When Mario Dumont surprised Quebec by leading the Action démocratique du Québec to forty-one seats and forming the official opposition in Quebec’s Assemblée nationale in March 2007, he already had an impressive track record. During the Charlottetown referendum of 1992, for example, he had challenged Robert Bourassa’s constitutional position, prompting the premier to expel him from the Quebec Liberal…
Graham Fraser
Graham Fraser is the author of Sorry, I Don’t Speak French and other books.
Articles by
Graham Fraser
Ernest Renan, the nineteenth-century French intellectual, is largely remembered for having written that “forgetting is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation.” What is less often cited is his reasoning: “Indeed, historical enquiry brings to light deeds of violence which took place at the origin of all political formations, even of those whose consequences have been altogether…
If you type “Catherine Dorion” into YouTube, you find video of a seemingly confident young woman doing a devastating takedown of the media baron Pierre Karl Péladeau in an Assemblée nationale committee hearing. If you google “Catherine Dorion hoodie,” you see that the BBC and other international outlets reported the story of that same young woman being refused entry to the Quebec chamber in…
Roger Frappier has been an extraordinary and relatively little-known success, working behind the scenes to produce nearly eighty movies since 1971. One of those films, The Power of the Dog (2021), earned its director, Jane Campion, an Academy Award and won the Golden Globe for Drama. The best known of his other films include Le confort et l’indifférence (1982) and Le déclin de l’empire américain…
On November 16, 1976, I had a rendezvous with Gérald Godin, who, to general astonishment, had just defeated the Liberal premier Robert Bourassa in his own riding, helping to sweep the Parti Québécois to power. We had never met, but I had known about Godin for several years. Malcolm Reid had written about him in his 1972…
If the popular image of the librarian is of a serious woman with glasses and hair pulled into a bun, the archivist is the greying man who is the prickly custodian of dusty files. Guy Berthiaume, who finished his career as the head of Library and Archives Canada, is neither one.
Gregarious and clever, Berthiaume has written Mes grandes bibliothèques: Mes …
Let’s start with a pop quiz. Choose one of the following: A) The British defeat of the French in 1759 was calamitous for Quebec, resulting in an exodus of the bourgeoisie, the imposition of British rule, and decades of subordination. B) The change of colonial administrations after 1759 meant very little for the vast majority of French…
It can be fascinating to see the gap between how people perceive themselves and how they are perceived by others. By all appearances, Lise Bissonnette is a formidable presence, whether as a reporter, an editor, a novelist, or an administrator. While deeply charming, she is known to be imperious, writing with a pen that can draw blood and responding to anything she finds fatuous or ill-informed with a devastating…
In early 2021, the video historian Sébastien Hudon sent an old review of an Orson Welles film to the Université Laval professor Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan. The byline read “René Lévesque.” Hudon wondered, “Is this the René Lévesque?”
So much of Lévesque’s life has been explored at length, including his years as a wartime correspondent and…
Learning another language can be a transformative experience; it can, quite literally, change your life. In learning another language, one becomes another person: stupid, inarticulate, and without a sense of humour at first and then, gradually, someone with a different identity. For Lori Farnham, learning French was a passport to worlds beyond, a ticket to…
When I was a young boy, Thornton W. Burgess was published in the Saturday Montreal Star, which was available in the village where we spent summer holidays. Burgess, an American conservationist, wrote children’s stories about the creatures in a patch of forest and field: Jimmy Skunk, Sammy Jay, Bobby Raccoon, Grandfather Frog, and a host of…
Existential pessimism is in vogue in Quebec. Consider François Legault, who defends his government’s new language legislation by saying that French is at risk of disappearing over the next half century. He has even dismissed the story of one immigrant — a Liberal member of the Assemblée nationale — who speaks Spanish at home but French in the workplace as nothing more than “an anecdote.”
With Le miracle québécois…
As I began to write this review, the occupation of downtown Ottawa by anti-mandate protesters, anti-vaccine militants, and right-wing populist extremists was unfolding. For weeks, the horns of big rigs that jammed the streets near Parliament Hill had kept residents awake. In a city of rule-respecting public servants, the culture shock was huge.
