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«« Normand Lester
Paul Wells
OTTAWA - A bitter, sensational new book by a veteran Radio-Canada journalist accuses English Canadian opinion leaders of waging "a contemptible campaign of hate" against Quebec.
In Le livre noir du Canada anglais (The Black Book of English Canada), Normand Lester says accusations of bigotry and xenophobia levelled against French Quebecers are all the more repugnant because for centuries, "English Canada has been guilty of crimes, rights violations, demonstrations of racism and exclusion against all those who weren't lucky enough to be white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant."
The book, the cover of which features an illustration of a maple leaf drenched in blood, went on sale in French-language bookstores yesterday. It is an exhaustively documented chronicle of verbal and even physical attacks against francophones, Jews, immigrants, aboriginal Canadians and others -- all perpetrated by English-speaking Canadians.
Mr. Lester is an experienced investigative reporter for the CBC's French-language television network and an expert on terrorism who first broke the news that Claude Morin, a Parti Québécois strategist, once worked an as RCMP informant. More recently, Mr. Lester caused an uproar in Montreal when he complained that a nurse treating him at the Jewish General Hospital demanded that he speak English.
A note inside his new book explains that its publisher, Les éditions des intouchables, is subsidized in part by the Canada Council, an arm's-length federal government agency.
Mr. Lester writes at length about "the attempted genocide against the Acadians" in the early 1700s and "the attempted genocide of Indians allied with France" a few decades later. He calls the hanging of Métis leader Louis Riel "a state crime." He describes the Canadian government's internment of Japanese-Canadians and its refusal to accept Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust during the Second World War.
And he promises more in a second volume, which will deal with the period since 1950.
The book is clearly intended as a rebuttal to the writings of critics such as the late Montreal writer Mordecai Richler, whose 1992 book Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! contained detailed allegations of historic anti-Semitism and xenophobia among Quebec's nationalist elite.
Mr. Lester levels some of his harshest criticism at the National Post, "the principal forum for this race-baiting anti-Quebec discourse." But he is furious at English-language journalists in general -- so furious that his book often fails completely to cite writings that might cast doubt on his thesis.
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