selections, also met with base
ingratitude. Canada did poorly, whereupon Jack Kent Cooke's New Liberty
Magazine took potshots at undemocratic methods, and nastily bit the
noble Dawes hand. The old guard squint at Cooke with the same wariness
that an earlier generation of Montreal millionaires turned toward Max
Aitken, when he invaded their stronghold, before he departed carrying
with him their scalps and their pants, to become Beaverbrook.
The most powerful individual in Montreal has long been John W.
McConnell, handsome whitehaired philanthropist, who before his recent
retirement owned, and bossed in detail, the Montreal Star, the tabloid
Herald, and Weekend Magazine, with a million syndicated circulation
across Canada. His wealth came not only from them, but from sugar
refineries, flour mills, and a hundred other interests. He is also
reputed to be the shrewdest stockmarket operator in Canada. A Liberal
who had close access to Mackenzie King, his papers never seriously
oppose Duplessis.
As for the Montreal Gazette, it is thoroughly dependable: straight Tory.
It can be relied upon to champion Churchill, Eisenhower, George Drew and
Duplessis, to be dignified, informative, always know what is good for
the children, and be doubtful about any change whatever.
Every little while some dignitary takes it upon himself to expound in
public the fairness with which the English minority in Quebec is
treated. French Canadians stress the point when they are demanding
concessions for French minorities in other provinces, English ones when
they want to pay a gracious compliment. The phenomenon is invariably
ascribed to the tolerance and justice of the French Canadian. Never does
the spokesman make mention of the unlikelihood that a minority which
wields almost complete financial power will be seriously oppressed.
The Jews, of whom there are few in Quebec outside Montreal, are a
minority within a minority. Among the French discrimination is
political, fomented for political advantage, with religious overtones;
among the English it is largely social. With the establishment of
Israel, Jewish standing has improved; the Jews have more pride, others
have more respect for them. One small but significant development is a
Jewish Cercle français, which invites talks from distinguished French
Canadians, and studies the French language and culture.
Never again, one hopes, will Adrien Arcand's bully boys march down St.
Lawrence Main, smashing windows and yelling A bas les Juifs, as they
used to do when Hitler was powerful. And yet ten years later, after
spending the war years in internment camp, Arcand was telling his
followers in Quebec City to pinpoint their attacks on a certain Jewish
merchant, "until the people are ready for direct action." And that same
year, Laurent Barré, who is still Minister of Agriculture in the
Duplessis Cabinet, told the Legislative Assembly that his son, on
entering the army, had been subjected to the indignity of a medical
examination by a Jewish doctor, and had been ill in consequence. "Our
children were thrown into the hands of infamous Jewish examiners who
regaled themselves on naked Canadian flesh." L'Abbé Gravel of
Boischatel, near Quebec City, explained the fall of France to his
parishioners by telling them that France was dechristianizing itself.
"If it lost the war, it was because in years preceding it had that dirty
Jew Blum at its head."
There are curious hangovers of mediaeval beliefs among the French
Canadians. A Jewish friend of mine went to a French Canadian home to
hire the sixteen-year-old daughter of the house as a nursemaid. The girl
kept staring at her hair. Finally my friend put up her hand uneasily,
and asked if it were untidy. The girl giggled and said, "Oh no. I was
just wondering about your horns. The sisters told us all Jews had little
horns on their foreheads that they hid under their hair. But yours is so
smooth, and I can't see anyl" Still, the girl was entirely amiable about
the matter, and came to work next day.
In spite of the indoctrination, there is often great friendliness to
Jewish people among French Canadians. A Jewish salesman told me he
prefers to sell in Quebec rather than in Ontario. (He speaks good
French.) In the English places, he said, the storekeeper greets him with
a cold, polite "Nothing today." In rural Quebec his counterpart grins
and says, "Maudit Juif, what are you going to cheat me on this time?"
And gives a good order. The few Jewish merchants who do settle in Quebec
villages usually stay and become part of the community. One such, after
he refused to betray some fugitives in the conscription crisis of 1917,
found the community could not do enough for him and his family-the cure
offered to set up a special English school for his children! Many people
do fight against the prevailing attitude, like the business man I know,
who rebuked a relative at his table for abusing Roosevelt as a Jew. "You
and I, my dear, were brought up with these prejudices, and can probably
never escape them. But I do not wish the children to acquire them."
