Fifty years ago my then girlfriend (today my wife) was taking the train from downtown Montreal after work to meet me in St. Eustache for dinner and a Friday night date.She got off the train and told me of the rather unpleasant experience of being chastised by the Via Rail ticket vendor for having the audacity of requesting a ticket for the Two Mountains stop.
The enraged defender of the faith told her rather impolitely that there was no such station and that if she wanted to go to Deux-Montagnes, that she'd have to ask for the ticket as such.
Selling train and metro tickets is honest work, but not brain surgery, it doesn't even require a high school diploma, with rudimentary literacy and sums the only job real requirement. It would seem that lecturing passengers isn't part of the job description, but somehow the apparent frustration and animosity towards 'Les Autres' wins out occasionally.
The ignoramus Montreal metro ticket booth operator who last year put up a sign in his booth warning passengers that life in Quebec happens in French, failed to understand that those offenders he was targeting wouldn't really get the
As for the ticket seller opposed to the description of 'Two Mountains,' I'd ask him to name that big country south of Canada and if he answered the 'Etats-Unis,' I'd smirk rather self-satisfyingly at his double-standard ignorance.
Such is the pettiness that hasn't changed over the decades where even today uneducated shlubs selling tickets in a dreary Metro or train ticket cage deem themselves arbiters of public policy and self-proclaimed saviours of the French language, empowered by the political atmosphere served up by nasty politicians and journalists.
Sadly this petty and hateful attitude permeates the political and journalistic class, where a failed independence movement has spawned gratuitous and mean-spirited attacks at anglos and ethnics.
And sadly the attitude pervades the CAQ and especially the Premier's office.
Make no mistake, the recent demand that the Lachute hospital remove its English signs is not based on the protection of the French language, but rather the persecution of the Anglo minority, a vicious and cruel reminder to them as to who is the boss of this province.
The idiotic rule that in order for a town to be accepted as officially bilingual, fifty percent of the population must be English, makes a mockery of the definition of 'minority.'
At any rate, as the CAQ is pushing full-steam ahead on religious restrictions, the public reaction is what is most frightening and worrisome.
Like the idiot ticket-sellers and assorted low-brows who feel empowered to chastise Anglos over perceived language slights, the Ethnics in Quebec are in for a rocky ride.
Any law that prohibits religious garb will herald open season for idiots with grade-school education to confront mostly Muslim women who choose to wear hijabs in public, EVEN IF THE LAW DOES NOT EXPRESSLY DISALLOW IT.
The unintended consequence of any anti-religious garb legislation is that it will signal to the public that such attire is unacceptable in any manner and in any place.
And it won't be pretty when the inevitable incidents of hate will manifest. Politicians and the French media will quickly disavow any responsibility for the climate of hate that the legislation will surely engender. The hand-wringing and sanctimonious reminders that Quebecers are open and welcoming won't cut it as incidents start to pile up, as they inevitably will.
For those in the media and in the radical French language and culture cabals who can't wait to lower the boom on Muslims, I wonder if they realize the cost to benefit ratio.
Quebec nationalists firmly believe that they can legislate the faith out of Muslim immigrants and somehow force them to embrace pork, poutine and maple syrup while abandoning Allah and the hijab.
Here's news for them, it ain't gonna happen, regardless of the law, regardless of the public shaming.
The truth is that if Quebec doesn't like what Muslims are, they shouldn't encourage their immigration. It is a painful truth which they don't want to face.
To those language and culture zealots, I would sound a warning that they should be mindful of the old Chinese saying.
"Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it"
Yesterday an Angus-Reid poll indicated that 53% of Canadians believe that Quebec gets extra advantages out of confederation.
Removing the Quebec element from the poll with some simple math deduces that the number of Canadians residing outside Quebec who believed that Quebec is advantaged is actually 62.7%.
I firmly believe that support for Quebec sovereignty is much higher in the rest of Canada than in Quebec and that put to a national referendum, Quebec would certainly be shown the door.
How's that for a kick in the butt!
In light of the poll, Aaron Rand of Montreal radio station CJAD polled his listeners as to what it is about Quebec that Canadians dislike and received a variety of answers, most of which were patently true.
The answer is in fact quite simple, Quebec's shameful and petty nastiness towards Canada, Anglos and Ethnics is what is so off-putting for Canadians.
Quebec politicians and the French media make it a point to shit all over Canada through oblique and overt slights and insults, typified by the pettiness of ignoring Canada Day and turning it into Quebec's 'moving day.'
I wonder how the Quebec media would react if Anglo towns would create 'Garage Sale Day' on Quebec's Fete Nationale.
Quebec nationalists are a petty and nasty group of frustrated losers who spend their time slagging Canada in general and Quebec's ethnics and Anglos in particular.
They are practiced in biting the hand that feeds them and remain ungrateful fantasists who believe the utter nonsense that an independent Quebec would be more successful.
And so we are treated and will continue to be treated to a certain brand of anti-Canadian, anti Anglo/Ethnic nastiness that is what modern Quebec has evolved into.
What remains is a frustrated and sad society, too afraid to strike out on its own and thus relegated to sniping, griping and insulting in order to wallpaper its humiliation over its own cowardice over sovereignty.
Like a spouse who stays in a loveless relationship because the money is good and the option to leave inconvenient, bitterness, humiliation and frustration are is the price to be paid for cowardice.
Such is nationalist Quebec, nasty and frustrated ,where Anglos, Ethnics and Canada are the targets of its frustration, blamed as the object of its unhappiness when in fact the problem lies deep within.
