Just another demagogue

Normand Lester is our hero, glowed Guy Bouthillier, president of the separatist Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste. In The Globe and Le Devoir, he celebrated the author of the virulently anglophobic Livre noir du Canada anglais. Last week, Mr. Lester, a Radio-Canada reporter suddenly "retired," received the society's medal and $3,000 prize "in recognition of his courage and the excellence of his investigative journalism."

Excellence? For anglophobes, his tirade against English Canada charms by its relentless rage against les anglais and French-speaking federalists. Premier Bernard Landry urged all to read it.

"Throughout the history of Canada, les anglais and their francophone lackeys only respected the rules of the game when it served their purpose. . . . That was true in the 1830s, true in the 1970s and is true today," he wrote. Trouble is, his tribalist tantrum is dishonest. He not only holds us responsible for deporting the Acadians, he invents history to maintain that les anglais also wanted to do it to les Canadiens. "That is exactly the policy that they will want to apply, after the conquest, to the Saint-Lawrence Valley."

He should read historian Lionel Groulx, no anglophile, in his Lendemains de conquête. "Recall the danger that [military governor James] Murray raised before the ministers in England: 'The emigration of this brave and hardy people would be an irreparable loss for the empire.' . . . They understood that the best way for this conquest to preserve its full value was to retain the population."

Mr. Lester blunders again when describing a 1996 incident when Liberal minister Doug Young taunted Bloc Québécois MP Osvaldo Nunez, an immigrant from Chile, that he "should decide what country he's respecting when Canada gave him his citizenship and now he's in this House preaching separatism."

Mr. Lester waxed indignant: "It was an overtly racist attack by a member of the federal government against an immigrant. The matter went unnoticed in the anglophone media. . . . No doubt they even secretly applauded Mr. Young, who had put in his place this ungrateful immigrant."

Good story, but not true. The Globe covered the story in full, and also published a scorching denunciation of Mr. Young by Bob White, then president of the Canadian Labour Congress. The Toronto Star ran a stinging editorial under the title, "Offensive comment." The Gazette published 15 pieces, including an editorial titled, "Get-out comment is way out of line."

Mr. Lester cheated when quoting columns by Allan Fotheringham, Diane Francis and myself. He portrayed Mr. Fotheringham as lusting for a new battle of the Plains of Abraham. For Ms. Francis, "the Québécois are contemptible."

"For Bill Johnson, the simple fact of francophone Quebeckers asserting their identity is, in itself, an act of subversion." Oh? When Allan Rock referred the legality of Quebec's unilateral secession to the Supreme Court, I wrote that it was about time, as both Quebec's Liberals and the Parti Québécois claimed a right to overthrow the Constitution on the basis of a referendum. The court's decision justified what I said. No matter. Any critic of unilateral secession or of Bill 101 is a racist. "It was inevitable that the anti-Quebec fever of the journalists and the intellectuals should spread to the politicians."

The author of such travesties is not a journalist, just a demagogue.