The psychiatrist, Dominican Father Bernard Mailhot; works hard on
interracial relations. He gets small groups together, to talk things
out. He concludes that: "Each feels threatened. French Canadians are
weak on the economic level. English Canadians think their dominant
position is undermined by the Jews. The Jews know that when things go
badly, they are the scapegoats." There are committees in the labour
federations, church committees, and others to consider the problem.
Quebec has not heard the last of it, and will not in our day.
The bulk of Jewish population, amounting to about 75,000, lives along
St. Lawrence Main in the very middle of Montreal, the centre of the
garment, shoe and fur trades. As its members make money, they spill over
into Outremont and other residential sections. The best-known leaders of
the community are the Bronfmans, one of them head of the Canadian Jewish
Congress. They own the big liquor firm of Seagram's. Justice Harry
Batshaw is the first of his religion to become a judge in Quebec. An
able and cultured man, he stands with the reformists who want to adapt
Judaism to changing times; he has been an ardent supporter of Israel,
and has visited it several times.
In the English community, discrimination is unofficial. It comes out in
the refusal to rent a house, in the removal of a child from her part in
a school play where she was to be the Virgin Mary, in the "personal
interview" required for entrance to medical school, in the denial of
promotion in business, the slow acceptance of professional work. Yet
Jewish citizens have contributed much to the arts, and as always are in
the forefront of charitable work.
The Cross of Maisonneuve stands high on Mont Royal, a symbol of belief
and pain. To the city lying along the slopes below, is it ever a
reminder that Jesus of Nazareth was a rebel and a Jew, who was put to
death for subversive activities?
Negroes from the West Indies and the American South are often pleased to
find how little colour prejudice there is in Montreal, among either
French or English. The Montreal Star quoted Warren Gardner, student of
racial questions, as saying that Montreal has special advantages for the
Negro. Coloured families can live in white areas. Job barriers are
beginning to crack, though Negroes still are in second-rate jobs as
servants and porters when qualified for better. But hospitals have begun
to accept Negro student nurses, there are Negro college teachers and
Negro postal employees. Montreal enjoys the reputation among Negroes of
a democratic city. They study at McGill, mingle with other students,
interne at the Royal Victoria. A southern girl who objected to the
presence of a West Indian girl in the dormitory where she roomed was
promptly told by the Warden, "If there is any preference here, it will
be given to the British subject, which you, Miss Blank, are not." A very
pretty West Indian girl was queen of the McGill winter carnival in 1949,
and everybody was delighted with her appearance in the role.
The partly American Negro colony along St. Antoine Street does suffer
from discrimination, especially in housing. They harbour some jealousy
of the West Indians, who are more or less expected to go back to the
islands whence they came, after they get their education. Among French
Canadians, there has been little colour prejudice since the days of the
coureurs des bois. When a Hindu woman who was a member of the Indian
Congress Committee and later an envoy to Geneva Conferences was refused
shelter at two of Montreal's big hotels, she was enthusiastically
entertained in French circles. There was sharp criticism in French
papers when the Chateau Frontenac (CPR hotel in Quebec City) closed its
dining-room to persons of colour, in deference to United States
tourists. The presence of the International Labour Office during the
war, and that of ICAO and IATA since, with their delegates from many
lands, have educated Montrealers to ignore superficial distinctions.
Indeed, Montreal has become a cosmopolitan city. The disapproving
attitude of French Canadians to immigration has been altered by a
realization that it is inevitable. Now, while Toronto Orangemen wail
that the Catholic Church controls Canadian immigration and puts up bars
against non-Catholics, French Canadian politicians shriek just as loudly
that French Canada must maintain its cadres by seeing to it that more
immigrants who can be assimilated into French culture are sought out and
admitted, that French is being drowned out in the flood of English (or
about to learn English) immigrants coming in. Meanwhile Montreal
coffeeshops are towers of Babel, music and art are stimulated by
European ideas. Hungarians, Poles, Baltic Germans, Rumanians, Italians,
every sort and kind of people hive in Montreal. Naturally they tend to
cluster around their own churches and restaurants. Poles, Bavarians and
other Catholic groups are apt to associate with French-speaking groups.
