Dissension in the ranks

Alliance Quebec is a far from happy family as it observes its 20th anniversary this spring.

Celebrations are likely to be a shoestring affair, limited to the relatively few who care much that it's still around at all.

And even some of those who do care feel more in funereal than festive mode on the landmark occasion.

Going into its third decade, Quebec's most prominent English community organization is not so much still on the march as on the limp toward a beclouded future.

There is widespread wondering as to whether it's still worth the hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars that keep it on life support.

Its membership has shriveled from the nearly 20,000 of the organization's maiden years to fewer than 4,000 - out of a Quebec anglo population of more than 800,000. Its funding, though still considered excessive by some, has been cut by a third this decade, from nearly $1 million to slightly short of $650,000.

Alliance Quebec has been abandoned by more than a dozen of its former affiliated English community groups and regional organizations. Its onetime role as the umbrella organization for Quebec English community activism is being progressively usurped by the more recently emerged Quebec Community Groups Network (QCGM), under which Alliance Quebec is just one among 20 member organizations.

For the past four years, the Alliance has been sorely crippled by infighting over policy and personality differences. A recurring line in interviews with present and former Alliance members this week was, "We've spent more time fighting among ourselves than we do fighting for English rights."

The poisonous atmosphere in the organization drove out many of its most dedicated members and prominent community figures. And not just the so-called "lambs" who were scourged by hardline former president William (Pit Bill) Johnson in his hostile takeover of the Alliance in 1998.

Even some who backed the Johnson ascendancy said this week that its promise was never fulfilled and that the dominant core of today's Alliance Quebec is a dogmatic, paranoid clique of Equality Party refugees that ruthlessly stifles any dissent and enforces blind loyalty to current Alliance president Brent Tyler.

"I think Alliance Quebec has lost its professionalism," Carlos Roldan, a member of the Alliance board of directors and former chairman of the Montreal chapter, said in an interview this week. "It suffers from an attitude of exclusion. Dissent is silenced very aggressively and volunteers are discouraged as a result.

"Even if dissent is not necessarily anti-Brent Tyler, it is always interpreted as anti-Brent Tyler," said Roldan, who will quit the organization after his board term expires next month.

Like Roldan, Gordon Thomson was a prominent supporter of Johnson and the tougher-minded, more confrontational approach he brought to the Alliance. He served a term on the board and as chairman of the constitution and bylaws committee, but he too has soured on the Alliance in its present state.

He said this week that he was discouraged by the constant petty infighting and an oppressive Tyler personality cult that puts loyalty to the president above all else, including competence.

"Brent is very much a control guy, very hands on," he said. "But I think sometimes he's more interested in surrounding himself with people who'd walk through fire for him rather than people who can get things done."

As far as getting things done, the Alliance has a distinctly modest recent record by its own account. In the latest issue of its newsmagazine, a list of Alliance initiatives in the past year cites mostly press conferences held by Tyler or statements made by Tyler and a few briefs delivered at committee hearings.

Alliance officials make much of the organization's backing for Alan Greer, the postal worker who at the risk of losing his job, took on Canada Post over alleged violations of the Official Languages Act.

But Alliance sources say it has also been a rocky relationship that left Greer less than satisfied. Last month he wrote Tyler to complain bitterly about Alliance foot-dragging on his case and of grandstanding at his expense, though Alliance officials say things have since been patched up.

For an organization that bills itself as Quebec's foremost English community lobby group, Alliance Quebec is conspicuously absent from the corridors of power.

Its strident, confrontational approach in language politics gets it no entrée to decision-makers in Quebec City. Nor does the federal minister responsible for language policy have any time for Alliance Quebec emissaries, and neither does federal Heritage Minister Sheila Copps, whose department funds minority-language groups.

It didn't help the organization's odour in Ottawa power suites when Tyler got Copps raked over the coals by the opposition with an Alliance brief to a Senate committee in which it protested that heritage bureaucrats had threatened to cut Alliance funding if it persisted in monitoring federal compliance with the Official Languages Act.

Alliance dissidents complain that most of the organization's grant money goes toward maintaining the Alliance infrastructure, including 13 paid staffers, a $70,000 office lease and a $50,000 stipend for the president - bucked up last year from $25,000 for Tyler's benefit.

They say the organization managed only two community events last year - a forum on education and a town hall meeting during last fall's municipal election, both of which drew fewer than 50 people.

"It leaves you wondering what Alliance Quebec does," said Roldan. "It's doing next to nothing in the way of projects."

Guiliano D'Andrea, president of the East Island chapter, said this week that most of the Alliance chapters off Montreal Island have lapsed into a largely dormant state, with only a token membership that serves little purpose beyond bolstering the organization's funding claims.

