Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health - Chapter 26 Third Section; The Poet as Revolutionary by Dave Jaffe

    The Poet as Revolutionary- Third section: The Life and Times of Paul Chamberland by Dave Jaffe


    In 2006 Jan Wong a longtime writer for the 'The Globe and Mail' went to Montreal to cover a mass shooting. Wong was born and  raised in Montreal. In her story on the shooting she mentioned that there could be a link between the mass shootings in Montreal and the language struggles in that city. Montrealers, francophone ones anyway, and others in the rest of Quebec were outraged. They deluged Wong with a barrage of e-mails, trashing her completely. In the ensuing controversy, Wong's life was threatened and she sunk into a great depression. In the end, 'The Globe and Mail' got rid of her.
      All of this is told in Wong's  book 'Out of the Blue'. her story wasn't the only one that showed the tensions that still simmer below the supposed placid surface of to-day's Quebec.
    For there's also Richard Henry Bain. On September 4, 2012, the Parti Quebecois led by Pauline Marois won the Quebec provincial election though the PQ didn't win a majority government. Bain went to a PQ gathering where Marois was appearing and maybe tried to kill her. He shot one person dead  and seriously wounded another stagehand.
     Although there have been other premiers across  Canada whose lives has been threatened, most anglophones premiers don't face the danger that Marois did.
     Last  the same Pauline Marois proposed a new bill that would have severely restricted Quebec government workers from wearing their traditional headgear like yarmulkes and hijabs at work. This raised ethnic tensions again in Quebec. Marois went to the polls again and her government was defeated. So it's still true as francophones used to say in the 1950's, "Quebec, c'est pas un province comme les autres."
     Yet despite all the controversies that erupt sometimes in Quebec, Quebec and the Quebecois have become far better off in the past 50 years.  Quebec's median family income stood at $73,000 a year in 2014. This puts it slightly behind Ontario's and British Columbia's. Shack towns in places like Lafleche on Montreal's south shore have vanished to make way for neat suburban streets and small comfortable houses.
     "I spend winters in Florida," a Quebecois said a few years ago. So do thousands of other Quebecois.
     Quebec has quite a few strong public companies like Hydro-Quebec and a big investment fund. The language of business in Quebec is now French and not English anymore. Its universities have grown into serious places of research and learning. Meanwhile the Roman Catholic church that Paul Chamberland and other Parti Pristes verbally attacked no longer has a strong hold on Quebecois minds. Less than one in five people in Quebec go regularly to church. The province's birth rate has also fallen dramatically. Families of five or six children that were common in Quebec and other places across Canada in the 1940's and after, are rare to-day.
     Meanwhile the scenarios conjured up for Quebec in the 1960's and 1970's didn't come true. Quebec stayed in Canada. And Quebec's population keeps on growing. It stood at close to six million in 1966. It's well over eight million to-day. Gilles Vigneault the great Quebec singer wrote the unofficial Quebec anthem called 'Gens du Pays'. At one time he predicted that the French language would die out in Quebec by the year 2000.
     Nothing like this happened. Over seven million people in Quebec speak French as their first language now. Only five million did in 1966.
     Meanwhile Quebec has become a far more diverse society than it was in 1966. Immigrants and their children from Haiti, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa live and grow up in Quebec especially in and around Montreal.
      "In the end everything fades save for memory," wrote the Franco-Algerian writer Albert Camus. The old Quebec of 1966 where poor francophones sometimes squared off  against their anglophone managers in vicious industrial disputes  has vanished. Rene Levesque's PQ government rewrote the province's labour laws and outlawed the use of scabs in strikes. This certainly defused tensions in strikes.  Chamberland changed too. He gave up writing poetry in the 1970's and became a mystic, though he still kept writing. Yet he wrote some fine poems in a time of great upheaval and change.