QUEBEC AFFAIRS
I had the enlightening but awkward experience over the Thanksgiving weekend of watching the CBC documentary about the 1970 October Crisis in the company of a member of the extended family who would have been a toddler at the time of "helmets and guns" in the streets of Montreal. (For the record, I was all of 16.)
It was awkward because, although he is comfortably bilingual, the documentary we were watching was in English, except for some original French footage from the time and, significantly, excerpts from Octobre, Pierre Falardeau's controversial docu-drama of events from the perspective of the FLQ kidnappers.
Notable among the English footage were clips from the exceptionally bilingual Quebec justice minister at the time, Jerome Choquette. Feeling the CBC documentary, as worthy as it was, presented perhaps "e;too English" a spin on events, I suggested to my guest that Radio-Canada was running a documentary on the October Crisis the next night.
So I tuned in as well to see how the French-language channel would deal with the touchy subject, thirty years after the fact.
Once again I found Jerome Choquette speaking entirely in English, with French subtitles, as he announced the Bourassa government's decision to not negotiate with the FLQ terrorists.
To someone not aware the documentary was the French voiced-over version of Robin Spry's 1973 National Film Board film, it would have seemed Quebec was ruled at the time by some clique of English-speaking stooges of Pierre Trudeau's Ottawa. Even René Lévesque's cameo role hinted Trudeau had some of Laporte's blood on his hands is in English.
That disturbing incongruity aside, the fact emerges that Radio-Canada ran the best documentary available on the most dramatic and dangerous time in Quebec's recent history, which happened to be a 27-year-old English-language film.
It seems the only fresh take on the crisis Radio-Canada provided were interviews with Laporte's son and nephew, 11 and 17 respectively when the deputy premier and labour minister was abducted from outside his south shore Montreal home. Nephew Claude actually was tossing a football around outside with Laporte when the FLQ gang's car screeched into view.
Though the pain that lingers still was instructive of the human consequences of Laporte's kidnapping and killing -- especially gripping was the nephew's recollection of seeing union leader Michel Chartrand declare to a pro-FLQ rally that his uncle deserved to be kidnapped -- the two were not qualified nor prepared to provide new analytic insight into the crisis.
So, based on a cursory search of materials available, it would appear the source video documents on the October Crisis are the new McKenna documentary shown on the English network, Falardeau's self-serving apologia for the terrorists in Octobre, and Spry's masterful treatment in Action: The October Crisis of 1970. To this list we could add the relevant episode in the French and English versions of Trudeau's TV Memoirs.
This suspicion is more or less confirmed in a Le Devoir article about the teaching of the October Crisis, or the lack there-of, to today's students in Quebec.
One teacher chose to show Spry's film to students instead of Falaradeau's or Trudeau's versions. According to Samuel Trudeau, his Conservatoire LaSalle grade 8 students were left depressed because, just like in the Patriote Rebellion of 1937-38, a Quebec uprising is put down and the cause is lost.
In Quebec, under current curriculum guidelines, the teaching of Quebec and Canadian history is only obligatory in Secondary 3, the equivalent of grade 10 in other provincial school systems.
There are sluggish movements afoot to up the count, but in the meantime, it appears, millions of Quebecers, young and older, are stumbling about with a vague or warped notion of their history, including the astonishing events of 1970.
This trend may be blamed on indifference in the Quebec political and academic milieu, or simply the generalized yawn that history evokes in virtually-realized youth.
It's sad to say, but it might just take a bombed Second Cup or a burning church to bring an unfortunate lesson of history to life.
Copyright © 2000 Peter Black/Log Cabin Chronicles/10.00 |
