At the risk of getting into a tar pit, I was vaguely amused today to see a piece by Lise Ravary in the Gazette, Anglos, it’s time to get over the 1995 Quebec referendum, in which she assumes all anglos are afraid of another referendum but, oddly, that this is why many of us won’t vote CAQ.
Maybe a lot of us don’t want the CAQ because it feels like the old days, like a return to the Union Nationale, like an unnecessary turn to the right at a time when Quebec should buck the trend and push back against Trump and Ford. Maybe we just don’t warm to François Legault – maybe we already feel his lack of respect for Montreal.
In short, anglos are diverse. I liked Christopher Curtis’s tweet today about this.
The other side of the coin was a National Post piece entitled It’s weird how Montreal is reluctant to honour Anglos, eh?. Leaving aside that irritating “eh” (which I will be glad to see buried forever), Kelly McParland brings together Daisy Sweeney, Mordecai Richler and the memory of Vimy Ridge in at attempt to show that Montreal has a “difficult time honouring Canadian figures who weren’t separatist heroes.” The mixed facts: it was the Coderre administration that chose to rename Vimy Park* but the same administration that promised Sweeney’s family to name a street for her, a promise which has not been revoked but simply redirected to renaming a park.
Likewise, both a library and the gazebo have been named to honour Mordecai Richler. So where’s the problem?
*and we showed on this very blog that the park never functioned as a war memorial in any sense save for the name, which it simply got because of an adjoining street.
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