Quebec has given out new guidelines to police on street checks, but communities were never consulted. Alain Babineau of CRARR says the practice of police stopping drivers, a chronic issue, isn’t even mentioned.
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Kate
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Kate
The city’s state of emergency has been renewed for five more days.
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Kate
A U.S. TV comedy cop show called Brooklyn Nine-Nine has been remade here in French as Escouade 99 (see trailer) and will be shown soon on Videotron. But a Latina actress who played a cop character on the original show is not happy that her character is being played by a white Québécoise.
The American actress should be aware that the ethnic mix here is not a carbon copy of New York City’s. Anyway, at least the roles played by Black actors in the U.S. version are played in Escouade 99 by Black actors from here.
Den of Geek writes about it here: “the often shamelessly weird and predominantly French‑speaking Canadian province will have its very own version of Brooklyn Nine-Nine.”
Faiz imam
If you look up fumeros comments, she’s very much aware of the ethnic differences.
But she makes a really solid point:
“While I understand the Latina population is v small in Quebec (& how many of them are funny actors?) the Amy and Rosa roles could’ve gone to ANY BIPOC so it’s disappointing to see that missed opportunity.”
How many Arab actors are there in Quebec? How many black actors? How about indigenous ones?
The answer is that there are a TON. The show could have tapped into any one of those communities and used it to produce some very interesting plot lines.
I’m a huge fan of B99, I have watched the entire show 2-3 times. It does a fantastic job showing a culture of positive empathy, while also tackling serious issues.
This show looks like a pale imitation.
MarcG
If they wanted the show to reflect reality shouldn’t it be 9.5 white men and half a white woman? I find it strange when art misrepresents what actually is… but I understand that it’s important for people from different communities to get paid and represented on the screen… but isn’t instulting to black people to have this TV show display a black person as the head of the police department when that’s never really going to happen? I’m a middle class white guy so I can only say philisophically that I think that I would want actual equality and justice rather than a false mirror of it on the TV. Is this a chicken or the egg thing?
MarcG
Make that 9.5 white men, .25 white women, and .25 clowns, as per the shameless weirdness.
Kate
This is the thing. The show is set in a police station in Quebec City, not even in Montreal. The odds of a setup there where the station head and another cop in the station could be Black, and several of the other officers Latina, are not high.
Diversity is great, but for a situation comedy, the situation has to be at least plausible before the hijinks break out.
Dhomas
It’s a tv show; you’re supposed to suspend disbelief. If it were exactly like real life, it wouldn’t be funny and no one would watch it. The whole premise of the show is kinda “wouldn’t it be funny if…”. I’m pretty sure there have never been any gay black police captains in NYC, but it doesn’t make B99 any less funny of a show. As Faiz imam said, they could have thrown in an Arab actor. Or a First Nation one? An Irish one. An Italian one. Hell, even a French (from France) one. Any of these could have developed some interesting plot lines.
MarcG
Righto. I misunderstood the criticism.
As an aside, it’s interesting that there’s so much mass entertainment about cops. They must have a big propaganda budget. Where’s qatzelok when you need him?
Kate
qatzelok is still banned. He’s been banned and un-banned before – I do it whenever he gets exceptionally idée-fixy and persistent.
Do you really want him back?
MarcG
Nope, I was just kidding
JaneyB
“the often shamelessly weird and predominantly French-speaking Canadian province”. What?? That author should not be writing about Quebec, especially while attempting to talk about minorities and cultural representation.
Kate
JaneyB, I thought that was actually a fairly affectionate characterization.
jeather
I saw a tweet, which I have since lost track of, that says that the Hispanic population in Quebec is larger than we think. Even if it’s not, there is no need to default back to white. I don’t think that “well this couldn’t happen in the real world (or it’s unlikely), so let’s give roles mostly to white men” would be the winner in terms of not insulting Black people (or women, something B99 is not great on). It’s not as if people were given the choice “actual representation in the real world, or one sitcom, not both”.
Uatu
Actually write in the minority cops as mandated diversity hires and watch the hilarity ensue! Maybe it could get Sugar Sammy a guest spot too.
DeWolf
It’s understandable that someone outside the very particular context of US racial politics would look at Melissa Fumero and Stephanie Beatriz and see a couple of white women, and wouldn’t see a problem in replacing them with white Québécoise actors. But part of the spirit of the show is its diverse cast, which has given it plenty of opportunities to discuss various cultural and political issues.
