Editorial Board / Comité de rédaction

Editor-in-Chief Rédacteur en chef Kenneth McRoberts, York University, Canada

Associate Editors Rédacteurs adjoints Mary Jean Green, Dartmouth College, U.S.A. Lynette Hunter, University of Leeds, United Kingdom Danielle Juteau, Université de Montréal, Canada

Managing Editor Secrétaire de rédaction Guy Leclair, ICCS/CIEC, Ottawa, Canada

Advisory Board / Comité consultatif

Alessandro Anastasi, Universita di Messina, Italy Michael Burgess, University of Keele, United Kingdom Paul Claval, Université de Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV), France Dona Davis, University of South Dakota, U.S.A. Peter H. Easingwood, University of Dundee, United Kingdom Ziran He, Guangzhou Institute of Foreign Languages, China Helena G. Komkova, Institute of the USA and Canada, USSR Shirin L. Kudchedkar, SNDT Women’s University, India Karl Lenz, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany Gregory Mahler, University of Mississippi, U.S.A. James P. McCormick, California State University, U.S.A. William Metcalfe, University of Vermont, U.S.A. Chandra Mohan, University of Delhi, India Elaine F. Nardocchio, McMaster University, Canada Satoru Osanai, Chuo University, Japan Manuel Parés I Maicas, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Espagne Réjean Pelletier, Université Laval, Canada Gemma Persico, Universita di Catania, Italy Richard E. Sherwin, Bar Ilan University, Israel William J. Smyth, St. Patrick’s College, Ireland Sverker Sörlin, Umea University, Sweden Oleg Soroko-Tsupa, Moscow State University, USSR Michèle Therrien, Institut des langues et civilisations orientales, France Gaëtan Tremblay, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada Hillig J.T. van’t Land, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Pays-Bas Mel Watkins, University of Toronto, Canada Gillian Whitlock, Griffith University, Australia Donez Xiques, Brooklyn College, U.S.A. ii International Journal of Canadian Studies Revue internationale d’études canadiennes

Special Issue – Winter 1993/Numéro hors-série – hiver 1993

Generations in Canadian Society Le phénomène des générations et la société canadienne

Table of Contents/Table des matières

Kenneth McRoberts Introduction/Présentation...... 5

Stéphane Dufour, Dominic Fortin et Jacques Hamel Sociologie d’un conflit de générations : les « baby boomers » et les « baby busters »...... 9

John C. Pierce, Nicholas P. Lovrich, Jr., Mary Ann E. Steger and Brent S. Steel Generational Differences in the Public’s Policy Preferences in British Columbia...... 23

Victor Thiessen and E. Dianne Looker Generation, Gender and Class Perspectives on Work...... 39

Eric Mintz Two Generations: The Political Attitudes of High School Students and Their Parents...... 59

Renée Joyal L’évolution des modes de contrôle de l’autorité parentale et son impact sur les relations entre parents et enfants dans la société québécoise....73

Denise Lemieux et Léon Bernier La transmission intergénérationnelle dans les projets de procréation : une approche qualitative et subjective des changements démographiques au Québec...... 85

Marta Dvorak Nino Ricci’s “Lives of the Saints”: Walking Down Both Sides of the Street at the Same Time...... 103 Mark T. Cameron Justice and the New Generation Gap ...... 115

Robert Drummond Rejoinder to “Justice and the New Generation Gap”...... 133

Mark T. Cameron Reply to Rejoinder ...... 137

Caterina Pizanias Re-viewing Modernist Painting and Criticism in the Canadian Prairies: A Case Study from Edmonton ...... 139

Michel Tousignant, Emmanuel Habimana, Mathilde Brault, Naïma Bendris et Esther Sidoli-Leblanc Les rapports entre générations dans les familles de réfugiés au Québec . 171

Claire Harris A Grammar of the Heart ...... 183

Review Essai/Essai critique Simon Langlois Trois regards sur les générations ...... 201 Introduction Présentation

Over the years, scholars have used a Au fil des ans, les spécialistes ont wide variety of approaches to adopté une vaste gamme comprehend Canadian society. d’approches différentes pour Canada has been regularly analyzed aborder et mieux comprendre la in terms of the presence of two société canadienne. On a souvent societies, one Francophone and the analysé le Canada sous l’angle des other Anglophone, or, more deux sociétés, francophone et recently, of a multiplicity of anglophone, ou, plus récemment, cultural, ethnic and racial sous celui de la multiplicité des distinctions. Another tradition has différences culturelles, ethniques et understood Canada in terms of raciales. Une autre tradition regional differences: economic, considère les différences régionales political and cultural. In recent qui caractérisent la réalité decades, class and gender rightly canadienne sur les plans have become central themes of économique, politique et culturel. analysis. Au cours des dernières décennies, les questions de sexe et de classe For whatever reason, scholars have sociale sont elles aussi devenues, et been less inclined to use the à bon droit, des objets d’analyse. concept of generations to guide their analyses. Yet, as this issue Pour une raison ou pour une autre, demonstrates, there is a lot to be les spécialistes ont eu moins gained in doing so. Moreover, these tendance à recourir au concept de various articles show that générations pour guider leur generational phenomena can take a analyse. Et pourtant, comme ce wide variety of forms. numéro en donne la preuve, il y aurait beaucoup à gagner à explorer The most dramatic form of cette perspective. De plus, les generational difference is, of divers articles réunis ici montrent course, outright conflict. In their que le phénomène des différences piece on contemporary Quebec, de générations peut prendre toutes Dufour et al demonstrate how the sortes de formes. generation of “baby boomers” that rose to political and economic La plus spectaculaire de ces formes prominence in the 1960s, thanks to est évidemment celle du conflit the Quiet Revolution, continues to ouvert. Dans le texte sur le Québec monopolize positions of power and contemporain, Dufour et al. authority, to the detriment and décrivent comment la génération resentment of younger Québécois des « baby boomers » qui a pris le who question the structures through contrôle de l’économie et de la which the “baby boomers” are able politique au cours des années 1960, to maintain their dominance. dans la foulée de la Révolution tranquille, continue à monopoliser By the same token, Mark Cameron les postes de commande. Ils illustrates how generations have montrent aussi comment cela se fait concrete differences of interest au détriment et au plus grand dam when it comes to such policy des Québécois plus jeunes, lesquels questions as mandatory retirement se sont mis à remettre en cause les and financing of public pensions. structures qui ont permis à ces « He tries to develop principles of baby boomers » de maintenir leur intergenerational justice, which are emprise sur la société.

International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue internationale d’études canadiennes Special issue / Numéro hors série, Winter/hiver 1993 IJCS / RIÉC the basis of an exchange with Dans la même optique, Mark Robert Drummond. Cameron souligne les intérêts Nonetheless, generational divergents qui animent les differences need not be based on différentes générations en matière difference in interest let alone on de politiques, comme la retraite obligatoire et le financement des conflict. They may simply entail régimes de pension publics. differences in worldview and L’auteur s’efforce de dégager des attitudes reflecting distinctive principes de justice qui, d’après lui, experiences. For instance, Pierce et devraient régir les relations entre les al establish that among residents of générations. Une discussion British Columbia there are s’engage à ce sujet entre lui et significant generational differences Robert Drummond. regarding policy questions, such as environmentalism, Aboriginal Ce ne sont pas toutes les différences rights, and immigration. At the de génération qui correspondent à same time, turning to the artistic des divergences d’intérêt ou world, Pizanias explores how dégénèrent en conflits. Elles among Prairie artists there emerged peuvent tout simplement découler a distinctive modernist generation. de visions du monde différentes et correspondre à des expériences Of course, the phenomenon of distinctes. C’est ainsi, par exemple, generations is most clearly revealed que Pierce et al. font valoir within the family. The relationship l’existence, au sein de la population between mother and child is de la Colombie- Britannique, de beautifully captured in a poetic différences importantes entre les work by Claire Harris in which a générations sur des questions de woman reflects on the stages of her politique telles que la protection de mother’s life. Two studies directly l’environnement, les droits des compare the attitudes of parents Autochtones et l’immigration. De la and children. In his study of a small même façon, Caterina Pizanias fait Newfoundland town, Mintz shows ressortir la façon dont une that the political attitudes of youth génération moderniste distincte a are only weakly related to those of émergé chez les artistes des their parents. In their examination Prairies. of youth in three different Canadian communities, Thiessen and Looker Bien sûr, la famille demeure le lieu find that work expectations are less où le phénomène des différences bounded by gender than are those entre les générations se manifeste le of their parents. Two other studies plus clairement. Une œuvre focus upon family structures in poétique de Claire Harris dépeint Quebec. Lemieux et al examine the admirablement la relation mère- degree to which attitudes about enfant : une femme médite sur les procreation are transmitted across étapes de la vie de sa mère. Deux generations within the same family. autres études procèdent à une Joyal traces how the Quebec comparaison des attitudes des provincial state became parents et des enfants. Dans son increasingly involved in defining étude d’une petite localité terre- the relationship between parents neuvienne, Mintz démontre que les and their children. attitudes des jeunes ont peu en commun avec celles de leurs Finally, two articles describe how parents. Dans leur étude de trois different generations of newcomers communautés canadiennes, may relate to Canada in Thiessen et Looker concluent que fundamentally different ways. les différences entre les attentes des

4 Generations in Canadian Society Le phénomène des générations et la société canadienne

Dvorak examines how the novelist deux sexes face au travail sont Nino Ricci portrays the differing moins marquées chez les jeunes que perspectives of immigrant chez leurs parents. Deux autres generations and the ancestors they études portent sur les structures left behind. Tousignant et al familiales au Québec. Lemieux et examine the distinctive relations al. s’interrogent sur le degré de between children and parents within transmission des attitudes face à la refugee families. Also, in a review procréation d’une génération à essay comparing the results of three l’autre au sein de la même famille. different studies, Simon Langlois Joyal met en lumière comment shows how circumstances and l’État québécois s’est progres- belief systems can vary from one sivement engagé dans un processus generation to another. de définition des relations entre les parents et leurs enfants. In short, beyond their inherent interest, these articles make a Enfin, deux textes s’attachent à compelling case that as well as such montrer à quel point les attitudes established themes of culture, des nouveaux arrivants à l’égard du region, class and gender, Canadian Canada peuvent être profondément society should also be understood in différentes selon la génération à terms of differences in interest, laquelle ils appartiennent. Dvorak experience and worldview among étudie la façon dont le romancier the generations of which it is Nino Ricci a dépeint le contraste constituted. entre les perspectives des générations d’immigrants et celles Kenneth McRoberts des ancêtres qu’ils laissaient dans Editor-in-Chief leur pays d’origine. Tousignant et al. se penchent sur les relations particulières des enfants et des parents au sein de familles de réfugiés. Par ailleurs, dans un essai critique qui compare trois différentes études, Simon Langlois souligne comment peuvent varier d’une génération à l’autre les circonstances et les systèmes de croyances. En somme, pour ne rien dire de leur valeur intrinsèque, tous ces articles font nettement la preuve de ce que les thèmes reconnus (culture, différences régionales, classes sociales et sexes) ne sont pas les seuls qui permettent de comprendre la sociéte canadienne : il faut également tenir compte des différences d’intérêts, d’expériences et de visions du monde entre les générations qui la constituent.

Kenneth McRoberts Rédacteur en chef

5 Stéphane Dufour, Dominic Fortin et Jacques Hamel

Sociologie d’un conflit de générations : les « baby boomers » et les « baby busters »*

Résumé Cet article porte sur le conflit entre la génération des jeunes des années 1960 et celle des jeunes d’aujourd’hui. Ces jeunes, ainsi qu’il y est montré, ont été marqués par la modernisation du Québec, plus particulièrement celle de l’éducation au sein de cette société. Cette modernisation les a définis respectivement comme la génération gâtée et comme la génération perdue au sens des expressions anglaises « baby boomers » et « baby busters ». Les premiers résultats d’une enquête portant sur les baby boomers et les baby busters et leur insertion respective au sein du marché du travail et plus généralement dans la société sont présentés dans cette perspective. Ils montrent un conflit entre ces générations envisagé, d’un point de vue sociologique, comme un rapport de domination. Celui-ci est établi à la lumière des avancées de la théorie du pouvoir et de l’idéologie.