Others enter the English community. They all find they need English to
earn a living; most speak several languages already. In the years since
the war, they have added new skills to the Canadian scene, strong arms
to its mines and factories.
One minority in Quebec is voiceless. The Indians and Eskimos are in
Quebec but not of it. They have no legal relation to the Provincial
Government, no faintest representation in it, yet they are daily
affected by the fact that it is French and Catholic. They travel on its
roads, they are sentenced by its judges, taxed by its laws, but they are
not its citizens-nor for that matter, are they citizens of Canada. Fewer
than two hundred Indians enlisted in Quebecenlistment bestows the
federal franchise, even on those who remain on the reservation. They
were held liable for home service, and judge Monet of Montreal ruled
that a Caughnawaga Indian who refused to serve was a draft-dodger.
Ontario has given its Indians the provincial franchise, but there is no
question of that in Quebec. Whether they use it is another question; at
present the older men deny any wish to vote. The 15,000 Indians within
Quebec are, like all in Canada, under the Indian Branch of the Ministry
of Citizenship and Immigration, -now in the charge of Honourable John W.
Pickersgill. The 2,000 Eskimos, for some reason lost in the mists of
time and bureaucracy, are administered by the Land Bureau of the
Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources, whose head is
Honourable Jean Lesage. Federal departments of Health, Education, and
justice also have fingers in the Indian and Eskimo pies. In Quebec
Indian agents are usually French Canadian. Except at Caughnawaga near
Montreal and along Hudson Bay, the Indians are French-speaking, when
they know a non-Indian tongue.
Indian education in Quebec is of course in the hands of church
authorities. The Federal Government has been accustomed to make grants
to the mission schools and forget about them. About half the Indian
children in Quebec never get to school, or go for so few days out of a
year that they count for nothing. Along the Bay the missions are
Anglican; to the east of Lake Mistassini they are Oblate.
Indians in Quebec are of three cultures, and were at three stages of
progress when the French arrived. There are the agricultural tribes of
the great valley, the deer-hunting tribes of the forests, and the
caribouhunting ones of the barrens. The Iroquois, now at Caughnawaga,
were a corn and squash raising people, with a highly organized
government. Women held high posts among them. Nowadays their men are
mostly structural steel workers, going freely across the border to the
United States under the Jay Treaty, to work on bridges and skyscrapers.
Women work in the Lachine canning factories .across the river from their
reserve, where they come under provincial labour laws, or make little
curios to sell to tourists. The provincial road, heavy with traffic, is
the main street of their village. Buyers at the little stores pay
provincial sales tax. The Jesuit mission came originally from Rhode
Island, bringing English with it, but now some of the priests are French
Canadian. A few learn Iroquois well enough to preach in it. Two-thirds
of the people still use the soft, complicated speech in their homes. The
United Church of Canada has a school also, and about eighty Indians
remain "pagans," holding their festivals four times a year in their Long
House. Caughnawaga is not a happy place; the RCMP maintain a post there,
to quell the drunken fights that break out-though Indians are forbidden
to buy liquor. The men who have gone away come back to summer
celebrations, in big cars, to visit their people. When they are old or
crippled in their dangerous trade, they may come back for good. The
Iroquois still own a tract of land in the Laurentians for a hunting
reserve, but they seldom go there. One feels they do not know which way
to turn, how to preserve their own way of life, or how to become
Canadians like their neighbours.
The Hurons at Loretteville, near Quebec, recently produced a remarkable
leader, Jules Sioui, who wanted to organize an Indian nation. He went to
jail for two years, in 1949, on a charge of inciting the Indians to
rebellion. He had recalled to them their loss of treaty rights, the
white encroachment on their lands, and he roused enough excitement to
worry the authorities. Maybe his way was not a good way, but he voiced a
lot of grievances.
The woods Indians are of Algonquin stock, Crees around James Bay and up
the coast, Montagnais east to Labrador, in some thirty bands. They are
dependent on their Hudson's Bay Co. post, the local agent, and the RCMP
patrol. They must trade their furs at the company store, getting an
advance in fall for the winter's work, and they are eternally in debt.