In other words, Fumero has a point – it would have been much more appropriate to cast ethnic minority actors for Rosa and Amy’s characters. After all, it’s a sitcom, not a documentary, which means it has no obligation to reflect the demographic reality of Quebec City. It’s not like the original version is an accurate version of a New York detective squad to begin with.
Daniel
Whitewashing those two important POC characters is insulting to the spirit of the original. And it doesn’t matter what racial breakdown we would normally see in a Quebec City police department. It’s a goofy sitcom, if you’re hung up on accuracy, you’re not going to make it far with this series.
Kids are inspired by what they see on TV and in movies, and it can have a deep effect on what they want to do with their future. This casting only furthers the problematic and institutional whiteness of our police force.
Kate
It seems like Patrick Huard is having to excuse himself repeatedly for his choice of casting. But the show is made now – maybe if it’s renewed for another season they will change things up a bit.
jeather
If you are making a shot-for-shot remake of a TV show you can probably take the time to google the cast and see that Beatriz and Fumero aren’t white.
Kate
jeather, I’ve seen it questioned on twitter whether the producers of Escouade 99 would have perceived those characters as nonwhite. That’s partly what I mean by U.S. demographics not mapping precisely onto Quebec’s.
GC
If they are reusing the scripts, I wonder what they will do when they get to storylines that revolve around the ethnicity of those characters. (Assuming they have any…I’ve only watched a couple of episodes of the original show.) I assume they must be tweaking a few things, however. New York is a very different city than Quebec, in ways other than demographics, so some of it is just not going to translate.
Blork
I’ve only seen a few minutes of the original show, but as other have pointed out, Quebec City and NYC are very different places on many levels, so I’m not sure how well this will translate. For one thing, I see in the trailer for the Quebec version a scene where the big boss comes in and the detectives all stand up (all wearing civilian clothes) and salute him, military style. Not sarcastically. That would NEVER happen anywhere in Canada, and particularly not in Quebec!
jeather
They might not have seen Beatriz and Fumero as non-white, but again, as people recreating a show, they have a responsibility to actually do some research into this, especially given the regular issues about diversity in casting in Quebec. I’m also unclear why whoever has the rights to B99 approved this version, though I don’t know enough about Hollywood to comment there.
Blork
I think it’s silly to assume they didn’t do any research into the characters and their ethnicity. TV shows — especially ones sold for regional remakes — come with “bibles” that describe characters and their story arcs. All of that would have been discussed at length, most likely. The issue (if there is one) is the CHOICE to not map the characters directly in terms of their ethnicity. I’m speculating that this choice was based on their wanting to find a balance between the breakdown on the original show and what would “fly” in Quebec in terms of being believable enough to catch and keep an audience.
DeWolf is right when he says “After all, it’s a sitcom, not a documentary, which means it has no obligation to reflect the demographic reality of Quebec City.” But maybe the producers thought they needed to reel in the diversity a bit from the original for the sake of believability from the audience’s POV.
…and by “believable” I don’t mean the audience needs to believe it’s real, I mean it can’t depart from it so much that it has no local flavor at all.
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Kate
There’s an airing of grievances now that the port strike has been put on hold, with the Conseil du patronat and the Manufacturiers et Exportateurs du Québec (MEQ) griping that it wasn’t good for business and demanding port activities be considered an essential service.
But the longshoremen have a legitimate gripe about the unpredictable scheduling of their work hours. If these boss groups want things to run smoothly, instead of dishing blame to the unions involved, maybe they need to assess the situation fairly and lean on the management at the port instead, to act more fairly by their workers.
Wouldn’t that be a thing, now.
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Kate
Mario Dumont writes about the persistence of English in Montreal and what must be done to stamp it out. “La CAQ va imposer le français en s’appuyant sur la volonté du reste du Québec” – yes, let’s let the little old man in Joliette have his way with the province’s economic turbine, as we cope with a pandemic.
Uatu
Yeah sure Mario. Hey let’s limit access to English post secondary education like the caq talks about. Good thing you already got your degree from Concordia, right?