Abstract This article deals with the generational conflict between the youth of the 1960s and those of today. These two groups have been marked by the modernization of Quebec, especially with regard to education. This modernization has characterized them respectively as a spoiled generation and a lost generation or as « Baby boomers » and « Baby busters ». The article reveals the results of a survey of the two groups and their integration in the work force and more generally in society. The data shows that the conflict between the two generations, from a sociological standpoint, can be seen as a relation of one generation dominating the other. This relationship is established in light of the developments in the theory of power and ideology. La distance entre deux générations est donnée par les éléments qu’elles ont en commun et qui obligent à une répétition cyclique des mêmes expériences, comme pour les comportements des espèces animales transmis par l’hérédité biologique; tandis que les éléments de la différence entre eux [les jeunes] et nous [leurs aînés] sont le résultat des changements irréversibles que toute époque porte en elle, c’est-à-dire qu’ils dépendent de l’héritage historique que nous- mêmes leur avons transmis, de cet héritage véritable dont nous sommes responsables, fût-ce inconsciemment. C’est pourquoi nous n’avons rien à enseigner : nous ne pouvons influer sur ce qui ressemble le plus à notre expérience; nous ne savons pas nous reconnaître en ce qui porte notre empreinte. Italo Calvino, Palomar.

International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue internationale d’études canadiennes Special issue / Numéro hors série, Winter/hiver 1993 IJCS / RIÉC

Le phénomène des générations a marqué l’histoire des sociétés canadienne et québécoise à diverses époques mais jamais tant que dans les années 1960 durant lesquelles elles ont été en conflit. Les jeunes de cette époque ont été « vraiment des dérangeurs importants », selon les mots de Guy Rocher (1993, p. 20), mettant en cause la société définie par leurs aînés. L’arrivée de ces jeunes dans la vie adulte coïncide avec l’entrée du Québec dans la modernité. Elle leur procure d’ailleurs une identité propre qui se caractérise par la modernisation de cette société, plus particulièrement celle de l’État et de ses institutions, privilégiée en vue de remédier à un retard économique et social manifeste. Cette modernisation de l’État s’exprime par plusieurs réformes dont, la plus éloquente, celle de l’éducation. « Qui s’instruit s’enrichit » est le slogan de l’époque. Il traduit le fait qu’une scolarité élevée assure une place de choix dans un marché du travail en pleine mutation. L’éducation devient donc la clef de voûte pour accéder au marché du travail et ainsi se démarquer des générations du passé confinées à des emplois qui nécessitent une scolarité moins élevée. « Le développement accéléré du système scolaire et des appareils de l’État durant les années 1960, écrit Simon Langlois, a favorisé une importante mobilité sociale chez les francophones. Plus instruits, ceux-ci ont occupé en grand nombre les nouveaux postes offerts dans une société en voie de modernisation. Ces diplômés [universitaires] ont rapidement constitué une nouvelle classe moyenne, urbaine et scolarisée. » (Langlois, 1990a, p. 82).

Les problèmes de la définition sociologique d’une génération Cette jeunesse des années 1960, ayant connu la modernisation de la société par l’entremise des réformes de l’éducation, forme en quelque sorte une « génération » appelée aujourd’hui les baby boomers. La sociologie qui prend les baby boomers comme objet d’étude doit approcher cette génération comme un fait social, un fait de société, y compris en ce qui a trait à sa définition. Comment donc les définir d’un point de vue sociologique? La définition sociologique d’une génération ne saurait reprendre, sur de nouveaux frais, la définition fournie par la démographie selon laquelle une génération est une cohorte de la population née dans un même laps de temps. Elle ne saurait épouser non plus la définition d’une génération en anthropologie d’après laquelle une génération est déterminée par une cohorte de la population constituant la descendance directe d’une autre cohorte et assurant le cycle de reproduction physique d’une société. La définition classique d’une génération stipule alors que ce cycle de reproduction s’étend sur une période d’environ 25 à 30 ans. Le chiffre avancé est immédiatement sujet à caution et pose problème dans la mesure où, s’il s’appuie sur l’âge de la fécondité, il n’en reste pas moins relatif aux pratiques liées à la sexualité, lesquelles, en termes d’âge, varient d’une société à une autre. Sans être détachée radicalement de ces fondements premiers que sont le rythme des naissances et le cycle de reproduction d’une population, une génération doit donc être envisagée comme un fait de société, et ceci serait la définition élémentaire d’une génération en sociologie. « Le phénomène social d’une génération, écrit Karl Mannheim dans son célèbre essai sur Le problème des générations, se fonde certes sur le rythme biologique des naissances et de la mort. Mais “être fondé sur” ne signifie pas pour autant “être déductible de”, “être inclus dans” » (Mannheim, 1990, p. 44). Selon lui, il est possible de rapprocher la situation de génération de celle de classe et de considérer la première de façon analogique à la seconde.

10 Sociologie d’un conflit de générations

La situation de génération et la situation de classe ont en commun de circonscrire, du fait de leur situation spécifique dans l’espace socio- historique, les individus dans un champ des possibles déterminé et de favoriser ainsi un mode spécifique d’expérience et de pensée, un mode spécifique d’intervention dans le processus historique. (Mannheim, 1990, p. 45) On ne peut parler d’une situation de génération identique que dans la mesure où ceux qui entrent simultanément dans la vie participent potentiellement à des événements et à des expériences qui créent des liens. (Mannheim, 1990, p. 52) Une génération est en ce sens, en sociologie, déterminée par une histoire commune qui confère une identité propre à un groupe d’âge particulier que Mannheim propose alors d’appeler « génération effective » produisant des « unités de génération » dans lesquelles existent des « groupes concrets ». Une génération ne constitue cependant pas un groupe concret au sens où ses membres seraient unis par des liens réciproques comme la famille. Elle forme ainsi une unité sociale exprimant des phénomènes sociaux qui interfèrent dans le rythme biologique de l’existence, avec sa durée limitée et son vieillissement, et qui déterminent une « situation de génération » attribuant à un groupe d’âge particulier une identité qui est le fait de la société. Cette perspective servira maintenant à la proposition d’une définition sociologique des baby boomers. Nées dans l’immédiat de l’après-guerre et pendant un court laps de temps, les baby boomers sont identifiés comme la génération des « enfants de la guerre », du boom démographique de l’après-guerre. La hausse de la natalité s’est condensée en un court laps de temps du fait de la précocité des naissances après le mariage et du bref intervalle entre les naissances. C’est ainsi qu’a pu naître cette « génération » qui allait peser de tout son poids dans la société. François Ricard a, mieux que quiconque, relevé ce fait : Ce fait est capital. Il apporte à [cette génération] un immense avantage d’ordre stratégique, pourrait-on dire, en lui donnant une force d’impact à laquelle elle n’aurait jamais pu prétendre à elle seule et qui dépasse infiniment celle de toute autre génération avant elle. Le baby-boom, on le sait, est d’abord une pure question de nombre, ce qui le rend, de fait, incontournable. En gonflant subitement la place des enfants et des jeunes dans la société, c’est-à-dire d’un groupe d’âge particulier au détriment des autres, il va modifier radicalement l’équilibre traditionnel de cette société, ce qui aura pour conséquence non seulement de créer une situation éminemment propice aux bouleversements et aux remises en question, mais aussi de donner à ce groupe d’âge particulier, ne serait-ce qu’à cause du poids numérique qui est le sien, une influence et une « autorité » considérables, réduisant du même coup celles que pouvaient détenir jusque-là les groupes plus âgés. (Ricard, 1992, p. 31) Les mutations de la société qui s’ensuivirent sont donc déterminées par cette génération, son poids démographique, mais aussi son identité, le sentiment d’appartenance que confère le fait d’être née « ensemble » et de s’insérer dans la société, plus particulièrement dans le marché du travail, à la même date. Ceci lui donne une « autorité » quant à la modernisation de la société dont cette génération a tiré profit. Dans les années 1960, une génération a accaparé un grand nombre d’emplois, contrôlé les organisations sociales mises alors en place;

11 IJCS / RIÉC

elle s’est dotée d’un système de sécurité jusqu’alors inconnu. Phénomène qui, de soi, n’avait rien de tout à fait inédit. Chaque génération du passé avait tenté de procéder de la même façon; mais aucune n’y avait aussi parfaitement réussi. Et aucune, étant donné la durée moyenne de la vie, n’était parvenue à se maintenir aussi longtemps dans ses conquêtes. Cette génération, qui est maintenant dans la quarantaine, est implantée au milieu de toutes les autres dans une singularité extrêmement visible. (Dumont, 1986, p. 22) Cette « singularité extrêmement visible » est-elle véritablement le fait d’une génération, de la génération du baby boom, ainsi qu’invite à le penser Fernand Dumont? Car s’ils sont nés ensemble, les enfants de l’après-guerre n’ont cependant pas tous bénéficié des retombées de réformes qui ont découlé de la modernisation de la société québécoise. Les baby boomers sont en fait les enfants de l’après-guerre qui ont souscrit au slogan « Qui s’instruit s’enrichit ». Il importe donc de distinguer les baby boomers des enfants du baby boom. Les baby boomers constituent donc cette partie du baby boom qui détient des diplômes universitaires, expressions par excellence de cette modernisation. La date d’insertion de cette génération dans le marché du travail s’effectue ainsi au tournant des années 1960, et il est fondé de penser que les baby boomers y ont obtenu une place avant le choc pétrolier de 1973. De ce fait, ils étaient partie prenante des luttes syndicales du début des années 1970 et des victoires remportées principalement au sein de la fonction publique. En effet, le système de sécurité précédemment évoqué par F. Dumont pour caractériser cette génération tient à des conditions salariales, des avantages sociaux et une sécurité d’emploi inédits jusque-là dans le travail. Ce « système de sécurité », manifestation des progrès économiques des francophones, est tenu pour suspect aujourd’hui tant il apparaît comme l’apanage des baby boomers. C’est même là-dessus que s’appuie l’opposition à cette « génération ». Si naguère celle-ci était opposée aux générations d’avant-guerre au nom des valeurs modernes, l’opposition qu’elle suscite remet en cause un « système de sécurité » qui caractérise la place de cette génération dans le marché du travail sous forme d’une valeur devenue sociale. Car les progrès dans le domaine de l’éducation ont continué de se manifester chez la génération qui a suivi celle des baby boomers et de caractériser la société québécoise contemporaine. Une scolarité élevée n’est donc plus le seul fait de cette génération des années 1960. L’étude des tendances de la société québécoise tend à montrer que les jeunes d’aujourd’hui constituent une génération massivement inscrite à l’université, à telle enseigne qu’elle compte davantage de diplômés universitaires que celle des baby boomers, en dépit du fait qu’elle est moins populeuse que cette dernière.

12 Sociologie d’un conflit de générations

Tableau 1

Nombre de diplômés de l’enseignement universitaire, réseaux public et privé, Québec 1970-1988

Année Baccalauréat Maîtrise Doctorat

1970 13 771 2 234 285 1971 17 446 2 307 326 1972 18 021 1 958 320 1973 13 735 2 599 407 1974 16 007 2 430 369 1975 16 942 2 514 354 1976 17 400 2 676 340 1977 18 675 2 706 274 1978 20 982 3 125 368 1979 20 411 2 901 333 1980 21 678 3 109 331 1981 21 830 3 200 395 1982 22 724 3 435 397 1983 22 245 3 594 418 1984 21 737 3 721 420 1985 22 221 4 025 499 1986 23 625 4 544 516 1987 23 860 4 553 593 1988 25 057 4 608 601

Source: Simon Langlois (sous la dir. de) (1990b), p. 551.

