File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2000/postcolonial.0006, message 69


From: "julian samuel" <jjsamuel-AT-vif.com>
Subject: In Vieux Quebec, ethnic cleansing occurs by attrition
Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2000 19:44:19 -0700


Dear Postcoloinal List members:

    The cultural and political elites in Quebec are racist. They will not
let minorities have key positions. The key jobs are for Francophone whites
who speak French with a local accent: father to son.

(Most of the anglophones I know speak French.)

    There is NOT ONE of "Les autres" (blacks, Asians etc are we known in
these few acres of snow) in a key position with the Parti Québécois and Bloc
Québécois. There may be one or two white European tribals, but much more.

    I personally consider both these parties very much like Jean-Marie Le
Pen (France). Their public face is different from the FN in France.

    PQ head, Lucien Bouchard said on TV that white women should have more
white babies; ex-PQ head, Jacques Parizeau said the 1995 referendum defeat
was because of money and the ethinc vote. "Money" was a code for what
minority? Your guess is as good as mine. Parizeau was attempting to generate
physical violence against the visible minorities who mostly (AS DID I) vote
no. Jean-Maire Le Pen, tsé.

    25 years ago visible minorities were not in key cultural and political
positions in the UK, the rest of Canada and in the USA. Now, in 2000 there
are a few minorities in key position everywhere I look EXCEPT Quebec.

What does this mean?

Julian Samuel, author, "De Lahore à Montréal" (1996)

Mar 1999

CANADIAN LETTERS | QUEBEC CITY

COLDER AND WHITER
In Vieux Quebec, ethnic cleansing occurs by attrition

BY DANIEL SANGER


There aren't many cities in the western world that, in the absence of a war
or a serious bout of ethnic cleansing, have become substantially less
diverse over the past century, that have bucked the global trend and gone
from being cosmopolitan and multicultural to being homogeneous and insular.
Quebec City - regardless of all its claims to be a "world-class"
capital -has. That doesn't mean it isn't a nice place for a ski weekend or a
summer getaway. Just that, however charming the euro-feel old city, however
enticing the real-estate prices, however noble one's aspirations about
bridging the divide, a person, especially a non-white, non-Catholic,
non-pur-laine-Québécois person, might want to think twice about living
there. As the exodus of many of the city's ethnic communities in recent
years shows, thousands have.

The best place to go to travel into Quebec City's past is not the
Disneyfied, UNESCO-approved Vieux Québec within the walls, but Mount Hermon
cemetery, overlooking the St. Lawrence. There, what was and what isn't any
more is chiselled into every stone: vibrant English and Irish communities, a
Chinatown. Diphtheria, shipwrecks, death in childbirth. Farquhar,
Piddington, Denoon, Wong Chow King Tai, Seto Henry Duck Him. Only the Jewish
community - in life excluded from the Catholic schools, barely tolerated in
the Protestant ones - is absent; it has its own cemetery, a kilometre away.

Another kilometre from that graveyard, for those Jews not yet in the ground
or moved to Toronto, New York, or Jerusalem, there's the Beth Israel Ohev
Sholem Synagogue. It's a discreet, white-brick, single-level suburban home,
a pleasant building, a step up from the last place the Jewish community held
its services - a borrowed room in the Masonic Lodge - but barely a shadow of
the old synagogue. That temple occupied a large corner lot in what has
become the chicest part of town. It is now a theatre. Inside the synagogue
on this early winter day, a minyan, the quorum of ten Jewish men required to
hold a Shabbat service, has been rounded up. But just barely. Even so, it's
a mix: younger, Sephardic francophone students studying at Laval, a visiting
New Yorker-turned-Newfoundlander professor, a very chatty if stuttering pur
laine fundamentalist of sorts. "J-J-J-J-J?ésus était un j-j-j-j-juif," he
tells me, by way of explanation. Actual born-and-bred-and-still-living-here
Quebec City Jews? One or two.

"The old synagogue, it had four hundred seats. On holidays, every one was
full," Rabbi Samuel Prager tells me, as we drink Manischewitz and eat
pastries after the service. Until the late 1960s, there were as many as 100
families in the community, and Prager gave Hebrew lessons five days a week
to a packed classroom.

"It used to be that the sons would take over their fathers' businesses,"
Prager laments. "But now it's 'my son the doctor,' 'my son the lawyer,' 'my
son the dentist.' " Educated in English - those Protestant schools - the
children moved away and the parents often followed. Prager's own life fits
the pattern. When his daughters moved to Montreal in the 1970s, he and his
wife trailed along behind. But Prager didn't give up on his congregation.
For twenty-two years, he's been taking the bus back to Quebec City every
Thursday, coaxing out a minyan on Friday, celebrating the Shabbat service on
Saturday, and, if there's a student or two, giving a Hebrew class on Sunday
before returning to Montreal. "I could have bought the bus company for all
my trips," he says.