Also no one should take that Netflix show seriously as a travelogue. It’s more a self indulgent foodie stuffing his face and who cares about being accurate about the location as long as there’s eating to be donedavid39
At the risk of further virtue signalling, which Kate hates, Montreal has long had a “barely Quebecois” feeling about it among people in the provinces, and I personally think that this timeless push-and-pull about the prominence of English in Montreal is a legitimate topic of public debate.
There’s a giant number of foreign students funneling into Montreal most of whom are both studying and interacting in totally in English. My niece just graduated from McGill (her French is utterly mediocre of course) and during her time there she ran in a majorly mixed group, none of whom spoke any French (other than the Quebecois and French), because they weren’t from here and didn’t need or care to learn it. Montreal is very easy to navigate with zero French.
If you’re some Quebec type, this has strike you as a failure, in some sense, of the whole project. So it’s only natural to think about ways to correct this.
jeather
If you (general you), a francophone from outside Montreal, want to fix Montreal by making it Frencher, you need to (a) move to Montreal and speak French and (b) improve English language teaching in high school so kids won’t be desperate to go to English post-secondary to finally learn the language.
Yung
That’s the spirit, jeather. Lay out the law for them.
Kate
david∞, big cities are often atypical of the hinterland culture. This has probably been true since the days of Athens and Rome, if not of Jericho and Mohenjo-daro, but is accentuated now with easy intercontinental travel and immigration. The city is always going to be more polyglot, more heterogeneous, than the countryside and its small towns.
Trying really hard to make Montreal into Joliette writ large is never going to work. The idea might fly as sales copy for the CAQ, but it’s both futile and damaging to Montreal’s future.
jeather
If they are trying to lay down the law for me, why shouldn’t I do the reverse? I speak French fluently (though as a clear second language). I support excellent French lessons in English schools (there’s a reason that immersion and bilingual schools are popular in the English system).
But honestly, I have asked people why they think my family, who came here speaking neither French nor English, chose English: the answer is, of course, that we weren’t allowed in the French schools.
steph
Can we get a serious serperatist political group started to split the island off from the rest of the province? (no clowns!). They’ll be happy – we’ll be happy – ROC can continue to complain about equalization payments .
Kate
steph, not surprisingly, the idea has been floated before, and smacked down hard. Dumont knows that there’s still a wave of people who’d like to make Montreal an exception to language laws – “Il y aura encore des voix à Montréal qui réclameront de soustraire la métropole aux lois du Québec.” This article is a plea not to do so.
Separatism is still around. This weekend, Gérard Bouchard pleads for Quebec sovereignty in Le Devoir. I can’t say I find his arguments compelling. During a pandemic would be no time to break up the country, but nationalism isn’t based on logic.
Kevin
There are times I wish Parizeau had sent Quebecers to the psychiatrist’s office instead of the dentist.
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Kate
Urbania has a five-part series by a writer who worked as a garbage man for part of the summer, on what it’s like, and the colourful but desperate characters who do it for a living.
mare
Very nice. It’s amazing how tough that job is, and that our labour and security laws allow such awful and dangerous working conditions. Stress and heavy lifting, no wonder lots of accidents happen, ad no wonder only the lowest social classes do this job.
I know in the Netherlands the job of garbage collector is completely mechanized. They’re only allowed to use the lift to empty the big wheeled containers (like they have here in the burbs) into the trucks. In dense inner city neighbourhoods, where there’s no room for households to park those containers people have to carry their garbage bags (and their glass and paper for recycling) to underground containers at street corners. That whole container is lifted onto a truck when they’re full after a week or so, and an empty one is left behind.
Ian
I worked a recycling truck for a few months, it wasn’t nearly as bad as what this guy went through on garbage trucks but was still bad enough that I quit when it started to snow out. It’s nasty, physically demanding work, but there is something delightful about riding on the back of one of those big trucks when you pick up a bit of speed.
I am kind of horrified that the crews are all subcontracted, though. In a lot of places they are fully unionized city workers, which only seems fair.
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Kate
A young man who sparked a police chase through downtown last November in the middle of the day – in a stolen car – has received a 17-month sentence. Readers may remember the incident, in which the driver of a fancy SUV sacrificed his vehicle to protect pedestrians crossing René‑Lévesque at St-Denis.
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Kate
Two men were shot, non-fatally, overnight in Old Montreal. The victims are not answering police questions.
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Kate
The Canadiens have been eliminated from the pandemic bubble series by the Flyers.
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