Le constat à tirer de ce tableau n’a en soi rien de surprenant. En effet, si les baby boomers furent partie des tenants des réformes de l’éducation engagées dans les années 1960 au Québec, les jeunes d’aujourd’hui sont assurément partie de leurs aboutissants et en ont recueilli les fruits. Les chiffres cités démontrent en effet un net allongement de la période d’études et une augmentation marquée du nombre de diplômés universitaires. Il importe donc de constater que les jeunes d’aujourd’hui sont très scolarisés à l’instar des baby boomers. L’insertion de cette jeune génération fortement scolarisée dans le marché du travail s’avère pourtant problématique. Les problèmes rencontrés se résument en termes de dévalorisation des diplômes, de chômage et de précarité du travail marquant un net recul de la jeune génération par rapport celle des baby boomers dans le marché du travail. Ce recul se manifeste au demeurant tant du point de vue de la rémunération que de celui des conditions de travail, mettant un frein à l’élévation du niveau de vie dans les sociétés occidentales. La détérioration des conditions salariales et des conditions de travail touche principalement la jeune génération, au point d’ailleurs que ce sont là les traits marquants de la génération des baby busters. « La génération du baby bust pourrait ne jamais atteindre le niveau de vie de ses aînés. Ce serait la première fois que cette situation se produirait, explique Jeffrey G. Williamson,

13 IJCS / RIÉC spécialisé dans l’histoire de l’économie à l’université Harvard, même la crise économique des années 30 n’a pas affecté toute une génération » (Cité par Berstein et al., 1991, p. 13). Il est donc permis de penser que les jeunes n’auront pas droit, dans un avenir prochain, à la place dans le marché du travail et dans la société dont jouit la génération des baby boomers. Par rapport à cette dernière les jeunes sont « perdus » au sens où, pour reprendre les mots de F. Dumont, ils n’arrivent pas à « maintenir les conquêtes » des baby boomers,de sorte que les jeunes peuvent être envisagés comme une baby bust generation selon l’expression américaine utilisée par Williamson. Les études sociologiques sur les problèmes d’insertion des jeunes dans le marché du travail, voire dans la société, mettent l’accent soit sur les changements technologiques, soit sur la dévalorisation des diplômes (Saint- Pierre, 1982; 1990; Langlois, 1986; Gorz, 1988). L’insertion poussée de la micro-informatique et de la robotisation ont, par exemple, entraîné une suppression graduelle des places dans le marché du travail définies par une scolarité élevée et, par conséquent, une déqualification accentuée du travail, de même que l’éclatement des conditions et des lieux régularisant la pratique proprement dite du travail. Le sens de l’appartenance et les diverses formes de solidarité suscités par la pratique du travail et rendus caducs en pareilles circonstances, les conditions et droits qui définissent cette insertion ont connu un éclatement. Ce mouvement s’est amorcé avec le premier choc pétrolier de 1973, pour s’accentuer avec la crise économique. Les études sociologiques consacrées à cet éclatement ont parlé de « flexibilisation » du travail et de ses conditions. Ce caractère de flexibilité vaut dans l’horaire du travail, le lieu où il prend place1, sa durée (travail sur contrat, par intermittence, à temps partiel, etc.), ses prérogatives, etc., à tel point, du reste, que le travail revêt désormais indubitablement une forme éclatée. Cet éclatement met fin au « travail salarié, à temps plein, s’exerçant en un lieu unique, protégé par une série de règles issues de la législation ou de la convention collective, dans lequel le salarié est lié à un employeur unique par un contrat de travail normalisé » (Caire, 1982, p. 135). Si le travail dans cette forme connaît son apogée dans les années 1960-1970, et ce de façon accentuée au Québec, plus particulièrement chez les francophones, avec les grèves massives de la fonction publique2, celle-ci connaît un premier recul avec le choc pétrolier de 1973 et la crise économique qui s’ensuivit. Cette tendance s’observe du reste dans la plupart des sociétés occidentales. Les répercussions de cette crise économique se manifeste certes par une augmentation du chômage, expression par excellence de pareille crise, mais aussi, dans un même temps, par la dénégation des droits acquis dans les domaines de la sécurité d’emploi, des conditions normatives et salariales en vigueur dans le marché du travail. L’insertion dans ce marché devient donc compliquée en pareilles circonstances, et ce pour la génération qui suit celle du baby boom, plus particulièrement, des baby boomers tels qu’ils ont été définis précédemment. Puisque ceux-ci y sont massivement présents et disposent de diplômes universitaires, les places de choix sont donc par conséquent déjà occupées. L’augmentation du nombre de détenteurs de diplômes universitaires et celle du nombre de diplômes détenus découlent de cette saturation du marché du travail, et l’insertion des baby busters en son sein se complique, voire se compromet. Cette insertion se complexifie d’ailleurs à ce point que cette génération est contrainte à prolonger indûment une période d’études sans que les diplômes universitaires soient reconnus à leur juste valeur. En effet, le jeu

14 Sociologie d’un conflit de générations de l’offre et de la demande établi en matière de diplômes par des économistes et sociologues de l’éducation (Passeron, 1982) révèle une nette disproportion entre le nombre de détenteurs de diplômes universitaires et les places offertes dans le marché du travail. Les « effets pervers » de la démocratisation de l’enseignement universitaire se manifesteraient ainsi sous la forme de ce déséquilibre dû à une inflation des diplômes. Les explications avancées, qui mettent l’accent sur les mutations technologiques ou la dévalorisation des diplômes, ne sauraient cependant suffire, pour intéressantes qu’elles soient. Si l’accent porté sur les mutations technologiques permet de saisir la flexibilité du travail qui en découle, le fait que celle-ci marque, pour l’heure du moins, l’insertion des baby busters dans le marché du travail est laissé dans l’ombre. L’éclatement du travail régulier, salarié et protégé consécutif à cette flexibilité ne touche pourtant pas le marché du travail des baby boomers. La flexibilité du travail n’émane donc pas que d’impératifs techniques, mais exprime un rapport social constituant le marché du travail sous deux formes qui définissent la place des baby boomers et des baby busters en son sein. Ce rapport social comprend donc le rapport entre ces deux générations, rapport pouvant être envisagé comme un conflit de générations dans le marché du travail dont la flexibilité du travail exigée des baby busters est l’expression par excellence.

Une étude sociologique sur les baby boomers et les baby busters L’étude sociologique de ce conflit de générations s’impose. Ce n’est, en effet, que récemment que la sociologie a pris ce conflit pour objet d’étude, ici comme ailleurs (Ferry, 1986; Grand-Maison et Lefebvre, 1993; Light, 1988). En 1991, une équipe de sociologues de l’Université de Montréal se proposait de l’étudier, tentant de saisir les processus d’« insertion dans la société » de ces deux générations, plus particulièrement l’insertion dans le marché du travail par la mobilisation de leurs diplômes universitaires, grâce à une démarche d’étude inductive. Dans cette perspective, il peut s’établir une stratégie méthodologique selon laquelle on considère les étudiants universitaires comme une population de choix en vue de saisir le rapport entre baby boomers et baby busters en terme d’un conflit social. En effet, la scolarité universitaire apparaît comme la clé de voûte de l’insertion dans la société, qu’elle ait suscité ou non un saut, voire un « boom » dans la mobilité sociale. De ce fait, deux cohortes de Québécois francophones ayant obtenu des diplômes universitaires ont été privilégiées. Par surcroît, dans la perspective évoquée plus tôt, la première cohorte envisagée devait réunir des étudiants qui ont obtenu un premier diplôme universitaire durant les années 1968-1973. En effet, cette période est consécutive à la réforme de l’éducation au Québec. Les années 1968 et 1973 sont marquées en outre par les contestations étudiantes et le choc pétrolier. Elles déterminent par conséquent le début et la fin d’une période de prospérité économique, accentuée par le développement de la fonction publique et l’intervention économique de l’État permettant des gains syndicaux quelque peu érodés par la crise économique suivant le choc pétrolier. La période 1984- 1989 correspond, elle, à une reprise économique consécutive à la crise économique de 1981-1982 et ses répercussions : crise de l’État-providence et « flexibilisation » accrue du travail et de la main-d’oeuvre. Sans être identique à la première, cette seconde période est aussi caractérisée par une relative prospérité économique. On peut donc supposer que l’insertion dans le marché

15 IJCS / RIÉC du travail, et donc dans la société, s’est faite dans des conditions somme toute favorables. Les cohortes établies selon cette stratégie sont représentatives des détenteurs de diplômes universitaires au Québec. Leur représentativité n’est toutefois pas d’ordre statistique mais sociologique, c’est-à-dire qu’elle tient au caractère déterminant des mutations de l’éducation et du travail dans cette société suite aux contestations des années 1960, des réformes et du développement de l’État. Le caractère déterminant de ces mutations sociales apparaît clairement dans la stratégie méthodologique qui vient d’être exposée3. L’échantillon de chacune des cohortes a été établi à partir des registres officiels de l’Association des diplômé(e)s de l’Université de Montréal couvrant l’ensemble des disciplines offertes dans cette institution. Un tirage au hasard opéré par ordinateur a réduit la population totale à une liste de 125 noms; de ce nombre, 89 personnes ont été rejointes. Les caractéristiques de l’insertion et de la position de chacune des cohortes au sein du marché du travail sont décrites dans le tableau 2.

Tableau 2

Principales caractéristiques des répondants à l’enquête1 (Secteurs économiques, insertion et position dans le marché du travail)

Baby boomers Baby busters Secteur Privé 15 (32 p. 100) 21 (54 p. 100) Public 32 (68 p. 100) 14 (36 p. 100) 4 s.emp. (10 p. 100) Insertion Facile2 45 (96 p. 100) 22 (56 p. 100) Difficile 2 (4 p. 100) 17 (44 p. 100) Position Stable3 39 (83 p. 100) 12 (31 p. 100) Instable 8 (17 p. 100) 27 (69 p. 100)

1. Sur le total des personnes rejointes (89), trois entrevues ont été écartées de l’analyse en raison de problèmes techniques ou en raison de l’échec de l’entrevue. 2. L’insertion est jugée « facile » quand la personne s’est insérée dans le marché du travail moins d’un an après l’obtention de son diplôme, et ce dans son domaine d’étude. 3. Un individu jouit d’une position « stable » quand il détient actuellement un travail avec sécurité d’emploi et a profité d’une telle sécurité dans la majorité des emplois occupés précédemment.

Chacune des personnes qui constituent ces cohortes dotées des caractéristiques précédemment décrites a été rencontrée dans le cadre d’une entrevue. L’entrevue se déroulait en face à face et selon un schéma d’entretien semi-directif, c’est-à-dire à partir d’un canevas précis mais dont la définition permettait d’explorer des avenues ouvertes par les interviewés. Ces entrevues ont été réalisées à la maison ou au travail, au choix des interviewés.

16 Sociologie d’un conflit de générations

Sociologie d’un conflit de jeunesses Que révèle l’analyse d’une telle série d’entrevues ? Les résultats de l’analyse démontrent que les baby boomers ont effectivement tiré bénéfice de leurs diplômes universitaires qui, dans un contexte favorable, ont considérablement facilité leur insertion à la société et au marché du travail. Les diplômes universitaires acquis par les baby boomers procurent immédiatement une place de choix dans le marché du travail dans la mesure où il est, à leur époque, en train de se redéfinir en fonction de l’élévation de la scolarité qui en découle et qui apparaît sous forme d’une valeur sociale. – Donc le diplôme que vous aviez obtenu...... avait sa valeur marchande. Bien que pas dans la discipline [cette personne détient un baccalauréat en sciences politiques], mais la recherche en marketing, à cette époque là, si on remonte vingt ans en arrière, c’était le démarrage (...) on venait tous d’un peu n’importe quelle discipline et on s’est ramassé en recherche en marketing (...). Je pense que les chômeurs instruits se voyaient moins vers le début des années 1970 parce que le Québec était en pleine expansion économique à ce moment-là.(...) Tous les domaines étaient en éclosion, donc effectivement il y avait de nouveaux domaines qui se créaient. Ce qui se passe maintenant c’est devenu trop gras, la machine est trop grasse, il y a trop de fonctionnaires et de syndiqués (...) Elle a besoin d’une cure d’amaigrissement et je pense qu’il a tellement changé, ce marché [du travail], que, effectivement, où pour nous c’était sans doute plus facile parce que c’était florissant à l’époque. (BB, bac en science politique) La cure d’amaigrissement évoquée ici concerne des gains au plan de la rémunération et des avantages sociaux qui, s’ils sont aujourd’hui mis en cause par les baby boomers eux-mêmes, n’en reste pas moins l’aboutissement de leurs revendications. Ces revendications ont donné lieu à des gains (amélioration du salaire, de la sécurité d’emploi, du pouvoir sur le travail, etc.) dont la généralisation, rendue possible par l’ampleur démographique de cette génération instruite, a donné lieu à une richesse collective jamais égalée dans l’histoire du Québec. Le schéma d’entrevue privilégiée autorisant une description du cadre de vie des interviewés permet à l’analyse de montrer qu’on a assisté sans contredit à l’émergence d’une « classe moyenne » chez les Québécois francophones. Sans éviter un jeu de mots facile, il est permis de définir cette « classe moyenne » comme une classe qui dispose de « moyens » financiers, scolaires et sociaux. La hausse de revenu que les baby boomers ont connue leur donne accès à la propriété d’une maison dans des quartiers chics, de voitures de luxe, d’une maison de campagne, bref, d’un bien-être « bien mérité », selon les mots de plusieurs interviewés, puisque « durement » acquis par le travail. L’analyse révèle par ailleurs que le travail constitue le trait saillant des baby boomers. En premier lieu, il est le fait des hommes et des femmes de cette génération. La totalité des interviewées faisaient partie du marché du travail au moment de l’enquête. En second lieu, le travail se révèle pour eux l’activité dominante de leur cadre de vie. Si le travail suscite un « manque de défis personnels » tant il est régulier et assuré, il donne lieu dès lors à un autre

