by PHILIP PREVILLE

There is much wisdom to be gleaned from watching people 20 to 40 years your senior run around in a panic. For one thing, they don't actually run much. Their years of experience and book-learning have taught them the value of poise: steady hands and calm voices prevail even in dire moments. The evidence of their desperation is subtle, found only in carefully chosen words.

This barely masked anxiety is increasingly widespread within Alliance Quebec, the province's most influential anglophone-rights lobbying group. "Say, Frank, you'd buy a membership in Alliance Quebec to keep Bill Johnson out, wouldn't you?" says one organizer to a friend. The subject is raised so casually in conversation, you'd almost think it was an afterthought.

But William Johnson is no afterthought. The outspoken Gazette columnist, partitionist agitator and Howard Galganov supporter announced his candidacy for AQ's presidency on March 4, and brought a stable of supporters with him. In the last month, the organization has been flooded with over 1,300 new memberships, and even the most conservative estimates claim that at least 1,100 of those are Johnson supporters. Suddenly, after years of neglecting the importance of grass-roots support, AQ has realized that it--and the $1 million in federal funding it receives every year--have become ripe for the plucking. Membership, which topped 10,000 a decade ago, had been allowed to dwindle to 3,500.

AQ's old guard aren't quite so sure, but they can see the writing on the wall. La vague Johnson is creating ripples weekly in the Gazette. Johnson's only challenger at this point, current AQ president Constance Middleton-Hope, held a press conference of her own Tuesday in an attempt to steal the spotlight back from her adversary. "The pressure's on for me to be out there," Middleton-Hope told the Mirror. "Not from Bill, I mean, but from my own campaign team." Sure, Constance, whatever you say.

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Everywhere William Johnson goes in Quebec, it's as though he were surrounded by a massive electromagnetic field. Positives and negatives align themselves quickly.

His supporters find him inspirational and are extremely loyal. His detractors take offence at his sharp, forceful tongue; they either denounce him as an anti-Quebec bigot or dismiss him as a grumpy old fart. Whatever the case, Johnson doesn't shy away from a fair political fight. He seems to prefer a tenacious old-style debate, like the kind they used to have in Athens, where words clash, principles collide and ideas are either triumphant or killed and buried for good.

The idea of Johnson as anti-Quebec or anti-French is ultimately misguided; anti-nationalist would be more accurate. Throughout his distinguished 30-year career as a journalist and commentator, as well as in his more recent activist forays, the 66-year-old Johnson has been a staunch defender of francophone minorities outside Quebec. But, having been raised in Quebec, Johnson's focus has been on minority rights here. His 1992 book, Anglophobie: Made in Québec, argued that French Quebec's literary and intellectual traditions were characterized by anglophobia, an ingrained fear and mistrust of English-speaking people, which he says still lies at the root of the sovereignty movement. Over time, he says, he "realized there was such a thing as a two-front war: a war against anglo bigotry and a war against anglophobia."

AQ's biggest problem over the last 10 years, Johnson says, is that its leaders have been too well-mannered, considerate, cordial, kind-hearted and, well, mushy. "The people who have led the anglophone community in the past all acted in good faith. They felt that if we are nice, put our heart on our sleeve, and say we love French, we'll get our rights. It doesn't work that way." Johnson is widely credited with coining the term "lamb lobby," used to describe AQ patsies who have caved in time and again to either the separatist Parti Québécois or the quasi-separatist Quebec Liberals. From his perspective, AQ has been so careful not to appear as anglo bigots, they've shied away from fighting anglophobia.

Johnson has set out six principles for AQ to defend, including the right to self-determination for all people (read: support for partition) and zero-tolerance for violations of human rights (as an example, he cites Quebec's current education-access rules). If elected president of AQ, Johnson says his first priority would be to tour the province and bring about a long-overdue reconciliation of English and French Quebecers. But who in their right mind would want the author of a book about anglophobia to be the broker of the peace? It would almost be like sending Jacques Parizeau out to make friends with the ethnics. "The only person who has any reconciling to do is William Johnson himself," says Middleton-Hope, adding that her challenger, unlike herself, has little experience with community-based organizations like AQ.