The Jewish community is depleted, but the Chinese community is effectively
erased, both from the Quebec City topography and the province's usually long
and deep collective memory. Robert Lepage did help write La Trilogie des
Dragons, a play that begins and ends with the words: "It used to be
Chinatown - today it's a parking lot." Still, when I ask a PR person at
Lepage's Quebec City company for a copy of the play, she responds,
incredulously, "There used to be a Chinatown here?"

There did, just a ten-minute gravity-assisted trot down the hill from the
National Assembly and the gates of the old city. In the 1950s and 1960s,
remembers hairdresser and restaurant owner Napoleon Woo, there were at least
a half-dozen restaurants, several laundries, a couple of food and medicine
stores. Three hundred households in total, Woo figures.

They used to get together for Chinese New Year and the spring festival to
worship the dead. "We'd first wake them up with firecrackers, then give them
food and then burn fake money for them," remembers Woo. "It used to be a big
picnic and party. Everyone would go. It was a lot of fun. It doesn't happen
any more." One reason why is the Autoroute Dufferin-Montmorency, an arching,
snaking series of overpasses, the centrepiece of quite probably the worst
bit of urban planning in post-war Canada. It rolled right through Chinatown,
razing most of it, casting the rest in a concrete shadow. Now there's just a
dilapidated building with a fading sign that reads "Chinese Nationalist
Party (Quebec Branch)." And, down the street, the restaurant Woo's father
founded, unchanged except for a new name: the Wok 'n' Roll. "I was sick of
the names that all Chinese restaurants have. This garden. The gates of that.
Something something palace. Plus we've got really big egg rolls." Woo's
French has the nasal drawl of someone born and bred in Lower Town, as he
was. Still, he knows better than to expect to be treated as a native of the
city. "Whenever I take a taxi, the driver always asks me, 'How long are you
here for?' With my customers it's always, 'When did you come here?' And if
they see that I'm cold, they say, 'You'll get used to it.' " Woo laughs. "I
always tell them that not only was I born here, I was born here in January."

Woo is forty-three now; the daughter he raised with the help of his
grandmother is twenty. People don't think big enough in Quebec City, his
daughter tells me, and she'll probably be leaving soon. Woo says he won't be
following her as other parents have followed their children to Montreal,
Toronto, even the States. That doesn't mean he'll be sticking around. After
all, forty-three is still young, his best carousing years were spent
changing diapers, and he has a good haircut. "I got things to do," he says,
mentioning New York.

It's a similar story for the city's increasingly invisible Greek and
Portuguese communities. A few names in the phone book, barren, dusty pews in
a church, an empty restaurant, sons and daughters far away. And it is the
same, it seems, for the immigrants coming these days. Examined closely,
provincial statistics on immigration reveal an odd trend: about 5 percent of
the foreign immigrants to the province head first to Quebec City, but only
half of those end up living there. It's a nice place. To visit. Of those
immigrants who stay, a disproportionate number are born and bred in France,
a fact behind an ugly report I heard from two friends in Quebec City:
certain French, of the Jean-Marie Le Pen school, are packing up and moving
to Quebec City in search of purity, having concluded that their own patrie
is too tinted.

Then there are the English and Irish communities, both the most reduced and
the most present. Together they made up about 40 percent of the city's
population a century and a half ago. But steamships took business up-river
to Montreal, two world wars devastated the regiments that English Quebecers
joined, the provincial bureaucracy was ethnically scrubbed. Now English
speakers make up less than 2 percent of the greater Quebec City population,
an older-than-average 2 percent, hunkered down in their diminishing
strongholds of Sillery, Shannon, or out on Ile d'Orléans.

The older ones meet at church and perhaps the Garrison Club, reminiscing
about days gone by, grousing about how everything has turned out. The young
anglos that remain are more proactive: they're busy planning their escape,
says Lorraine O'Donnell, who was hired by the feds to do a survey of Quebec
City's English. Their families may have been in Quebec City for generations,
but "they don't feel at home here," she says. "There isn't a lot of room
here for difference. It's a white, francophone, pur laine town," she says,
"and people here like it that way."

Daniel Sanger investigated Montreal's telemarketing scams for the November,
1999, issue.

Story © Daniel Sanger
Photograph © Ross MacDonald





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