17 IJCS / RIÉC

« travail » : création de petites entreprises ou participation au jeu économique (investissements, etc.). En marge de nos professions, ma femme et moi avons investi dans de petits commerces, de petits immeubles, de sorte que nos enfants nous disent « vous pensez juste à ça ». Ils nous considèrent comme très matérialistes. Les enfants sont très critiques de ce point de vue là. On a toujours eu des affaires en marge de notre travail, le9à5etla sécurité [d’emploi] à vie ça devient vite lassant... (BB, bac en architecture) Le travail, pour ne pas dire l’économie, est devenu dans de telles conditions la valeur propre à cette génération. Cette valeur devient sociale, au sens où elle vaut à l’échelle d’une société marquée par le poids démographique des baby boomers et le pouvoir qu’il procure à cette génération. Il ne s’agit pas ici d’affirmer que les hippies d’hier sont devenus les RÉActionnaires d’aujourd’hui. Les baby boomers sont en fait partie et produit d’une société dont la modernisation a coïncidé avec leur date d’insertion. Il n’en reste pas moins que la modernisation de cette société a « doté » cette génération d’un « système de sécurité », pour reprendre l’expression de F. Dumont, lui conférant une « singularité extrêmement visible » qu’elle parvient encore à maintenir. Si cette singularité est « extrêmement visible », c’est qu’elle ne touche, à première vue, que cette génération par rapport à d’autres générations, particulièrement celle qui suit les baby boomers, la génération dite du baby bust. L’analyse de la série d’entrevues réalisées auprès de la seconde cohorte qui compose la population privilégiée pour les fins de l’enquête va parfaitement en ce sens. Scolarisée et détentrice de diplômes universitaires avantageusement comparables à ceux de ses prédécesseurs, cette génération s’insère dans le marché du travail dans des conditions précaires qui se manifestent en premier lieu par l’intermittence du travail : travail à forfait, à la pige, à temps partiel ou surnuméraire. En second lieu, cette précarité s’exprime par des failles dans le « système de sécurité » qu’auraient dû leur conférer droits et avantages sociaux. Les contraintes du travail résultant des gains obtenus par les baby boomers résident dans son caractère régulier, protégé et hautement rémunéré qui lui vaut d’être aujourd’hui décrié comme rigide dans le marché du travail où l’accent n’est désormais plus mis sur la valeur du diplôme universitaire mais sur la compétence, la flexibilité et la mobilité manifestées chez les baby busters dans le travail proprement dit. Bien d’abord j’étais à temps partiel, j’étais syndiquée mais j’étais ce qu’on appelle une catégorie que sont les statuts précaires, dans le jargon syndical, ce qui fait que je n’avais pas de sécurité d’emploi... – Comment sont définies les conditions de travail ? Ça se fait par beaucoup d’ententes verbales, parce que c’est un travail à la pige, il n’y a pas de contrat de travail, si l’on veut. Alors c’est l’entente verbale et l’usage qui prévalent. (...) Alors tout le monde est traité à peu près sur le même pied, ilyauncontrôle naturel qui s’établit entre les gens. (bb, maîtrise en études françaises) Quoique souvent protégé par un syndicat, le travail ne procure pas ou plus de « système de sécurité »; à tout le moins, le caractère officiel de celui-ci

18 Sociologie d’un conflit de générations s’estompe, ce qui suscite une sorte de régulation diffuse. Celle-ci se différencie du système de sécurité dont elle est néanmoins la contrepartie en abolissant ce qu’il est désormais convenu d’appeler ses « rigidités sociales ». « Nous entendons par là, écrit Simon Langlois, les contraintes qui sont codifiées formellement et qui sont susceptibles d’affecter les comportements des acteurs sociaux, notamment les jeunes. (...) Mais ces rigidités ne découlent pas seulement de la codification légale qui contraint différents publics ou diverses catégories d’acteurs; elles résultent aussi de l’institutionnalisation des relations sociales — notamment dans le domaine des relations de travail [dans la société d’aujourd’hui] » (Langlois, 1986, p. 303.) Ces rigidités sociales ne découlent donc pas du travail lui-même mais de ce qu’y exerce la génération des baby boomers du seul fait de son poids démographique, politique et social. La « dualisation » du marché du travail (Gagnon, 1990) est invoquée pour rendre compte de cette différenciation du travail et du « système de sécurité » dont il était jadis pourvu. Mais on relève pas assez que cette dualisation est un fait de générations qui oppose les baby boomers et les baby busters.«Aufil des ans et sans trop qu’on s’en rende compte très explicitement, ajoute Simon Langlois, diverses formes, maintenant cristallisées, de relations sociales ont été mises en place, avec pour résultat de rendre plus difficile l’insertion des jeunes, et notamment parce que s’est institutionnalisé un rapport de forces qui semble jouer systématiquement contre les jeunes sur le marché du travail. » (Langlois, 1986, p. 319.) Ce rapport de forces ne semble pas, pour l’heure, s’incarner dans un conflit ouvert entre générations comparable aux contestations étudiantes des années 1960, voire aux mouvements des jeunes dans leur ensemble qui ont marqué cette époque. Il n’en est pas moins manifeste mais semble se dissimuler derrière, ou plus précisément se confondre avec les contraintes nouvellement apparues dans le marché du travail. En effet, l’analyse de la série d’entrevues précédemment évoquée démontre que l’opposition des baby busters face aux baby boomers s’exprime principalement par une mise en cause du « système de sécurité » dont jouissent ces derniers, système dont la rigidité est envisagée de façon critique par une mise en valeur de la précarité du travail. [La précarité du travail], moi je trouve au contraire que c’est un stimulant très, très important... On ne risque pas de s’encroûter quand on est toujours sur la corde raide et dans une situation précaire. Il n’y a rien de pire, à mon avis, que la sécurité d’emploi, le syndicalisme jusqu’aux oreilles, qui vous met sur les rails jusqu’à la retraite. Au contraire, moi ça me stimule et je n’en souffre absolument pas. (bb, maîtrise en études françaises) La difficulté de parvenir à ce « système de sécurité » par le travail contraint sans doute les baby busters à une telle critique. Ainsi, le travail perd auprès de cette génération sa valeur de « système de sécurité » au profit d’une précarité du travail jugée « stimulante ». De ce fait, cette génération a tendance à rejeter, par exemple, la protection de syndicats dont elle est par ailleurs exclue en raison de sa position précaire dans le marché du travail ou dont elle peut faire les frais en raison de sa « rigidité ». En la rejetant ou en s’en excluant, les baby busters confortent eux-mêmes leur position précaire dans le marché du travail en faisant éclater la rigidité du travail. Ceci met au jour la position paradoxale, pour ne pas dire contradictoire, des baby busters dans le marché du travail voire plus généralement, dans la société. La théorie de l’idéologie et du pouvoir proposée par l’anthropologue

19 IJCS / RIÉC français Maurice Godelier permet de poser que cette contradiction est constitutive d’un rapport de domination dont la « domination la plus forte n’est pas la violence des dominants mais le consentement des dominés à leur propre domination » (Godelier, 1978, p. 176): Pour mettre et maintenir « au pouvoir », c’est-à-dire au-dessus et au centre de la société une partie de la société, un ordre, une caste, une classe par rapport à d’autres ordres, castes, classes, la répression fait moins que l’adhésion, la violence physique et psychologique moins que la conviction de la pensée qui entraîne avec elle l’adhésion de la volonté l’acceptation sinon la « coopération » des dominés. (Godelier, 1978: 176). Dans la mesure où la domination définie dans cette théorie n’est pas réduite à son aspect proprement politique — renvoyant aux stratégies délibérées et volontaires des parties sociales considérées, telle une classe ou, en l’occurrence, une génération — cette contradiction peut donc être posée en un rapport de domination par lequel les baby boomers dominent les baby busters dans le marché du travail et, plus généralement, dans la société non sans que ces derniers « coopèrent » en quelque sorte à leur propre domination. La coopération à cette domination n’est en rien délibérée ou volontaire, comme incite à le penser une lecture rapide de la théorie de Godelier. Celle-ci est inhérente à la contradiction précédemment relevée. Ce rapport de domination se confond avec les contraintes du marché du travail, pour ne pas dire se dissimule sous les exigences du travail proprement dit alors que celles-ci sont le fait de l’histoire de la société québécoise aboutissant aujourd’hui à ce conflit des générations.

Conclusion Suite à la présente analyse, la mise au jour de ce conflit des générations entre baby boomers et baby busters permet par surcroît d’établir que la « faillite » qui caractérise les baby busters n’est pas un « effet d’âge » suivant lequel les baby busters, étant jeunes, sont en train, comme les baby boomers au même âge, de s’insérer dans le marché du travail et la société et peuvent par conséquent aspirer à occuper la position qu’occupent aujourd’hui les baby boomers.En effet, pour l’heure, « l’observation des 10 ou 15 dernières années montre qu’il n’y a pas ici seulement un effet de l’âge. Il y a aussi un effet de génération : en vieillissant les jeunes retrouvent moins que ce que les autres avaient au même âge » (Langlois, 1990a, p. 95). Cela n’est pas propre au Québec mais vaut sans doute de différentes manières à l’échelle de la société canadienne. Néanmoins, la position dominée des baby busters qui découle de ce conflit des générations vient compromettre les avancées de la modernisation de la société et de l’éducation au Québec qui se manifeste par les conquêtes des francophones dans le marché du travail, modernisation jadis revendiquée par les jeunes des années 1960 devenus la génération gâtée des baby boomers.

Notes * Cet article émane de recherches bénéficiant de l’aide financière du Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada et du ministère de l’Enseignement supérieur et de la science du Québec. Nous tenons à exprimer notre gratitude à Marcel Fournier et Yolande Cohen pour leurs commentaires opportuns et féconds. Nos remerciements vont aussi aux deux évaluateurs anonymes qui nous ont transmis leurs judicieux commentaires.

20 Sociologie d’un conflit de générations

1. La micro-informatique permet, par exemple, le travail de bureau à la maison. Les avancées en cette matière sont aujourd’hui considérables. Près de 12 p. 100 du travail naguère réalisé en un lieu de travail est présentement effectué à domicile, selon un horaire voulu. 2. Le début des années 1970 a été marqué par des grèves importantes de la fonction publique québécoise, majoritairement francophone; celles-ci ont donné lieu à des victoires syndicales de première importance, qui ont permis des gains nets en termes de salaire et d’avantages en matière de sécurité d’emploi. Voir J. Rouillard (1989). 3. Ces considérations s’appuient sur la méthodologie qualitative caractérisant la méthode de cas. Sur ce sujet, voir Hamel, dir. (1992); DUFOUR, FORTIN et HAMEL (1991); et RAGIN et BECKER (1992). 4. BB: baby boomer; bb: baby buster.

Bibliographie BERNSTEIN, A. et al. (1991), « Qu’est devenu le rêve américain », Courrier international, 45, pp. 13-16. CAIRE, Guy (1982), « Précarisation des emplois et régulation du marché du travail », Sociologie du travail, 2, pp. 135-158. DUMONT, Fernand (1986), « Âges, générations, société de la jeunesse » in Fernand Dumont (sous la direction), Une société des jeunes?, Québec, Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture, pp. 15-28. DUFOUR, Stéphane, Dominic FORTIN et Jacques HAMEL (1992), L’enquête de terrain en sciences sociales, Montréal, Éditions Saint-Martin. FERRY, Luc (1986), « Interpréter Mai 68 », Pouvoirs, 39, pp. 5-14. GAGNON, Gabriel (1990), « Travail, culture et émancipation », Revue de l’Institut de sociologie, no 3-4, pp. 285-291. GODELIER, Maurice (1978), « La part idéelle du réel. Essai sur l’idéologique », L’Homme, vol. XVIII, no 3-4, pp. 155-188. GORZ, André (1988), Métamorphoses du travail. Quête de sens, Paris, Galilée. GRAND-MAISON, Jacques et Solange LEFEBVRE (1993), Une génération bouc émissaire, Montréal, Fidès. HAMEL, Jacques, sous la direction de, (1992), « The Case Method in Sociology », Current Sociology, vol. 40, no 1. LANGLOIS, Simon (1986), « Les rigidités sociales et l’insertion dans la société québécoise » in Fernand Dumont (sous la direction), Une société des jeunes?, Québec, Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture, pp. 301-323. LANGLOIS, Simon (1990a), « Anciennes et nouvelles formes d’inégalités et de différenciation sociale au Québec » in Fernand Dumont (sous la direction), La société québécoise après 30 ans de changements, Québec, Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture, pp. 81-98. LANGLOIS, Simon, sous la direction de, (1990b), La société québécoise en tendances 1960- 1990, Québec, Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture. LIGHT, Paul C. (1988), Baby boomers, New York-London, W.W. Norton & Company. MANNHEIM, Karl (1990), Le problème des générations, Paris, Nathan. PASSERON, Jean-Claude (1982), « L’inflation des diplômes », Revue française de sociologie, vol. XXIII, no 4, pp. 551-586. RAGlN, Charles et Howard BECKER, sous la direction de, (1992), What is a Case? Exploring the Foundations of Social Inquiry, New York, Cambridge University Press. RICARD, François (1992), La génération lyrique, Montréal, Boréal. ROCHER, Guy (1993), « Repères pour une société en mutation », Forces, no 100, pp. 15-20. ROUILLARD, Jacques (1989), Le syndicalisme au Québec : des origines à nos jours, Montréal, Boréal. SAINT-PIERRE, Céline (1982), « Les jeunes et le travail : remise en question ou fuite en avant? », Revue internationale d’action communautaire, 8/48, pp. 158-164. SAINT-PIERRE, Céline (1990), « Transformations du monde du travail », in Fernand Dumont (sous la direction), La société québécoise après 30 ans de changements, Québec, Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture, pp. 67-80.

