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Bonnes fêtes!

Montreal Gazette Saturday, June 22, 2002


Éditorial - It's the St. Jean Baptiste weekend. School has ended, vacation season has stared, the weather is warming up, the beer is cooling down, there's the Canada Day holiday after this one, and 7.4 million Quebecers find themselves collectively feeling pretty mellow.

"La St. Jean" has long had special meaning for francophone Quebecers, but take a moment to reflect on what has happened here in the years since the 1995 referendum: the provincial government has become steadily less strident about the nationalist message. It's no coincidence that over those same years, many anglophones and allophones have found themselves with an increased sense of appartenance to Quebec.

In Montreal, especially, the demographic changes long seen by sociologists and statisticians are becoming more plainly visible to the rest of us, with each passing year: anglos speak more French, many francophones feel less threatened by English even as they understand more of it, and the World Cup of soccer has put very many of us on the same sporting wavelength for a while, regardless of race, creed, place of national origin, or anything else.

Our new island city is six months old, almost, and the sky hasn't fallen yet. There have been plenty of teething troubles, and the real crunch is still to come, at union-contract time. But so far, at least, the predicted disasters are missing.

At the provincial level, the decades-long logjam created by "the national question" might finally be breaking up. A lot of Quebecers seem to have decided that maybe Canada, like the megacity, is not so bad, at least for now. The energy that went into that independence argument for 25 or 30 years can be of much more use, we're all discovering, in many other ways. People have moved on.

The word has got out: there really is no need to choose between Quebec and Canada. In fact, voters' revulsion over that old self-imposed wound has helped to create a potent third force in Quebec politics. Mario Dumont's eye-opening platform, flat tax and all, has got Quebecers rethinking concepts they haven't really questioned in a generation: the constraints of regulation, the burden of taxes and, generally, the role of the state. Whatever conclusions are reached, the process of thinking such issues through again is long overdue.

We wouldn't say that everything is rosy in Quebec this holiday weekend. Our society still wastes human potential in many ways. And the bad old days linger still in a few manifestations such as Bill 104, the Parti Qu?b?cois government's mean-spirited new law to further restrict access to English schools. We live in hope that soon, perhaps even before next year's fte nationale, that miserable little law will be repealed.

Such problems aside, though, it's fair to say that as the 2002 holiday season starts, Quebecers, all us of, are more at peace with each other, more content with our place in the world and our potential - better in our skins, as they say in French - than we've been in many, many years. Bonnes fêtes!