In 1947 Dr. Percy Vivian, of McGill's Public Health Department, made a
study of the Indians at Rupert's House, one of the oldest posts on the
Bay, where an Anglican mission has been established over a hundred
years. He found the Indians living in patched tents or one-room log
buts, often two families in a hut, surrounded by filth, refuse and
excreta. The only furniture was boxes to store food. The dirt floors
were covered with spruce boughs for sleeping on. Cooking utensils were
lard pails and frying-pans. During seven months they travel inland; in
summer at the post the children go to school. He found the people moved
slowly and were apathetic, the children unnaturally docile. The
tuberculosis rate was forty-six times Ontario's.
For the inland bands the story is much the same, with less schooling.
Measles and flu take heavy toll. The change from the skin tent to the
crowded log cabin promotes the spread of disease. Diet of tea and flour
is no help. Few Indians get training as doctors or nurses; those who do
and come back to their tribes too often relapse defeated. The new
hospital at Moosonee (Ontario) is helping some tuberculosis patients
from the Quebec shore; the distribution of vitamin tablets does some
good. But what the Indians need is jobs and wages, food and housing,
education and citizenship. Mr. Lesage travelled around the Northwest and
came back with a programme for technical training for the Indians. Being
himself Quebecois, perhaps he can apply it to Quebec as well.
Yet in spite of everything, these woods Crees have amazing vitality. In
the spring the young men put their love notes in a forked stick along
the path the maidens will take to the lake. The old songs and dances are
not wholly forgotten. The sweathouse of the medicine man is set up not a
hundred yards from the missionary's cabin, and he will never know.
Far to the northeast, in the scanty woods and on the barrens, dwell the
most wretched and primitive people of all, the Nascopi. They know
nothing of agriculture; both men and women hunt. They make canoes with
bone or wooden tools, and dogsleds like the Eskimos. During the winter
they scatter through the vast interior; in summer they came to sea or
river to dance and visit. with other bands, to pick berries and.,. fish.
Their religion is merely magic for. success in hunting; they shake
rattles and pound. drums to make strong the caribou man who lives with
the caribou or to propitiate the master of the salmon. Like the Eskimo
(whether learned from them or from Mongolian ancestors), they amuse
themselves with complicated string games, esoteric cat's cradles. From
them comes the legend of the Windigo, the cannibal monster feared all
along the Côte Nord. Their tag-ends of Catholicism amount. to a liking
for the display of the mass, and for the shiny medals. F. G. Speck, who
lived with them and wrote a book about them, says, "For the white metal
crosses the women wear around their necks, they pay the missionary
priests $2.50."
But even to the Nascopi change has come, as it has to. the Montagnais.
Up through their country drives the railroad to the iron of Ungava. It
was an Indian chief who first brought a bit of rock to a geologist and
led him to the great discovery. They work on the roadbed, on the dozens
of plane-strips, they act as guides; new opportunities open. The Quebec
Department of Mines, collaborating with the Indian Bureau, has given
courses in prospecting to twenty or more Indians at Sept Isles. All
through the north country, because of the need for conservation of furs
and the development of fur-farming, Indians begin to trap under
supervision, or to work for money wages. The mines, the pulpmills push
the frontier farther north each year. At Bersimis, the great powerplant
which is to supply Gaspé by cables under the St. Lawrence is only a few
miles. north from the Indian reserve. Indians found work at day
labour-some of them discovered that bootlegging brought windfall
profits.
The question whether Indians can or should join unions comes up in an
appeal to the Quebec Superior Court, in the case of an Abitibi sawmill
company. Ninety-two of the 291 employees were Indians, but the A.F. of
L. local which was certified by the Labour Relations Board said they
ought to be excluded because they don't pay unemployment insurance,
because they come to work and go back to the reserve as they please. It
seemed they voted against having a union; without them the local had a
majority of the employees. So Indians must either be educated in the
value of unions or kept out of them entirely!
Eskimos too are drawn into the money economy. Since they live on seal
and whale meat, animals even the white man's guns have not been able to
exterminate, they fare better than the Indians whose caribou grow
scarce. They continue to flourish in one of the harshest environments
known to man, from Great Whale Bay on Hudson Bay, around the Straits and
halfway down the Labrador shore. They learn fast to use and repair the
white man's machines; they even learn to drive a hard bargain with him.