21 John C. Pierce, Nicholas P. Lovrich, Jr., Mary Ann E. Steger and Brent S. Steel

Generational Differences in the Public’s Policy Preferences in British Columbia*

Abstract This paper examines generational differences on three issues of public policy based on public opinion of samples taken in two cities (Vancouver and Prince George) of British Columbia. The three issues polled are forest management, native claims and immigration. Along with differences between the publics of the two cities, significant generational differences of opinion surface in the survey results. However, the differences vary somewhat, depending on the relative salience of the policy issue to the local political and social context. The study examines the generational differences in policy preferences controlling for two “new politics” value dimensions (postmaterialism and libertarianism) and two measures of core Canadian cultural values (communitarianism and particularism). The generational differences in policy opinions remain widespread and significant even after introducing controls for the four sets of political values mentioned above. The study suggests two possible explanations for these results. First, other measures or dimensions of “new politics” and Canadian cultural values may produce results more consistent with their hypothesized impact. Second, these issues of public policy may be so salient that they are rooted in very specific generational contexts and thus unconnected to larger value dimensions. In either case, the generational differences portend significant change in the policy future of British Columbia.

Résumé À partir d’un sondage d’opinion publique mené dans deux villes de la Colombie-Britannique (Vancouver et Prince George), l’article examine les différences générationnelles concernant trois questions de politiques gouvernementales : la gestion forestière, les revendications autochtones et l’immigration. En plus de révéler des différences d’opinion entre les deux villes, les résultats du sondage indiquent des différences importantes entre les générations. Par contre, ces différences varient selon l’importance de ces questions dans le contexte social et politique au niveau local. Les auteurs examinent ces différences quant aux préférences politiques en se concentrant sur les dimensions de valeurs de deux « nouvelles politiques », le postmatérialisme et les idées libertaires, et sur deux mesures des valeurs culturelles fondamentales des Canadiennes et Canadiens, le communitarianisme et le particularisme. Les différences générationnelles

International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue internationale d’études canadiennes Special issue / Numéro hors série, Winter/hiver 1993 IJCS / RIÉC dans les opinions de politiques gouvernementales demeurent répandues et considérables même une fois que des éléments sont introduits pour soumettre à un contrôle les quatre valeurs mentionnées ci-dessus. L’étude offre deux explications des résultats. Premièrement, d’autres mesures ou dimensions relatives aux nouvelles politiques et aux valeurs culturelles canadiennes peuvent produire des résultats plus compatibles avec leurs impacts prévus. Deuxièmement, ces questions de politiques gouvernementales peuvent être si saillantes qu’elles sont ancrées dans des contextes générationnels très spécifiques et donc détachées des dimensions de valeurs plus vastes. Dans les deux cas, les différences générationnelles annoncent un changement important dans l’avenir des politiques gouvernementales de la Colombie- Britannique.

Introduction The question of generational change in Canada takes on special meaning in the context of political culture’s effects on the public policy preferences of a country’s citizens. Numerous observors have pointed to distinctive orientations to politics and society in the culture of Canada. In contrasting Canada to the United States, Lipset has written that “...the cultural differences of the past continue” (1990:212), while Merelman has noted the presence of “quite distinct cultures of political participation” (1991:11). This unique cultural character of Canada is said to have grown out of its particular historical and institutional roots. The preservation of this Canadian cultural identity across succeeding generations remains a concern for those who observe a gradual cultural erosion from the wave of media, economic and social influences from south of the border (Jackson et al., 1986:149-160; Westell, 1991). The potential divergence among generations in Canada was emphasized in a recent study by Neil Nevitte, who concluded that “evidence that young Americans and Canadians are more like each other than their elder co- nationals underscored and visibly illustrated just how similar the prevailing values in these two countries have become” (1991:11). If the younger generation in Canada is becoming separated from its older co-nationals, one need not look too far for evidence of that distancing—generation-specific responses to the cross-border penetration of media and economics generally, and the recent free trade agreement particularly. Even more broadly, however, Canadian cross- generational cultural homogeneity has run into divergent forces produced by powerful transnational, post-industrial effects. These transnational, post- industrial forces are said to be separating the political values of younger generations from their elders in many modern democracies (van Deth and Jennings, 1989:17). Economic security, highly developed mass communication systems and sophisticated technologies in all walks of life are thought to have created a greater emphasis on libertarian (emphasizing individuals’ freedom and control of their own lives) and “postmaterial” (non- economic concerns with freedom of speech and widespread participation in politics) values, especially in those generations maturing after World War II. That one might observe an interplay of historical, generational convergence and contemporary, post-industrial-produced, generational divergence is consistent with what is known about the learning of attitudes central to a political culture. It is widely thought that most political learning occurs during a citizen’s early years (Jennings, 1989:315). In times of stability, culturally- dominant political orientations will be transmitted across generations in a

24 Generational Differences in the Public’s Policy Preferences in British Columbia relatively unimpeded manner. On the other hand, if different generations are affected by dissimilar environmental forces during their respective formative years the generations are more likely to have uniquely characteristic political attitudes, and to hold relatively strongly to those attitudes throughout their lives. Thus, the historical view of Canadian cultural homogeneity (regional differences set aside for the moment) would suggest socialization processes resulting in cross-generational similarity within Canada. On the other hand, the theories of post-industrial political change would point toward the position that younger generations in Canada will have been socialized to a cultural content that differs systematically from that of their older compatriots. The potentially contrasting effects of traditional and post-industrial cultural forces on generational differences in Canada may be uniquely revealed in the responses of individuals to contemporary issues of public policy. The salience, visibility and personal relevance of current issues of public policy may provide a powerful stimulus to the activation of deep-seated historical and contemporary values. This paper explores the dynamics of generational differences in public policy attitudes and their traditional and modern cultural roots in British Columbia. We address the question of whether there are significant policy differences among generations within each of two locations, and whether those public policy differences are affected by individuals’ adherence to Canadian cultural values and to post-industrial values.

Public Policy, Political Culture and Post-industrialism We expect to find generational differences in attitudes about issues of public policy in British Columbia, but we also expect that these generational differences will be significantly altered by the degree to which individuals support values inherent in traditional, Canadian political culture and by the extent to which they adhere to “new politics” post-industrial values. More specifically, we anticipate that support for traditional, Canadian cultural values will bring the generations closer together on issues of public policy, while differences on “new politics” values will push the generations farther apart. Issues of Public Policy This paper looks at generational differences in public attitudes about three issues of public policy. These three issues are immigration, native land claims and forest resource management. They were chosen because they have been high on the contemporary Canadian political agenda, and hence should be salient to Canadian citizens. Moreover, these issues have the potential to tap into the traditional cultural roots of Canada while at the same time being clearly connected to many of the values identified with “new politics” conflict in the post-industrial era. Attitudes about these issues of public policy provide the opportunity for a concrete expression of historical cultural orientations and of contemporary values because each reaches into Canada’s past while emerging high on the present political agenda. Canadian Political Culture The distinctive characteristics of the Canadian political culture are well- described in the writings of the last several decades. Seymour Martin Lipset, noted and often controversial sociological observor of Canadian political culture, contends that “Canada has been and is a more class-aware, elitist, law

25 IJCS / RIÉC abiding, statist, collectivity-oriented and particularistic (group-oriented) society than the United States” (1990:8). Robert Presthus believes that “Canada’s political culture includes a generally affirmative perspective of interest groups, based largely upon a corporatist theory of society and a mildly positive appreciation of government’s role and legitimacy” (1974:4). Richard Merelman suggests that “...in Canada the culture of political participation is dominantly group-oriented, somewhat dynamic, and divided between a hierarchical model of parliamentary politics and an egalitarian model of dualism involving British and French cultural groups” (1991:11). Adherence to these distinctive cultural norms certainly may structure the nature of generational differences on the three issues of public policy. That is, we picked policy areas that are currently salient, but which also seem to tap into the core areas of the Canadian political culture. Specifically, the issues of native claims and immigration strike at the heart of Canadian corporatism and particularistic group-based views of politics and society. The issue of forest management policy may reflect conflict over the Canadian value of collective decisions about a resource that many consider to be a public good. As noted below, these issues also are directly relevant to the central dimensions of post- industrial change and its value effects. Post-industrial Value Change Shared support for core elements of the Canadian political culture would act to minimize generational differences on issues of public policy. At the same time, a number of observors have commented on fundamental changes in the political and social world of modern democracies that have acted to separate the policy positions of younger and older generations. Environmentalism, civil rights for minorities and women, peace movements, anti-nuclear attitudes, greater openness and access to the political process—these are said to characterize individuals with political values produced by post-industrial change. These political values are said to have grown out of the peace, prosperity and technological changes of the post-industrial era. University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart, the leading contemporary exponent of this view, has suggested that because many in the younger generations no longer had to worry about threats to economic and physical security, the peace and prosperity of the “new politics” period produced commitments to “postmaterial” values (those values giving high priority to widespread public participation in political processes and to the protection of freedom of speech) for individuals socialized during that period (1977; 1990). Thus, a potential foundation of generational differences in opinions about issues of public policy in Canada would be one’s relative adherence to these “new politics” values. Indeed, these “new politics” values would seem to have a direct link to the public policy issues under consideration here. One would expect the younger generations—those most likely to be socialized into “new politics” values—to be more likely to support native land claims, to be open to immigration, and to be more protective of the environment in their reaction to issues of timber policy. If so, one then can ascertain whether the political values themselves account for the generational patterns in opinions about those public policy issues.

Data Collection In 1991-92, a mail survey was used to collect public attitudes on issues of public policy, Canadian political culture, and post-industrial political values

26 Generational Differences in the Public’s Policy Preferences in British Columbia among two random samples of one thousand citizens each drawn from two cities in British Columbia. After eliminating non-deliverable mailings and deceased addressees, a response rate of about 43 percent obtained in both cities (the resulting sample sizes ranged from about 275 to 300). The sample addresses were purchased from a commercial market research firm whose data base is built from telephone directories. The two cities in British Columbia are Vancouver and Prince George. Vancouver is the major metropolitan coastal city of the Province, while Prince George is the major interior population center. These two cities should provide an appropriate context for contrasting the relative influence of cultural and post-industrial orientations on generational differences. Vancouver is the modern, worldly city of western Canada in which one would expect the influences of post-industrial society to work most effectively in the socialization of recent generational cohorts. Moreover, it is in Vancouver where immigration is the most salient, with the conflict and controversy engendered by the heightened immigration of Pacific Rim peoples. On the other hand, Prince George, as the more isolated interior city, may be a more likely repository of traditional, Canadian cultural values and a less likely home for “new politics” attitudes. Moreover, because of its location, the issues of native land claims and forest resource management are more likely to be salient to the residents of Prince George. These characteristics of the two cities thus provide the opportunity to observe the impact of contextual effects on the interplay of generational influences and cultural and “new politics” values. For purposes of the subsequent data analysis, the respondents are grouped into three age cohorts or “generations.” These three are: the “younger” generation, which includes those less than forty years of age at the time of the survey; the “middle” aged generation, which includes respondents forty to fifty-five; and, the “older” generation, including those over fifty-five.