Like several others interviewed this week, he said the Alliance hierarchy handed Tyler the presidency because of his high public profile as a crusading English rights lawyer, but since then the group has increasingly become a vehicle to boost Tyler's law practice.

"If I join Alliance Quebec, what do I get?" said D'Andrea. "What I get is maybe three or four mailings a year asking me to send money for Brent Tyler's court cases. It's become an extension of Brent Tyler's legal practice and not much more."

What little publicity this year's campaign for the Alliance presidency generated has been mostly the wrong kind.

Alliance infighting crossed the line from figurative to physical at the West Island chapter annual meeting where Tyler got into a scuffle with youth wing president Christopher Dye and his brother James. Police were called and an assault complaint was lodged against Tyler, which is still under investigation.

Last weekend, the sparse crowd of 60 that turned out for the Montreal chapter meeting was jolted by the sight of two hefty bodyguards flanking Tyler for the occasion. Rumours flew that Alliance was paying for the hired muscle to protect Tyler from his own membership; the running joke was that they were there to protect the membership from Tyler.

Tyler flatly denied this in a subsequent interview, saying he felt a need for the bodyguards because of death threats he received in connection with a court case he brought against convicted terrorist and brownshirt rabble-rouser Raymond Villeneuve.

He said arrangements for the bodyguards were made through Alliance Quebec, but that he will foot the bill.

"I don't need protection from AQ members, and I'm not taking federal money to pay for my personal security."

The campaign for the presidency culminated this week - a month ahead of schedule - when Tyler's only opponent, Sam Guglielmi, pulled out of the race, charging that the election process was rigged against him by the Alliance establishment.

Guglielmi, a 40-year-old engineer previously active in school board politics and who joined the Alliance a year ago, said he was trying to bring some fresh blood into the Alliance and propose a more conciliatory approach to pushing English community interests.

"We wanted to steer AQ into a direction that's more acceptable to the mainstream," he said in an interview. "But there was resistance from the start and no sign of openness to new ideas. If you advocate diplomacy, lobbying, you're denounced as a lamb."

Tyler this week blamed the media for the Alliance's current image problem and dismissed Guglielmi as a sore loser who lacked the fortitude to go the distance.

"I suppose infighting sells more papers than coverage of the many positive things we do," he said. "Things like talking to local groups, seniors' groups, reaching out to community organizations, consulting with school boards, lobbying the Montreal police to set up a hate-crimes unit."

He said he is certain the Alliance is on the right course, and that resorting to the courts in defence of minority rights is a standard and honourable practice in democratic precincts - at least outside Quebec.

"Our measure of relevance is the recurrent studies that show the No. 1 concern of English-speaking Quebecers, no matter where they live, no matter how old they are, no matter what amount of money they make - across every conceivable line - is equal rights," he said. "At the end of the day, English people should ask themselves, 'Who did more than Alliance Quebec to secure our rights and advance our interests generally?' "

Tyler said he was handicapped until now by his interim status. He was only elected by the provincial board last August to serve out past president Anthony Housefather's term after Housefather quit last August in favour of a city council seat.

"I haven't really had a chance to implement what I want to do with this organization because I never fully had a mandate to do it," he explained. "Now that I have it, a lot of changes are going to happen. We're going to change social policy with our activism."

But many who have served with the Alliance over the years feel its past is more glowing than its future. A surprising number of prominent alumni are reluctant to get dragged into any discussion of Alliance Quebec.

"You don't want it to spoil the good memories," said Chomedey MNA Tom Mulcair, who was in on the Alliance ground floor back in the early '80s along with a talented and committed group of anglo community activists in their 20s and early 30s.

With the English community in shock from the re-election of the PQ the year before, the group proposed what at the time was a radical approach to language politics, said Mulcair.

"You had a bunch of idealistic people who believed the goals of the English community could be achieved by working with the majority community. As corny as it may sound, we really believed in building bridges."

Today's Alliance leadership is more into bridge bombing, he said.

"On the local level there are well-intentioned, hard-working people. On the provincial level, I find that they're completely out of sync with the general population and their leadership is profoundly embarrassing."

Perhaps the most doleful sign of the Alliance's current state is that its misfortunes have become fodder for the town's professional wags. (See Mike Boone's Letterman-style top 10 reasons to attend an Alliance Quebec meeting, Gazette April 16: e.g. "There's a remote chance that during the fights a political meeting will break out.")

A former Alliance director found it significant that even the Suburban weekly, notoriously the leading voice of angryphone Quebec, has taken to lampooning the Alliance in editorial cartoons.

Backroom legend Keith (The Rainmaker) Davey is famous for among other things floating the dictum that you're dead in the water if people are laughing at you.

It's a sorry way to spend a 20th anniversary.

- Hubert Bauch's E-mail address is hbauch@thegazette.southam.ca