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Landry and his friends
DON MACPHERSON - The Gazette Tuesday, December 04, 2001
"All welcome," it said in the invitation on handbills and a hard-line sovereignist Web site announcing Sunday's meeting of a new pro-sovereignty "coalition" at the Medley rock club on lower St. Denis St. near UQAM's concrete campus.
And some of the biggest embarrassments to the sovereignty movement felt comfortable attending.
Raymond (Ultra-Violent Ray) Villeneuve, the convicted FLQ terrorist, sat near the stage. He's currently on trial for threatening English-rights lawyer Brent Tyler and has expressed admiration for the Sept. 11 terrorists.
Yves Michaud worked the room, lingering near the media tables in a way that said "interview me." There was little interest, however, not even with the approach of the first anniversary of the xenophobic and anti-Semitic remarks on his part that ultimately provided Lucien Bouchard with a pretext to quit politics. (n.s.)
Then there were the invited speakers. One was Guy Bouthillier, the president of the Société St. Jean Baptiste de Montréal, which recently honoured Normand Lester, author of a currently best-selling work of anti-English hate literature. When Bouthillier mentioned Lester (who was not in attendance), the audience burst into its loudest cheers of the afternoon.
Anglo-Hater
Another speaker was Pierre Dubuc, publisher of l'Aut'Journal, who complains in the current edition of his left-wing, pro-sovereignty monthly that the Parti Québécois government, with its forced municipal mergers, has handed over Montreal to the English.
The anglo-hating film-maker Pierre Falardeau, whose recent 15 Février 1839 on the subject of the Patriotes is to feature films what Lester's take on Canadian history is to non-fiction literature, took time out from his busy schedule of hustling federal subsidies to attend and was greeted with one of the warmest ovations. He did not disappoint with his speech, declaring at one point that the only true Quebecers are francophones.
All this might not have been of interest to anyone but those in attendance had the occasion been the annual fall gathering of old-line, tuque-and-ceinture-flÍchée nationalists to commemorate the Patriotes' rebellion against the English.
But this was not a small gathering on the fringes of the sovereignty movement. This was a meeting held under the auspices of the PQ, hosted by its hard-line Montréal-Centre region, with the party's director of communications on hand to attend to media relations. The leader of the other mainstream sovereignist party, the Bloc Québécois, was one of the speakers.
And the keynote speaker was no less than Bernard Landry himself, the premier of all Quebecers as well as the leader of the PQ.
Landry might have claimed not to realize that Villeneuve might show up (we don't know for sure since the premier uncharacteristically declined to speak to reporters after the meeting). But he had knowingly accepted to speak on the same platform and to allow himself to be associated with the likes of the notoriously anglophobic and volatile Falardeau. And this was after a week in which Landry had already raised new doubts about the sincerity of his commitment to "inclusive" nationalism by plugging Lester's book.
Xenophobia
The manifestations of xenophobia at the meeting contrasted with the organizers' efforts to present the sovereignty movement as diverse, ethnically and generationally as well as ideologically.
Other speakers included sovereignists who are members of minority groups, such as Afifa Maaninou, the Moroccan-born new chairman of the Montreal Island school council. To draw young people, many of whom were in attendance, entertainment was provided by the hot francophone hip-hop group Loco Locass, and singing humourist Mononc' Serge performed his song Le Frisé (Curly), about Liberal leader Jean Charest, "le plouc (hick) de Sherbrooke."
The supposed "coalition" to promote sovereignty is a thinly disguised attempt by the PQ to win back the support of disaffected left-wing and nationalist hard-liners, not for an eventual referendum but in time for the next election. And all are welcome, even the most embarrassing.
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