Findings Generational Differences The impact of generation on public policy preferences in Vancouver and Prince George is shown in Table 1. The results in that table reveal significant generational differences in both locations. In both Vancouver and Prince George, the older generation is less likely to see forest management issues as particularly serious, although the gap between generations is greater in Vancouver. Likewise, in both locations the older generation is much more likely to come down on the side of economy when posed with a trade-off between the environment and the economy, and more likely to support clear- cutting as a forest management tool. Overall, then, on the public policy issue of timber management we do find a number of generational differences. Moreover, those generational differences appear to be larger and more frequent in Vancouver than in Prince George. Several generational differences also surface in the immigration issue area. In Vancouver, the youngest generation is slightly more likely to see immigration as a serious issue. In Vancouver, contrary to expectations, the youngest generation is more likely to oppose additional immigration and more likely to think that native born residents should have priority in rights. In Prince George it is the middle generation that stands out, being more likely to support additional immigration.

27 IJCS / RIÉC

An important pattern has developed in these first two policy areas. Generational differences in response to these issues are greater in those contexts where the issue is not as salient. That is, immigration is clearly more of an issue in Vancouver than in Prince George, while timber management is more disputatious in Prince George than in Vancouver. One possible explanation is that value-based, generational differences in policy evaluations are more likely to surface in the absence of over-riding cues and information present when all generations are similarly exposed to a highly salient issue. The third issue area with generational differences in policy preferences is native claims. In both cities, the youngest generation is least likely to see the issue as particularly important. Again, contrary to expectations, in both locations the youngest age group is less likely to believe that native claims should be protected and less likely to support additional claims. To this point, then, it is clear that there are a number of important generational differences in individual preferences on important issues of public policy. At the same time, the magnitude and the consistency of those differences depend on the relative salience of the policy area to the particular city in which the respondents reside. The more salient the policy area to the location of the respondents, the less likely is there to be generational differences in attitudes about those policies. The possible explanation is that the relative absence of policy salience requires the respondent to move away from the common experiences shared across generations within the geographic location to a reliance on relevant individual values which are thought to vary more systematically across the generations. The next task then is to attempt to assess the impact of traditional and post-industrial values on generational differences in policy preferences. We begin with a look at the extent to which controlling for “new politics” values diminishes the differences among the generations. If the generational differences in policy preferences stem from generational differences in the prevalence of “new politics” values, controlling for those values should significantly reduce the cross-cohort policy preference disparities. “New Politics” Values If the response to issues of public policy flows out of fundamental and characteristic values relating to political culture, then when people in different generations agree on those cultural orientations the generational differences should be significantly reduced, regardless of the location. To test this proposition, in this section we examine the impact of cultural values on generational differences in policy preferences.

28 Generational Differences in the Public’s Policy Preferences in British Columbia

Table 1

Generational Differences on Policy Issues: Mean Responses to Survey Questions

Prince George Vancouver Young Middle Old Young Middle Old Forest Management Serious Issuea,b 6.15 6.00 5.80 5.73 5.79 4.96 (1=not; 7-most) Environment/Economyb 3.43 3.48 3.85 3.30 3.27 3.82 (1=environment; 7=economy) Clear-cuttinga,b 3.57 3.79 4.56 3.18 3.38 3.74 (1=stop; 7=allow)

Native American Claims Serious Issuea 4.03 4.42 4.40 4.21 4.67 4.57 (1=not; 7=most) Protect Native Rightsb 1.86 2.13 2.82 2.44 3.01 2.85 (1=same; 7=additional) Native Claimsa 3.11 3.13 3.63 3.79 3.89 4.02 (1=fair now; 7=more)

Immigration Serious Issuea 4.43 4.41 4.35 4.91 4.73 4.73 (1=not; 7=most) More Immigration 3.50 3.82 3.60 3.53 3.85 3.97 (1=limit; 7=encourage) Rights of Immigrantsb 3.00 2.68 3.09 2.87 2.79 3.56 (1=same; 7=less) a location differences p£.05; b generational differences p≤.05

The dominant conceptualization of value change in the last thirty years is found in the work of Ronald Inglehart (1977; 1990). Inglehart contends that the younger generations are distinguished by their disproportionate commitment to what he calls “postmaterial” values. Postmaterial values emphasize the right to say what one thinks and to participate in decisions and processes of government. Material values, on the other hand, emphasize stability in the economy and the maintenance of order in the country. Postmaterial values are said to have grown out of the security and prosperity of the l960s and l970s, when most of the younger generation learned and developed their own values. Postmaterial values generally are linked to more

29 IJCS / RIÉC

“liberal” and inclusive kinds of policy positions, such as support for the environment and support for native claims. Thus, controlling for those value preferences of our respondents may significantly alter the impact of generation on policy preferences. The results are shown in Table 2.

Table 2

Generational Differences Controlling for Postmaterial Values: Mean Responses to Survey Questions

POSTMATERIAL VALUE ORIENTATION Materialist Mixed Postmaterialist Forest Management Y*MOYMOYMO Serious Issueb 5.78 6.00 4.90 5.91 5.81 5.28 6.22 6.10 5.69 (1=not; 7-most) Environment/Economya,b 3.61 3.55 3.90 3.34 3.44 3.94 2.93 2.90 3.31 (1=environment; 7=economy) Clear--cuttinga,b 2.83 4.21 5.15 3.49 3.68 4.08 3.41 3.12 3.69 (1=stop; 7=allow)

Native American Claims Serious Issuea,b 4.11 4.52 2.74 3.89 4.34 4.84 4.66 5.08 4.66 (1=not; 7=most) Protect Native Rightsa,b 1.94 2.45 2.16 1.84 2.24 2.75 2.86 3.22 3.75 (1=same; 7=additional) Native Claimsa 3.78 2.59 2.95 3.28 3.29 3.90 3.83 4.38 4.38 (1=fair now; 7=more)

Immigration Serious Issuea 4.00 3.93 3.79 4.53 4.63 4.57 5.03 4.67 5.23 (1=not; 7=most) More Immigration 3.53 4.07 3.89 3.47 3.70 3.82 3.48 4.20 4.19 (1=limit; 7=encourage) Rights of Immigrantsb 2.82 3.40 3.42 2.76 2.88 2.92 3.10 2.20 4.26 (1=same; 7=less) a value differences p≤.05; b generational differences p≤.05 * Y = Young; M = Middle; O = Old

Postmaterial values are measured by the respondents choosing which two of four statements most closely reflect their own priorities. These four value statements are: maintaining order in the country, giving people more say in government, fighting rising prices and protecting freedom of speech. Those

30 Generational Differences in the Public’s Policy Preferences in British Columbia

respondents choosing statements two and four are called postmaterialist, while those picking options one and three are materialist. Other combinations are labeled mixed. It is clear from Table 2 that introducing the control for postmaterial values fails to erase the significant impact of generation on policy preferences. In all three cases dealing with forest management, there are significant differences among the generations. To be sure, value type also makes a difference on the environment/economy trade-off question. On two of the three native claims issues (seriousness and the protection of rights), generational differences remain when controlling for postmaterial values. Even on the third issue, inspection of the table reveals generational differences there as well, but somewhat inconsistently patterned within the different value types. Likewise, on each of the native claims issues, postmaterial value orientation also significantly differentiates the generations. In the immigration issue domain, no overall generational differences remain after the postmaterial value control. However, a close look at the table shows a few generational distinctions—the younger materialists and the younger and middle postmaterialists are less likely than their older counterparts to argue for fewer rights for immigrants than for native born residents. Similar, very weak patterns exist in the findings on whether Canada should allow more immigration. Overall, across the three issue areas, several important findings emerge. First, postmaterial value orientations do independently affect respondents’ opinions about issues of public policy. Second, however, even when taking into account those values, many generational differences in public opinion remain. A second approach to fundamental value change in recent decades was developed by Scott Flanagan (1982). Flanagan believes that an authoritarian- libertarian dimension best captures the nature of recent value changes, with the predominant movement along that dimension from the authoritarian end toward the libertarian pole where there is greater emphasis on individual freedom and independence. We employed Flanagan’s index of libertarian values, which includes fifteen questions (l982). The items in that index are shown in Appendix I. We summed the number of libertarian responses for each respondent, and then trichotomized the resulting distribution of scores into groups: low, medium and high. Table 3 presents the average generational policy preferences within each level of support for libertarian political values. As was the case with postmaterial values, controlling for libertarian value orientations does not eliminate the impact of generation on public policy preferences. To be sure, libertarian value orientation also influences public policy preferences, especially on forest management and Native American issues. Yet, on those two policy areas, in five of the six instances, generational patterns also are significantly different. Even on the immigration issues, within certain of the value groupings there are obvious generational differences, but not always in the same direction for each level of support for libertarian values. Thus, for example, among those with low levels of support for libertarian values, the young cohort is less likely to believe immigration to be a serious issue, but the pattern is reversed for the middle age cohort.

31 IJCS / RIÉC

Table 3

Generational Differences Controlling for Libertarian Values: Mean Responses to Survey Questions

LIBERTARIAN VALUE ORIENTATION

Low Medium High Forest Management Y* M O Y M O Y M O Serious Issuea 5.38 5.61 4.93 6.19 5.96 5.32 5.87 6.13 6.05 (1=not; 7-most) Environment/Economya,b 3.84 3.55 3.93 3.17 3.49 3.86 3.38 3.00 3.32 (1=environment; 7=economy) Clear-cuttinga,b 4.00 4.30 4.70 3.17 3.61 4.04 3.30 2.89 3.95 (1=stop; 7=allow)

Native American Claims Serious Issuea,b 3.84 4.52 4.14 4.06 4.17 4.43 4.28 5.22 5.25 (1=not; 7=most) Protect Native Rightsa,b 1.75 1.83 2.64 2.08 2.33 2.66 2.20 3.29 3.63 (1=same; 7=additional) Native Claimsa,b 3.00 2.78 3.62 3.39 3.17 3.81 3.41 4.58 4.38 (1=fair now; 7=more)

Immigration Serious Issue 3.94 4.59 4.75 4.93 4.52 4.57 4.65 4.38 4.83 (1=not; 7=most) More Immigration 3.63 4.20 3.45 3.41 3.56 4.00 3.54 4.00 3.75 (1=limit; 7=encourage) Rights of Immigrantsb 2.63 3.05 3.36 3.21 2.69 3.16 2.94 2.42 3.38 (1=same; 7=less) a value differences p≤.05; b generational differences p≤.05 * Y = Young; M = Middle; O = Old

Traditional Canadian Culture As noted earlier in the paper, several significant attributes are said to distinguish the Canadian political culture. In particular, especially when compared to the culture of the United States, the Canadian culture is thought to be more supportive of collective political activity and a communitarian orientation to rights (Lipset, 1990), and to be more likely to view society as a collection of groups and politics as a group activity (Presthus, 1974). Our survey contained seven questions that were designed to tap support for these two dimensions of Canadian political culture. A principal components factor analysis of the responses produced two distinct dimensions. The first dimension includes four of the seven items, and has face validity as representing communitarian concerns. The four items measuring support for

32 Generational Differences in the Public’s Policy Preferences in British Columbia communitarianism reflected attitudes about: 1) whether all persons should earn about the same amount; 2) whether the way property should be used should be decided by the community; 3) whether competition is often wasteful and destructive; and 4) whether society is more than a collection of individuals. Each response could be placed on a seven-point scale. For each individual, the responses were summed across the four items. The resulting distribution of individual scores was trichotomized so that each individual was placed in a high, medium or low category of support for communitarian values. A similar process was employed to measure support for the values of particularism. Three questions provided the foundation for the measure: 1) whether interest groups are necessary; 2) whether people of great responsibility should be treated with special respect; and 3) whether some groups should have privileges in some cases. For each individual, responses were summed across the three items and the resulting distribution of individual scores was trichotomized into low, medium and high categories. Controlling for support for communitarian values fails to erase generational differences in public policy preferences. As Table 4 shows, generational differences remain on all three of the forest management items, on two of the three Native American claims questions, and on one of the immigration items. At the same time, in six of the nine cases, there also are significant differences among the individuals at different levels of support for communitarian values. Thus, the measure of support for the putative Canadian communitarian value does distinguish among individuals on a number of important policy opinions. However, that measure is not an acceptable surrogate for generation in accounting for policy preference differences among Canadians.

