Go home

DON MACPHERSON - The Gazette Thursday 19 April 2001

Go home. Or, since this is Canada, make that please go home.

All of you - the 34 heads-of-government-except-for-Cuba's, your bodyguards, food-tasters and cell-phone carriers (and, in the case of Dubya, your ventriloquist), the self-appointed representatives of the people at the "people's" summit, the protesters and the police who have both been preparing for a riot and thus increasing the likelihood there will be one, the media who are following the others and the publicity-seekers who are following the media - please, just turn around and go back where you came from.

The summit hasn't even started yet, and already we're tired of you. And we're afraid of what will happen when you all come together in our house.

Don't believe those welcome signs in the four languages of the Americas that the government of the Quebec "nation" has hung out for you. They've only done that because they think it bugs our federal government in Ottawa.

If you were once welcome, you aren't any more.

After Seattle and all that's followed, the question isn't so much whether you will bring trouble to Quebec City but how high the body count will reach by the time you leave.

Go hold your summit and your riot somewhere else instead. I hear it's lovely this time of year in Tierra del Fuego. And since the summit is about creating a free-trade zone extending all the way down to the tip of South America, might I suggest that it would be a nice symbolic touch if you all went down there? There are fewer people to hurt and things to break.

And for those of you who had to cross the border to get here, I bet you won't have as much trouble leaving the country as you may have had getting in. Don't let the door hit you in the behind as it closes, you hear, and make sure you come back and see us again real soon - just as soon as you hear Satan has bought a franchise in the National Hockey League, because hell has frozen over.

Quebec City doesn't need your money that badly and it's already played host to foreign presidents. Nor does it need to be divided like Berlin by a charmless fence, or to have its restaurant and shop windows boarded up or to be occupied by more people in uniform and bearing arms than were at the first battle of Quebec, the one on the Plains of Abraham.

It doesn't deserve you - yeah, that's a nice way of putting it. Quebec City doesn't deserve you. Neither do the rest of us.

Just look at the effect you've been having on our local politicians, making them as jumpy as farm animals before a storm. Our permanent Quebec-Ottawa post/pre-referendum cold war was already bad enough. Now the hostilities have escalated, for your benefit.

Quebec's premier, Bernard Landry, deprived by Ottawa of the opportunity to make a fool of himself in the summit itself, has to settle instead for putting up a big electronic message board on the grounds of the provincial legislature facing the convention centre where the summit is being held. The Bernietron, the government has assured us, will display fascinating "did-you-knows" on how much maple syrup Quebec trades to Nicaragua in return for how many bananas and such, but unfortunately, no dot races.

The other day, two federal ministers got their boxers in knots because they suddenly realized Landry has been saying Quebec is, as he pronounces the word in French, a "nnnation." [ns]

And there was a brief but intense flurry of insults and demands for satisfaction directed at the summit's federal organizers yesterday after some lamppost banners hung on behalf of the Quebec government were taken down and replaced by ones for the summit, which the sovereignist mayor of Quebec City, Jean-Paul L'Allier, overheatedly blamed on the Canadian army. Before the incident could go down in Quebec history as "the night of the long banners," however, it was revealed that the switch had been made by a private contractor acting on its own because the Quebec banners had been put up where the summit banners were supposed to be.

And the actual summit hadn't even started yet. How long is it before they all go home? Three more days?