The Plains truth, I swear

Radio-Canada, the Quebec arm of the CBC, have suspended one of their veteran journalists for writing a book.

Normand Lester, who has been at his job for 35 years, has been sent into perdition for writing a rant about certain anglophone scribblers who, he claims, have purposely picked on Quebec and stirred up trouble and this is what is breaking up the country. (Radio-Canada idiots defend their action by saying their strict rules bar their employees from letting their personal opinions stray into the public marketplace. Ho, ho.)

As an example, Lester starts off the book by stating that somebody named Fotheringham has stated that "Canada is going back to the Plains of Abraham" -- the inference of course being that there will be violence if not shooting and civil war.

Even Fotheringham is not so stupid as to suggest such a thing.

What Fotheringham said, in a speech somewhere, some day, is that Canadians who live outside Quebec -- especially Western Canadians -- cannot understand why Quebec is so uneasy when for 32 of the last 33 years (Joe Clark, John Turner and Kim Campbell being there only for their Andy Warhol 15 minutes) the prime minister of Canada has come from Quebec.

The finance minister is from Quebec. The chief of staff of the Armed Forces is a francophone. Three of the nine justices of the Supreme Court are, by law, from Quebec -- which is now down to 24 per cent of Canada's population. No one will ever become prime minister, as Lester Pearson accurately told us, who is not bilingual. The reason, Fotheringham said, "goes back" to the Plains of Abraham.

In all major battles -- the Battle of Trafalgar, Waterloo, the American Civil War -- he said (and I know this because I was listening) there was a clear winner and a clear loser. But in 1759, on the Plains of Abraham, when Wolfe beat Montcalm, the French thought it was a TIE!

Fotheringham then quoted the esteemed American historian, Henry Steele Commager, as writing: "Never, in the history of colonial wars, has the victor treated the vanquished so generously." The British leaving the French, as he pointed out, protection for their language, their Roman Catholic religion, the civil code in law.

We have, in our current prime minister, a chap who has more power in his own country than Dubya Bush has in his. He appoints, personally, the head of the Armed Forces, all the Supreme Court justices, every single senator, the head of the CBC, the head of the CRTC, 10 lieutenant-governors, even the head of state. The PM appoints his own head of state, that being the (bilingual) A. Clarkson.

As I've written many times in this column, under our undemocratic parliamentary system, with a majority government, he is an elected -- though friendly -- dictator.

Come to think of it, that would make a good subject for a thin book for someone to write. Would probably sell.

An example of our tenuous state came this week when Premier Bernard Landry ventured into the enemy camp of Toronto for a speech.

Astonishingly, it was the first time in six years that a Quebec premier spoke in Toronto, the last being Jolly Jacques Parizeau.

Before a packed audience at the Toronto Board of Trade, Landry dumbfounded me -- I've known him for 20 years -- with his fumbling grasp of the English language -- almost worse than the abysmal Chrétien level. This wasn't the young junior minister of the Lévesque government I'd known. In one strange flight of imagination, he said Lester Pearson was born in the United Kingdom.

(Mike Pearson, who was born in Newtonbrook, Ont., did some graduate work at Oxford. Go figure.)

Paul Wells in a fine National Post column divined that Landry was so "terrified" and nervous at actually confronting this audience that he panicked and his language skills vanished. We need more communications, not the Plains of Abraham. If Lester is to be suspended, it should be for writing a bad book.