33 IJCS / RIÉC

Table 4

Generational Differences Controlling for Communitarianism Values: Mean Responses to Survey Questions

COMMUNITARIANISM VALUE ORIENTATION Low Medium High Forest Management Y* M O Y M O Y M O Serious Issueb 5.82 5.82 5.05 6.02 5.89 5.24 6.03 6.08 5.41 (1=not; 7-most) Environment/Economya,b 3.96 3.79 3.98 3.16 3.42 3.60 2.74 2.88 3.88 (1=environment; 7=economy) Clear-cuttinga,b 4.16 4.64 4.64 4.29 4.82 4.83 3.83 4.35 4.48 (1=stop; 7=allow)

Native American Claims Serious Issuea 4.19 4.03 4.20 3.69 4.68 4.48 4.49 4.77 4.96 (1=not; 7=most) Protect Native Rightsa,b 1.95 1.77 2.07 1.95 2.65 2.58 2.64 2.80 4.29 (1=same; 7=additional) Native Claimsa,b 3.02 2.49 3.25 3.24 3.52 3.71 4.26 4.18 4.71 (1=fair now; 7=more)

Immigration Serious Issue 4.82 4.64 4.64 4.29 4.62 4.82 4.83 4.35 4.48 (1=not; 7=most) More Immigrationa 3.86 3.58 3.17 3.10 3.86 3.82 3.63 4.05 4.43 (1=limit; 7=encourage) Rights of Immigrantsb 2.89 2.71 3.27 3.02 2.85 3.21 2.88 2.61 .04 (1=same; 7=less) a value differences p≤.05; b generational differences p≤.05 * Y = Young; M = Middle; O = Old

The measure of support for the values associated with particularism does a little better than the communitarian measure in suppressing the impact of generation on public policy preferences. Nonetheless, as Table 5 reveals, on five of the nine policy questions, there remain significant generational differences—all three of the timber management questions, and one each for the native claims and immigration domains. Even in some of those cases where overall statistical signficance is not attained, important generational differences remain within certain categories of support for particularism. Thus, on the question of the seriousness of native claims, in each particularism level the younger generation is less likely to think of the issues as very serious.

34 Generational Differences in the Public’s Policy Preferences in British Columbia

Table 5

Generational Differences Controlling for Particularism Values: Mean Responses to Survey Questions

PARTICULARISM VALUE ORIENTATION Low Medium High Forest Management Y* M O Y M O Y M O Serious Issueb 5.90 6.10 5.14 6.01 5.84 5.47 5.87 5.92 4.85 (1=not; 7-most) Environment/Economya,b 3.26 3.04 3.63 3.54 3.56 3.86 3.32 3.42 4.06 (1=environment; 7=economy) Clear-cuttinga,b 3.51 3.10 3.55 3.23 3.86 4.29 3.64 3.77 4.21 (1=stop; 7=allow)

Native American Claims Serious Issue 4.08 4.59 4.90 4.28 4.53 4.48 3.83 4.35 4.10 (1=not; 7=most) Protect Native Rightsa,b 2.51 2.85 3.02 2.13 2.40 3.00 1.72 2.13 2.59 (1=same; 7=additional) Native Claimsa 3.54 3.81 4.16 3.23 3.29 3.63 3.51 3.24 3.59 (1=fair now; 7=more)

Immigration Serious Issue 4.49 4.62 4.85 4.43 4.31 4.41 4.98 4.77 4.61 (1=not; 7=most) More Immigration 3.26 3.61 3.57 3.73 3.96 3.74 3.50 3.62 4.16 (1=limit; 7=encourage) Rights of Immigrantsb 2.95 2.76 3.42 2.88 2.50 3.50 3.09 2.92 .65 (1=same; 7=less) a value differences p≤.05; b generational differences p≤.05 * Y = Young; M = Middle; O = Old

The final portion of the analysis integrates all of the independent variables into a single regression analysis predicting each of the nine policy preference items. In addition to cohort and the four value measures, the regression also incorporates locale as a variable. That is, we create a dichotomous, independent variable with residence in Prince George as one value (1) on the measure and residence in Vancouver as a second value (2) on the measure. This allows us to determine if cohort maintains its independent effect on policy preferences while controlling simultaneously for all of the other independent variables. The results of the regression analysis are shown in Table 6.

35 IJCS / RIÉC

Table 6

Regression Analysis Predicting Policy Preferences With Cultural Values, “new politics” Values, Location and Cohort

POLICY PREFERENCES Forest Nature Claims Immigration Serious Envir/ Clear- Serious Rights Claims Serious More Rights Econ cut F 7.2 11.1 7.7 4.4 16.6 14.2 3.5 .34 1.5 Fsig .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .002 ns ns R2 .09 .12 .09 .05 .17 .15 .04 .01 .02 Communalism* .06 -.20c -.09a .11a .25c .27c -.03 .10a .06 Particularism -.09a .13b .12b -.12a -.19c -.12b .04 .04 .00 Locale -.13b -.02 -.06 .01 .13b .11a .11c .03 .05 Libertarianism .16c -.08 -.19c .08 .11a .14a -.04 .02 -.03 Postmaterialism .03 -.16c -.05 .12b .11a .10a .17c .00 -.02 Cohort -.14b .16c .15b .04 .13b .06 .03 .01 .10a a p£.05; b p£.05; c p£.001 * Entry in each cell is the standardized regression coefficient

Even in the context of the simultaneous controls for the other five variables, generational cohort retains a statistically significant impact on five of the nine policy preferences, and on at least one preference from each of the three policy areas. Cohort has the most consistent effect in the forest management policy arena. Perhaps contrary to expectations, the youngest cohort is less likely to think of forest management as a serious issue, more likely to affirm economic values when traded-off against environmental values, and more likely to support clear-cutting as a forest management practice. Similarly, the younger cohorts are less likely to believe that immigrants should have the same rights as native born citizens. Importantly, each of the other variables also has a statistically significant impact on multiple policy preferences. While a detailed discussion of each significant relationship is beyond the scope of the paper, it is important to note that locale does affect four policy preferences while controlling for all of the other variables. Thus, for example, Prince George respondents are more likely to think that forest management is a serious issue, while Vancouver respondents are more likely to think that immigration is a serious issue. In each case, the policy area has a particular salience for the individuals from that locale—forest policy for the natural resource-dependent community of the interior, and immigration policy for the immigrant-rich city of the coast.

Conclusion This paper has investigated the question of whether there are generational differences in the public policy preferences of residents of two cities in British Columbia. The answer to that question clearly is in the affirmative. The generational differences surface in both Vancouver and Prince George,

36 Generational Differences in the Public’s Policy Preferences in British Columbia although the apparent relative salience of issues in the two cities does seem to alter those patterns. In particular, the greater the salience of the issue, the less evident are the generational differences. The significant salience of the issue for a locality may suffuse the environment with sufficient information common to all generations to allow locational self-interest to overwhelm the distinctive values that would separate those generations. The focus on generational differences within a particular society usually points to changes in values across time such that younger generations acquire fundamentally distinct orientations to politics and society. We tried to determine if our observed generational policy differences are the consequence of differences in fundamental value orientations. We looked at two sets of values: the values of postmaterialism and libertarianism which many scholars believe to be the wedge driven between generations across a broad spectrum of democratic societies; and, the values of communitarianism and particularism, which numerous observors identify as distinctively characteristic of Canadian society and politics. Yet, controlling for individual’s positions on these four value dimensions did little to eliminate the generational differences observed in the beginning of the paper. There remain significant generational differences in positions of public policy for which these value dimensions are unable to account. Why might the generations differ on these issues of public policy in ways that are not significantly changed by taking into account either “new politics” or traditional Canadian values? Several tentative answers may be proffered. First, it may be that we have simply failed to identify the appropriate value dimension which simultaneously is associated with these policy questions and disproportionately situated within particular generations. While we have included those values that should be particularly relevant to either the younger generations (postmaterialism and libertarianism) or to the older generations (communitarianism and particularism), their inclusion fails to produce the anticipated effect. Subsequent analyses thus should be directed at identifying alternative value dimensions that may account for these generational patterns. A second possibility is that these particular policy questions are simply not connected in the public mind to fundamental value orientations. They may be so salient and so connected to the day-to-day lives of people that they produce opinions long before they become engaged with fundamental, transnational or nation-specific values. With such political and personal prominence, certain public issues may stand alone, in effect becoming value dimensions in and of themselves. But the objects of those independent beliefs still may be differentially relevant to the different generations, given their variable positions in the social and economic structures, and hence produce wide gaps in the responses of different generations. What is clear is that there are significant generational differences in the policy positions of residents of British Columbia. Regardless of whether those differences stem from fundamental values, or from the idiosyncratic nature of their relationship to the different age groups, it is clear that they will have a long-term impact on the politics of the province. As the younger generations mature and move through the political and social structure, they will gradually change the overall colouring of the province’s public opinion, and with that change produce evolution in public policy itself.

37 IJCS / RIÉC

Notes * The research reported here was funded by the Canadian Embassy, Washington, D.C. The ideas and the views expressed in this paper, however, are entirely those of the authors.

References Flanagan, Scott C. 1982. “Changing Values in Advanced Industrial Societies.” Comparative Political Studies 14:403-444. Inglehart, Ronald. 1977. The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Inglehart, Ronald. 1990. Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jackson, Robert J., Doreen Jackson and Nicholas Baxter-Moore. 1986. Politics in Canada: Culture, Institutions, Behaviour and Public Policy. Scarborough, Ontario: Prentice-Hall. Jennings, M. Kent. 1989. “The Crystallization of Orientations.” Pp. 313-348 in M. Kent Jennings and Jan W. van Deth et al., eds., Continuities in Political Action. New York: Walter De Gruyter. Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1990. Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States. New York: Routeledge. Merelman, Richard M. 1991. Partial Visions: Culture and Politics in Britain, Canada and the United States. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Nevitte, Neil. 1991. “North American Continental Integration and Value Change: Cross- National Evidence.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 25-September 1, 1991. Washington, D.C. Presthus, Robert. 1974. Elites in the Policy Process. London: Cambridge University Press. van Deth, Jan W., and M. Kent Jennings. 1989. “Introduction.” Pp. 3-22 in M. Kent Jennings and Jan W. van Deth et al., eds., Continuities in Political Action. New York: Walter de Gruyter. Westell, Anthony. 1991. “The Weakening of Canadian Culture.” The American Review of Canadian Studies 21:263-268.

Appendix I The authoritarian-libertarian value orientation index is based on responses to whether too much, about right or not enough emphasis is given to each of the concerns listed below. The “libertarian” response is indicated in parenthesis. 1. Increasing benefits for the disadvantaged (too little). 2. Protecting homosexuals from discrimination (too little). 3. Personal freedom (too little). 4. Seeking personal fulfillment (too little). 5. Being open-minded to new ideas (too little). 6. Sexual freedom and abortion (too little). 7. Improving the environment and quality of life (too little). 8. Patriotism and loyalty to one’s country (too much). 9. Providing for strong defense forces (too much). 10. Respect for authority (too much). 11. Preserving traditional morals/values (too much). 12. Following custom and the expectations of one’s neighbours (too much). 13. Removing pornography from the marketplace (too much). 14. Having deep religious faith (too much). 15. Teaching children good manners and obedience (too much).

38 Victor Thiessen and E. Dianne Looker

Generation, Gender and Class Perspectives on Work

Abstract This paper examines the culture of youth’s work expectations. These are contrasted with the images they have of their parents’ work world, as well as their parents’ own descriptions. A generational-linked sampling design was employed, consisting of 1,200 Canadian 17-year-old adolescents and their parents. We document a homogenization of youth’s expected work culture. Intrinsic to this homogenization process is a significant blurring of class and gender typification. Also implied (and observed) is a process whereby working-class youths distance themselves from their father’s work, while middle-class sons and daughters pattern their expectations after their father’s work. Finally, the attributed generation gap in work culture for both working and middle class, and among both sons and daughters, is substantially greater than the experiential generation gap.

Résumé Les auteurs de cette étude examinent les attentes des jeunes en ce qui a trait au travail. Ces attentes sont comparées à l’image qu’ont les jeunes du travail de leurs parents et à la description des parents de leur propre travail. Les auteurs utilisent un échantillon de parents-enfants canadiens composé de 1200 adolescentes et adolescents âgés de 17 ans et de leurs parents. L’article repère une homogénéisation auprès des jeunes face à leurs visées de carrière. Ce processus d’homogénéisation s’accompagne d’un mélange considérable des types basés sur la classe et sur le sexe. On y retrouve également un processus par lequel les jeunes de la classe ouvrière se distancient du travail de leurs pères, tandis que les garçons et filles de la classe moyenne façonnent leurs attentes selon le travail de leurs pères. Enfin, l’écart que l’on attribue entre les deux générations pour ce qui est du travail sur le plan des classes ouvrière et moyenne, et selon le sexe des jeunes dépasse de beaucoup l’écart basé sur l’expérience.

Canadian youth face a work future radically different from that of their parents. In this paper we will first sketch the major changes in the work opportunity structure. This brief description will be followed by a review of the literature, focusing especially on the work expectations of youth and their relationship to work experiences of the parents. Then we present our data, which contains images of work of adolescents and their parents. This data will permit an assessment of the fit between the culture of work expectations and the structure of work opportunities. It will also contribute a Canadian perspective on the debates detailed in the literature review.

