Calling all angryphones

>>Documentarian and activist reflects
on the glory days of Quebec’s linguistic battles

by CHRIS BARRY

Name: Gabriel Villeneuve

Name: Jimmy K

Age: 39

Occupation: Documentary filmmaker/former anglo activist

Bio: This feisty Montreal East resident says he can’t recall exactly what motivated him to become an anglo rights activist back in the 1990s “but I’ve lived through two referendums, I’ve always paid attention to the news, and it was making me mad. There was no defining moment really, I just think it came about from a lifetime of living in Montreal.” After finding himself considerably dismayed at how close the 1995 referendum results turned out to be, Jimmy hooked up with the Equality Party, twice running as a candidate for the party in the Robert Baldwin riding and later becoming party president. For a while, he was a bona fide talk radio host on CIQC, discussing all the important political issues of the day before a new programming formula at the station cut his career in media short. Now paying the bills via his work in the IT field, Jimmy has put together a film documenting the anglo rights movement of the ’80s and ’90s called Angryphone. He drives a sensible 2002 Mazda Protégé.

The deal with his Angryphone film: “Well, this documentary isn’t about starting a revolution, it’s about documenting what happened in the late ’80s and ’90s, it’s about a period of time—the rallies, the court cases, the boycotts. Like, who was an angryphone? A lot of people hold the misconception that it was some sort of radical person, but actually, it was the most sane of people who got categorized as such. Just people asking for the same rights everyone else in North America enjoys, which was to be treated equally. The film is really about what it was like to be involved with English rights here in the ’80s and ’90s, the struggle for Canada and Quebec.”

What’s happened to bring about the relative linguistic peace we’ve been experiencing lately: “What’s happened is that we’ve given up. We’ve no leadership in the anglophone community, and what, maybe 500,000 English-speaking people have left the province. And who were those people? They were the fighters. It’s the people who decided not to fight who stayed.”

Should Quebec anglophones still be pissed off? “Well, if it doesn’t bother you that your bills and other documents the government sends you are in French only, or that your English-speaking children can’t get jobs in the civil service because less than two per cent of union representation is held by anglos, or that there really are no significant career jobs for anglos here, then hey, you shouldn’t be having any worries. But if it does bother you, then yeah, you should be upset.”

Why he hates French people so much: “But I absolutely do not. The Equality Party didn’t stand for anything like that, it was about treating everybody fairly and equally, the French, the English, new immigrants. It’s amazing how everybody seems to think the Equality Party was an English rights party, because it wasn’t. It was more of a bilingual rights party, for French people who wanted bilingual education, and for English people who wanted the same thing.”

Where you can watch Angryphone: It’s only available online at www.angryphone.net.

Last book read: Champion Kharma, by Howard Galganov.

Musical preferences: Iron Maiden, Rush, Marillion.

Words of wisdom: “Time can only move forward, unless you have a flex capacitor.”

Comments: dimwit@hdot.net