Foot-in-mouth disease returns

DON MACPHERSON The Gazette 2.6.01

Maybe it was due to a realization the premier of Quebec is expected to show a certain restraint and has enough fires to put out as it is without setting them himself.

Or maybe it was the private poll results suggesting Landry needed to smooth the more abrasive facets of his image before he led the Parti Quebecois into an election.

Perhaps, however, it was unreasonable to expect a 64-year-old man would be able to effect such a sudden change in his behaviour and make it complete and permanent. For in recent days, Landry has suffered a couple of minor relapses, submitting to the temptation to say more than he should. This week, Landry announced his government and representatives of the Duplessis orphans are close to agreement on financial compensation for the 1,000 surviving orphans for the mistreatment they suffered.

The orphans were placed in mental institutions rather than orphanages from the 1930s to the 1950s simply because it was financially profitable for Quebec's Duplessis government to do so. That was because the federal government subsidized the provinces more for mental institutions than for orphanages.

But it was not enough for Landry to take deserved credit that under his leadership, the government is at last moving to provide the orphans with satisfactory compensation.

He went on to say the government will not blame the Catholic nuns and priests in whose care the orphans were placed in church-run institutions, and praised them for their devotion. Not blaming them might help achieve closure. But there was no need for unqualified praise for all of them, either, since, while some of the orphans' caretakers were as devoted as Landry said, others inflicted various forms of abuse on them.

And Landry went farther, making an attempt to exploit the orphans' situation for partisan political purposes that was foolish as well as offensive. In effect, he blamed their suffering on the federal system, saying if Quebec had been sovereign at the time, it would have had the money to care for them properly. They should be called Saint-Laurent's orphans instead, he said, referring to Louis Saint-Laurent, the prime minister from 1948 to 1957. Apparently, Landry can find a way to blame just about anything on either Ottawa or the federal system. But in this case, it was Quebec, not Ottawa, that chose to send the orphans to mental institutions. Quebec was hardly overtaxed at the time, and it could well have afforded to place them in orphanages instead.

And Landry has been criticized for another recent remark that showed a lack of sensitivity concerning the apprehensions of English-speaking residents of Montreal suburbs officially recognized as bilingual, which are about to be reduced to boroughs in the expanding Montreal megacity.

In an interview with La Presse, Landry suggested anglophones living in the west-end district of Notre Dame de Grace in the present city have no complaints about a lack of municipal services in their language.

It could be that English-speaking city residents don't complain much, though, since there is no Office de la Langue Anglaise to receive their complaints, it's hard to tell.

One possible reason they mighty not complain is that they're at ease in French. Another is that they're grateful for whatever service in English they do receive from an administration that is officially unilingual French.

But residents of the bilingual suburbs are used to more than that. Indeed, that might be one reason they prefer to live in those suburbs rather than the city. They're also used to receiving service in English as a legally protected right, not a favour on the part of a benevolent administration of a city in which they are a minority.

And as history has taught them, such favours to the minority can be withdrawn at any time.