Middleton-Hope prefers to focus on the things that AQ does behind the scenes: negotiating guarantees for English-language access to health care, education and training. Her camp believes Johnson's preoccupation with partition and sign laws put him out of touch with anglos outside the Montreal area, where many delegates will come from. And she says that most of Johnson's principles, such as his demand that Quebec be once again recognized as a bilingual province, just aren't practical. "We can't make the province a bilingual province again. We can't keep harking back to the past that way."

But for Johnson, that kind of attitude demonstrates just how out of touch AQ really is. "The Charter of the French Language [Bill 101] is an unjust law that tries to put down and degrade English. The community's grass roots do not accept it.

"I think the principles I have laid out will achieve a broad endorsement from the anglophone community," he says. "They are meant to be rassembleur." Johnson is convinced that, under his leadership, Alliance Quebec's membership will multiply by 20.

Middleton-Hope, three years Johnson's senior, is just as convinced of her own position: Bill Johnson is agitating about things--partition, the rule of law, a bilingual Quebec, United Nations' tribunals--that are ultimately a waste of time.

Do either of these senior citizens have their finger on the pulse of the community? If Johnson likes a vigorous political fight, he'll get one from Middleton-Hope. And if it's a battle of the dinosaurs, she says, she's a velociraptor. "I intend to win, and I will win."

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Constance Middleton-Hope has one question for William Johnson: "If Alliance Quebec is such a lamb lobby of an organization, why would you want to run it?" The question cuts deeper than it first appears. Johnson himself has spent more than 10 years repeating the moniker "Compliance Quebec," undermining the organization's credibility at every opportunity. Why take it over? If he's so convinced he can increase membership twentyfold, why not just start his own organization?

This is where Johnson's other political connections--not to mention AQ's cool million in annual federal funding--come to the fore. "It looks like the Equality Party is trying to take over Alliance Quebec," says former AQ president Royal Orr.

It's a theory that's hard to prove, but not particularly far-fetched. On the one hand, Johnson is not an Equality Party member and the party leader Keith Henderson will not officially endorse his AQ candidacy. On the other hand, at the height of the partition movement, Johnson worked closely with Henderson and other party members--including Brent Tyler, who serves as Johnson's legal counsel for his AQ campaign--to organize unity committees in various municipalities. Orr notes that Equality was decimated in the last provincial election, and the partition movement is fizzling fast. Equality hasn't scored a lot of victories lately; an AQ takeover would be a coup. According to Dermod Travis, a former AQ board member and spokesperson for the small anglo-rights group Forum Action Quebec, "the most frightening thing about Johnson leading Alliance Quebec would be the million-dollar war chest for the Equality Party in the next provincial election."

When presented with this scenario, Johnson lets out a genuine belly laugh. "That's the first time I've heard that one," he says. "Alliance Quebec cannot be identified with any party. We would take positions on particular issues and criticize parties who go against our positions, or pressure them not to oppose our positions."

Which would leave Johnson free to criticize both the Liberals and the Parti Québécois during an election campaign, and to use AQ's resources to promote a set of principles which, as luck would have it, dovetail nicely with Equality's platform.

Still, Johnson says it's out of the question; he has no interest in hitching himself to Equality's wagon. "The Equality Party is in trouble with Charest's arrival on the provincial scene," Johnson observes. Indeed, if it looks as though Charest might actually beat the PQ, no one in the anglophone community would vote against the Liberals. But would Johnson, as AQ president, tone down his criticism of the Liberals to help make Charest look good? No--a bottom line is a bottom line. "Charest will now have to speak the nationalist language. It's always important to have a counter-poise to that."