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William Johnson, typical francophone >> Anglos are finally realizing what it means to be Canadian. How quaint COMMENTARY by MARK FORTIER News Editor's note: Here at the Mirror, we believe that anglos writing to an anglo audience about anglo politics can become a tired routine. Thus, on the occasion of William Johnson's election as president of Alliance Quebec, we invited Ici News Editor Mark Fortier (a francophone despite the k) to trade places with Mirror News Editor Philip Préville (an anglophone despite the accent aigu). Last Saturday during his press conference at the Dorval Hilton, immediately following his narrow victory over Constance Middleton-Hope, William Johnson was almost touching. His nostalgia for a bilingual Quebec and his overtures to a gentle and "tolerant" French Canadians betrayed his state of utter disarray. Listening to him talk about his platform, which had become that morning the platform of Alliance Quebec, you could see why this man makes the pundits in the francophone press chuckle with glee (even if, deep down, he also has them all a bit worried). He makes them all smile, Johnson does, because he embodies the angst-ridden existential tragedy familiar to all French Canadians. Francophones can't help but vicariously relive their own past through William Johnson's inner torture. They also find it amusing to see a reflection of their own worries in a man they are supposed to despise. Alliance Quebec's turpitude allows francophones to measure how far we have progressed over our 30 years of collective psychotherapy, and to note that, finally, anglophones are beginning to realize they are a minority. William Johnson, of course, deplores this menacing state of affairs. No more than 30 minutes into his presidency, he was already saying he would launch a court challenge, in the name of individual rights, against Bill 101--which, ironically, is what turned anglophones into a minority in the first place. And to challenge everything out of a fear of losing one's fundamental rights is to understand the entire history of French Canada. And that is certainly not bad news. But what's really funny about William Johnson is that he has come to embody everything he so dislikes about sovereignists. What became perfectly clear over the weekend was that Johnson, and virtually all Alliance Quebec delegates, are strident nationalists (albeit of the Canadian persuasion). They're also ardent defenders of their community's collective rights, which they prefer to call "individual" rights. They are the mirror image of the "secessionists" they so eagerly accuse of being fascists. As such, the resolution advocating the partition of Quebec, adopted 97 votes to 63, was an eloquent invitation to civil war--a call to arms in defence of the rights of the Canadian people. It is now the policy of Alliance Quebec to "demand of the Quebec government a clear commitment that it would not use force to take as hostages and prisoners the minority people of Quebec in case of secession." In other words, anglophones are happy to play the referendum game, but only if they win. (Sound familiar?) If they lose, they want the results sorted by ethnicity in such a way that they can append themselves back on to Canada, territory included. The resolution assumes that, if Quebec does not refuse to "take hostage the minority people of Quebec," then the government of Canada could legitimately use force to free Canadian POWs from the clutches of the separatists. That happens to be exactly the same argument the Serbs used to invade Croatia and Bosnia. That being said, Johnson is president of Alliance Quebec, not Alliance Canada. So the convention voted to send him on a cross-Quebec tour to "reconcile" the anglophone and francophone communities. Impressive trick: in two resolutions, Alliance Quebec declared that anglos are simultaneously foreigners in Quebec, and yet totally québécois. Poor Johnson is obviously stricken by political schizophrenia--the very pathology that has traumatized the anglophone community since the 1995 referendum. Johnson, much like the community he represents, is trying awful hard--more awful than hard, actually--to imagine how to be both Canadian and Québécois, both anglophone and québécois, both a majority and a minority and, finally, a defender of both civil liberties and collective rights, all at once. It's a first: anglos coming to terms with their own split personality. It's a problem francophones have been dealing with since Confederation. Finally, Quebec's anglophones are starting to figure out what it means to be Canadian.
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