Up at Fort Chimo, they worked on the plane strips asday labourers. Their
wonderful language with its long words made up of a dozen particles,
each shading the meaning of the others, has little dialectal variation
in Quebec. Their sculpture finds a ready market in Canadian cities. The
anthropological research centre at the University of Ottawa has started,
with Oblate collaboration, a great project for the study and recording
of Indian and Eskimo languages.
French Canadians never had any quarrel with the native peoples, except
as a function of the quarrels between English and French. They wanted
their trade, not their land. Even the great Count Frontenac liked to
dance by the Indian campfires. They have long worked side by side on the
edges of the bush, suffered the same hardships, often intermarried.
French Canadians can be of excellent service in bringing Indians and
Eskimo into a greater participation in Canadian life, in training them
to share in the development of the North. They have much to contribute
to that development, in knowledge and skill.
Source: Miriam CHAPIN, Quebec Now, Toronto, The Ryerson Press, 1955, pp.
155-172.
© 2000 Claude Bélanger, Marianopolis College
Bullock
"Bidoux" <bid...@videotron.fr> wrote in message
news:4025B079...@videotron.fr...
How Others Have Viewed French Canadians and Quebec
Crap snipped....
As the saying goes; The only thing that the French are good for hosting is
an invasion.
Tarapia Tapioco
THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN UPDATED TO REFLECT THE REALITY OF THE 21st
CENTURY:
"It is out of such incidents that some of the illfeeling between
English
and French arises. The French Canadians live in history, drilled to
remember all that has made them what they are; a bunch of whining,
monolingual, arrogant, ignorant provincial bumkins who demand
everything they can from the Federal seat of government and then cry
for more and more and more, like sucking the farts out of a dead bear
when there is no more blood to drain."
Truer words have never been spoken
Len McLaughlin
=====
Quebec Now - Chapter 13 : The Minorities
By Miriam Chapin
>
>
There are curious hangovers of mediaeval beliefs among the French
Canadians. A Jewish friend of mine went to a French Canadian home to
hire the sixteen-year-old daughter of the house as a nursemaid. The girl
kept staring at her hair. Finally my friend put up her hand uneasily,
and asked if it were untidy. The girl giggled and said, "Oh no. I was
just wondering about your horns. The sisters told us all Jews had little
horns on their foreheads that they hid under their hair. But yours is so
smooth, and I can't see any"
>
>
Paul Morgan
predujeces of the past alive.
On Sun, 08 Feb 2004 15:44:31 GMT, "Len McLaughlin" <l...@nospam.com>
wrote:
Len McLaughlin
physic as it was then. Has anything changed? Note the word 'drilled'.
Would that be the same as brain washing? It puzzles me as to why would
Bidioux be admitting to this? Also that the Quebecois live in 'history' and
we live in the 'present'. Ours is the more healthy, is it not?
-Len
================
Bidoux wrote-
>How Others Have Viewed French Canadians and Quebec
>
>Quebec Now - Chapter 13 : The Minorities
>By Miriam Chapin>
>
>Whereat [sic] the English Canadian with me snaps, "Well, you French do
>pick the damnedest things to get sore at."
>
Paul Morgan
wrote:
>From Bidoux's posting we get the following insight into the Quebecois
>physic as it was then. Has anything changed? Note the word 'drilled'.
>Would that be the same as brain washing? It puzzles me as to why would
>Bidioux be admitting to this? Also that the Quebecois live in 'history' and
>we live in the 'present'. Ours is the more healthy, is it not?
>-Len
It means that we have progressed and they are stagnant. The stagnant
always die off.
Len McLaughlin
"Paul Morgan" <he...@home.net> wrote in message
news:344d209478s6okesa...@4ax.com...From Bidoux's posting we get further insight into Quebecois
racism. First horns and now this. What a sick bunch back then.
--
Bidoux wrote -
Bidoux
refusal to
rent a house, in the removal of a child from her part in a
school play where she was
to be the Virgin Mary, in the "personal interview" required
for entrance to medical
school, in the denial of promotion in business, the slow
acceptance of professional
work. Yet Jewish citizens have contributed much to the arts,
and as always are in
the forefront of charitable work.
Len McLaughlin a écrit :