In this…
As Mélanie Joly pores over her briefing books and prepares for her next trip as Canada’s sixteenth foreign affairs minister, she could do worse than to read the advice that Jocelyn Coulon gave shortly after the October 2019 election to the “future” holder of the portfolio, as yet unnamed: “As minister, you direct several thousand diplomats who are Canada’s eyes and ears in the world.”
In a lengthy open…
The sociologist Joseph Yvon Thériault is a remarkable figure in Canada’s French-language intellectual life. Extraordinarily prolific, he has written on community identity, cosmopolitanism, international perceptions of Quebec, modernity, small societies and large. Or, as the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation puts it, on “citizenship, democracy, the welfare state, memory, the French-speaking world and collective identity.” He has led research groups and headed university…
Diaries are odd things, particularly when they are written with publication in mind. Part gossip, part newsletter, at once intimate and distant, they provide a snapshot of how things appear to the writer on any given day. The British have developed them into an art form; North Americans, not so much, though Charles Ritchie and Allan Gotlieb have been…
Throughout February 1978, many Quebeckers changed their plans for Wednesday nights. Strikers at the newspaper Montréal-Matin moved a union meeting. A university history class persuaded its professor to reschedule a lecture. They all wanted to watch a seven-part television mini-series. Even the premier’s office organized a special screening of the second episode for reporters who had been obliged to cover a first ministers’…
The popular election narrative was born with Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President 1960. The book, which won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and dominated bestseller lists for months, “revolutionized the art of political reporting,” in the words of William F. Buckley. White’s compelling prose, his access to John F. Kennedy’s team, and the exciting nature of an election that saw JFK narrowly…
It’s a very good time to read Jocelyn Létourneau’s extended essay on Quebec history. For one thing, last year was a year of anniversaries: fifty years since the October Crisis, forty years since the 1980 referendum, twenty-five years since the 1995 referendum. Reflections on these existential events stimulated a stream of articles, books, and documentaries that were coloured by regret and…
On November 27, 1979, Robert Comeau was called upon for the second time to testify in public before the Keable Commission, the Quebec inquiry into police activities during and after the October Crisis. Previously, in four in‑camera hearings, he had denied any participation in the Front de Libération du Québec and had refused to speak…
Even when the 1995 Quebec referendum resulted in victory for the No side, by a mere 50,000 votes, the province’s right to secede unilaterally remained a subject of debate. The stakes were high, and the federal government referred the question to the Supreme Court. Three years later, the court released its judgment in the Quebec secession…
Plain Language
The first murmurs of a constitutional debate that lasted three decades July | August 2018
André Laurendeau and Davidson Dunton would begin each public hearing of the royal commission that became identified with their names by asking three questions: “Can English-speaking and French-speaking Canadians live together, and do they want to? Under what new conditions? And are they prepared to accept those conditions?”
What would follow was dramatically different across the country: confusion about the question in large parts of the…
Claude Ryan is a complex figure in a number of ways. A devout Catholic who briefly attended a monastery and worked for Church organizations for years, he never became a priest. Never having been a reporter or columnist, he became an editor and then publisher—and a confidant to those in power. Despite his personal individualism, he fought for a more hierarchical interpretation of the relationship between Catholics and their…
Undeclaring a Language War
A Montreal academic confronts the “mytho-constitutional Quebec universe” October 2017
This is the year of Canadian anniversaries. But in the flurry of events surrounding Canada’s 150th, Montreal’s 375th, the 40th anniversary of the Charte de la langue française (Charter of the French Language) in Quebec, and all the symbolic gestures of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, there has been relatively little mention—certainly in English—that 2017 is also the 35th anniversary of the patriation of the Constitution and the introduction of the Charter of Rights and…
Almost exactly ten years ago, I left the Toronto Star to become the commissioner of official languages—a move from being a reporter to being an agent of Parliament, from almost four decades of managing little more than a keyboard to heading an organization of 170 people. At one level, it was a huge and improbable…