The freedom to do sloppy research

Yet that's what we're gathered here today to do.

Mr. Lester is the Radio-Canada television reporter who's been suspended with pay, pending further trouble, for writing Le livre noir du Canada anglais (The Black Book of English Canada). A masterpiece of subtlety, it features a blood-stained maple leaf on the cover and asserts that English-speaking Canadians are a bunch of racists. Anti-French, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-Indian, and the hits just keep on coming. Mr. Lester's bosses at the state broadcaster worried that he had run roughshod over the corporation's requirement that reporters be objective on big questions of public debate.

Mr. Lester actually has a point. It has become altogether too easy and common for commentators outside Quebec to level vile slander at anyone residing within Quebec's borders. Any number of outlets are home to too many people who think they can cut sophisticated political debates short with idiotic accusations of racism.

So in some measure, Mr. Lester's book is a timely dispatch from the Department of Turnabout is Fair Play. Canada did turn back Jewish refugees during the war. Canada did ship thousands of Canadians of Japanese descent off to internment camps. Canada's treatment of aboriginal populations has often been appalling. This country is one big glass house, and stone-throwing is a poor strategy for any of us.

But still, it'd be nice if Mr. Lester could get the odd fact straight.

His opening chapter, the one dedicated to current events, contains an error of fact or omission at almost every paragraph. He says that for the Post's Diane Francis, "Quebecers are contemptible creatures," then quotes a paragraph from one of Diane's columns: "They whine and moan ... They revise history ... They are, in a word, despicable."

The problem is that in that column Diane specifically stated she was referring not to Quebecers in general but to separatists. And a search of her other columns shows she has used the same word, "despicable," on any number of other targets -- including Quebec anglophones who refuse to learn French.

Mr. Lester canvasses the case of Doug Young, the Cabinet minister who in 1996 said a Bloc Québécois MP of Chilean origin shouldn't, as an immigrant, be a separatist. The affair "passed unnoticed in the anglophone media," Mr. Lester claims. "No theatrical indignation! Not the slightest disavowal!"

Wrong. The Gazette called Mr. Young's comment "way out of line." A Gazette columnist raked the minister over the coals. The Toronto Star weighed in, too. So did the Canadian Jewish Congress.

Similarly, Mr. Lester ascertains an anglo plot to destroy David Levine, an early Parti Québécois supporter who was appointed to manage an Ottawa hospital in 1998. Mr. Lester digs up a few cretinous columns to demonstrate "the racist appeals of the street and the media," but manages to miss a Gazette editorial three Gazette columns, a Star editorial, three Globe editorials, three Globe columns -- all defending Mr. Levine.

It goes on like this. In separate chapters, Mr. Lester berates Mordecai Richler as a francophobe and Mackenzie King as an anti-Semite, nowhere noting that one of the most prominent critics of King's anti-Semitism was Mordecai Richler.

The rest of the book rests on more solid ground -- but only because to a very great extent, it's a paragraph-by-paragraph rewrite of standard English-language texts. It is cheeky, to say the very least, of Mr. Lester to write that "English Canadians have a completely skewed vision of their national history" because "their historians have ... hidden the crimes committed in building the country." Hidden where? In books by Irving Abella, Ken Adachi, Jack Granatstein, Peter Ward, Gerald Tulchinsky, a half-dozen English academic journals, and the archives of Concordia University and the Canadian Jewish Congress, all sources credited in Mr. Lester's footnotes.

Clever English bastards! Hiding their history in their history books! Of course, given Mr. Lester's limited ability to find editorials on the editorial pages, perhaps it's sheer luck he found anything at all.

In short, it's a remarkable book. The author manages to make a valid point, despite his diligent efforts to napalm his own credibility. But if employers were to begin punishing journalists for writing bad books, none of us would be safe. The state broadcaster has a special mandate, or should have, to avoid any appearance that it imposes state ideology on its craftsmen.