International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue internationale d’études canadiennes Special issue / Numéro hors série, Winter/hiver 1993 IJCS / RIÉC

The Work Opportunity Structure This past generation witnessed deep structural changes in the nature of the paid labour market. In this respect Canada shares a number of features with other industrialized countries. These characteristics include a marked decline, both in relative and in absolute terms, of jobs in the manufacturing sector. Capital’s response to each downturn in the economy is to displace even more workers with modern technology, and to relocate production to settings where labour costs are relatively low. The end result is the shrinking of traditional blue collar jobs in Canada. At the same time, the past generation or so has seen a doubling of the proportion of married women in the labour market. A division of labour in the nuclear family between homemaker and breadwinner is no longer tenable. Young men are competing with young women on arguably more equal terms for scarce jobs. One immediate corollary of these trends is the spectre of long-term unemployment and under-employment. One in five youths under the age of 25 is currently unemployed; and the percentage of part-time jobs has doubled in the past two decades (Macleans, August 2, 1993:35). Jobs are also increasingly polarized between well-paying professional type of work and low-wage, dead-end service type work—between the yuppies and the McJobs. Although the latter are more numerous than the former, they are also increasingly casualized. Krahn (1991:23) reports that part-time jobs increased at a rate four times that of full-time work in Canada between 1977 and 1986. With the number of jobs in between these two extremes disappearing, the stakes surrounding job entry are higher than ever. To obtain and retain the good jobs will increasingly require flexible skills and general problem-solving abilities, including information processing and organizational skills. Even a university education may not be sufficient preparation. Among the industrialized nations, Canada’s continued role as a resource hinterland exacerbates uncertainties. The vagaries of foreign markets are such that boom-and-bust cycles are virtually synonymous with reliance on the primary sector. The resource sector has been the backbone of rural Canada. As Osberg, Wien, and Grude (forthcoming) note, “the full-time employment of male breadwinners in forestry, fishing, mining and agriculture was the economic basis on which successive generations of rural Canadians were raised. In Nova Scotia, as elsewhere in Canada, the most crucial problem facing rural areas today is the large scale disappearance of such traditional jobs.” This situation introduces a regional/geographic aspect to the transformation of the opportunity structure. Jobs in the expanding service sector are increasingly concentrated in urban centres. Consequently the rural areas are witnessing the disappearance of their traditional resource sector jobs without obtaining the benefit of the general increase in service-sector jobs. How do these trends intrude on the consciousness of adult Canadians? And are they reflected in the job and career expectations of their children? The main interest of this paper centres on generational differences in the cognitive maps of the world of work. How do parents describe their work world? What does the parents’ work world look like through the eyes of their children? And how do these images relate to what these children expect for their own near future?

40 Generation, Gender and Class Perspectives on Work

When assessing these generational similarities and differences, it is important to be mindful of gender and class variations in these images. That is, we will ascertain the extent to which men’s cognitive profiles of their work is different from that of women’s and the extent to which social classes differ in their views about men’s and women’s occupations.

Literature Review Class and gender, along with race/ethnicity and region, arguably constitute the key dimensions which condition work experiences. Most scholars accord an essential role to parents for creating generational continuity along the class dimension, and to the family and other patriarchal institutions for perpetuating gendered work roles. Kohn’s (1969) pioneering work on the relationship between social class and work values deeply appreciated the fundamental difference in work processes between the middle and the working class. He recognized that control over the work process and the conditions of work was key. Consequently he expected working-class parents to inculcate values of obedience and conformity in their children which would realistically prepare them for their work conditions. Middle-class parents, in contrast, would emphasize and reward autonomy. From this perspective, important parental class differences in images of work would be expected. Additionally, to the extent that parents successfully socialize their children, substantial class differences in youths’ expectations of work could also be expected. Bowles and Gintis (1976:143) express the impact of parents this way: “There is a tendency for families to reproduce in their offspring not only a consciousness tailored to the objective nature of the work world, but to prepare them for economic positions roughly comparable to their own.” Given the generational shifts in occupational structure, how apparent are they to the parents and the youth? Weis (1990:151) concludes, on the basis of her case study of a working-class community in the United States, that “[p]arents understand clearly that the jobs in which they participated upon leaving high school are no longer available. They have lived through de-industrialization and stress to their children that education is the only way to obtain stable employment.” In her case study, the town’s major employer had closed down, providing concrete evidence of de-industrialization. It remains an open question as to what extent parents in our Canadian samples have lived through, or are aware of, de-industrialization. Braverman’s (1974) deskilling thesis can also be seen as predicting a homogenization of work processes, with increasing routinization in all work, making it less likely that there would be class differences in how boring, difficult or rewarding work is experienced to be. Willis (1977:127) echoes this view: “More than ever today the concrete forms of most jobs are converging into standard forms. They require very little skill or opportunities for intrinsic satisfaction.” If working-class parents understand the eclipse in their traditional jobs, then the basis of Kohn’s expectation of class-specific values would be removed. Working-class parents should describe their work environment quite differently from how middle-class parents describe theirs. Their respective offspring, however, should describe their expected work in quite similar terms.

41 IJCS / RIÉC

That women’s work is treated differently from men’s work constitutes a truism that hardly needs to be pointed out: it is usually paid less, given less respect, and considered to be less important to the community. Even where women have managed to be represented in traditionally male occupations, they earn less and they earn less prestige. Thus, one would expect mothers to describe their work in substantially different terms than fathers. At the same time, the feminist movement has had some success in addressing these inequities and the mass media increasingly views these as mainstream issues rather than marginalized issues of an unreasonable fringe. The gains made by the women’s movement should be reaped by the young generation, and would, in the first instance, be reflected in the images of work young women and men hold. Adolescent women’s images of their future work should be comparable to the expectations of their male counterparts. Current studies reveal gender patterns at variance with earlier ones. Thus, Weis (1990:55) in her ethnographic study of working-class youth remarks that: “The most striking point about female identity ...is that there is, unlike the case in numerous previous studies, little evidence of a marginalized wage labour identity. These girls have, in fact, made the obtaining of wage labour a primary rather than a secondary goal.” Boys’ identities continued to be defined in terms of “other than” feminine. That is, they define their aspirations and futures as distinct from those of girls and women. In this respect, Weis’ boys of the late 1980s show no change from Willis’ lads of the early 1970s. But in another respect they were different: Weis found no evidence of glorification of manual work that so pervaded Willis’ description of working-class boys. Unfortunately both studies are ethnographic accounts of single communities that differ not only temporally but also culturally (Weis studied a U.S. community; Willis U.K.). Thus, it is perilous to conclude that changes have occurred. At the same time, both studies found that working-class boys distanced themselves from the feminine. In a recent Canadian study of working-class male culture, Dunk (1991) reports that “the Boys” in his Thunder Bay study classified work as manual or mental, and devalued the latter as devoid of practical abilities. They were also unabashedly sexist. How might such gender distancing manifest itself in the teen-aged men in the sample used here? Perhaps they would see little similarity between the attributes of the jobs they expect and those they see as characterizing their mother’s work. The manual/mental distinction and the class-linked glorifying of the one and devaluing of the other seems to be a particularly pronounced part of male identity. Although this distinction is also a relevant class distinction for women’s work, it does not appear to be as clear, neither does it play as prominent a role, in women’s identity. For these reasons, stronger class-linked images of work among men than among women can be expected. The approach in this paper focuses more on sex typing than on gender segregation. What are the attributes associated with women’s work and men’s work? Bradley (1989:9), referring to the work of Game and Pringle (1983), describes the sex typification this way: “[Woman’s work] is usually indoor work, considered to be ‘lighter’ than men’s work; it is clean, safe, physically undemanding, often repetitive and considered boring, requires dexterity rather than ‘skill’....By contrast, if we visualize typical men’s work, we tend to

42 Generation, Gender and Class Perspectives on Work

evoke images of the outdoors, of strength and physicality; men’s work may be heavy, dirty, dangerous....It is frequently highly technical, based on mechanical knowledge or scientific expertise; at the highest level it requires characteristics of creativity, innovation, intelligence, responsibility, authority and power.” Since our study taps many of these sex typification, we would expect fairly large differences between the descriptions of mothers and fathers, and between sons and daughters. In light of Weis’ (1990) description of young women’s expectations for entering non-traditional occupations, we might hazard that the expectations of sons and daughters will be less sex-typed than the reports of their parents. At the same time, it is to be remembered that we are dealing with the meaning the work has for mothers and fathers, and the expected work attributes sons and daughters hold, regardless of how realistic or unrealistic, how accurately or inaccurately they might mirror actual work processes. One can imagine a variety of “coping strategies” that might operate universally among men and women, the working class and the middle class, youths and their parents, to distort images of their own work, permitting them to face anew each days work, to see it as meaningful, interesting, important to society and worthy of respect. Bradley’s (1989:7) quote of Ruth Wills (Lays of Lowly Life, 1861), a Leicester working woman and poet, captures this component: “No more delightful wandering.... Henceforth it must be work, woman’s work, dreary and monotonous sometimes, yet pleasant withal, as it rewarded me with the proud consciousness that I was not only able to eat my daily bread but earn it.” These quotes suggest patterned actor-observer differences in perception. Specifically, it could be expected that teenagers view their parents’ jobs in a less rosy light than the parents do. Examples of youthful optimism abound. Such optimism flourishes even when it has little objective basis. Thus, Tanner (1991) in a study of high-school drop outs in Edmonton, Alberta notes that many of them nevertheless have high expectations for their work futures.

Data and Measurements Sampling Design Analyses of generational differences is made less hazardous if the sampling design links the generations. A linked design, where respondents and their parents are included, for example, “holds constant” all socio-economic factors that might otherwise be differentially distributed between generations due to sampling fluctuations. Such a design also creates a direct way of measuring the concept of generations. Our design chose 17-year-old adolescents and their parents. Although mother-father contrasts are an important dimension of this study, single-parent families were included to make the sample more representative of youth generally. School boards were approached to get the names of 17 year old adolescents: those currently enroled, those who had left without completing their secondary school certificate, and those who had graduated. In depth, face to face interviews (one and a half to two hours in length) were conducted with the youth, and questionnaires were given to their parent(s). Three sampling sites were included: Hamilton, Ontario (to permit

43 IJCS / RIÉC comparisons with a study conducted there in 1975), Halifax, Nova Scotia, (to permit an assessment of regional variation) and rural Nova Scotia (to permit an evaluation of rural-urban differences), with a target of 400 youths (and their parents) from each of these three sites1. The youth response rates were: Hamilton, 78%; Halifax, 71%; rural Nova Scotia, 72%. Adjusting for parent- absent homes, the parental response rates were 77% and 70% for mothers and fathers, respectively. The sample contained 1,206 youths (567 sons, 639 daughters). With respect to the topic of images of work, information was ascertained for just under 1,200 youths, 600 fathers, and 800 mothers. Images of Work Our concern is not with specific occupations, nor even with their prestige or status; rather, it is how work is experienced along a multiplicity of descriptive/evaluative dimensions. This is done out of our belief that the specific job or occupation is much less relevant than the general job characteristic. Willis (1977:101) reaches the same conclusion with respect to the experiences of his working-class `lads’: “The central subjective realisation of the commonality of modern labour and relative indifference to its particular embodiment, is one of the most basic things that `the lads’ truly learn at the heart of their culture...” Images of work were obtained through responses to a battery of 16 possible job attributes. These were, in the order they were given, as follows: Dangerous, Boring, Secure, Tiring, Respected, High pressure, Dirty, Good pay, Routine, Important to the community, Difficult, Has flexible hours, Rewarding, Has a lot of power, Has long hours, Enjoyable. Teenagers were asked to rate the most recent job of their father and mother, as well as their own expected job, on these attributes. The precise wording for obtaining these images was: Mother’s and Father’s Job: (IF MOTHER/FATHER NEVER WORKED FOR PAY, OMIT AND CHECK HERE ) Using the categories on card 1, how much do each of the following describe how you would see your mother’s/father’s job for pay or profit? (HER/HIS MOST RECENT JOB) Expected Job: Using the categories on card 1, how would you describe your expected job, which is: ______[WRITE IN FROM EARLIER RESPONSES] IF RESPONDENT HAS NO IDEA WHAT JOB HE/SHE WILL END UP IN, CHECK HERE AND OMIT. The possible response categories (contained in card 1) were: “Very”, “Somewhat”, “Not very”, and “Not at all” (A “don’t know” response was coded as such, as well as a “not ascertained” outcome). The mother and the father of the teenager provided images only for their own job “for pay or profit.”2

44 Generation, Gender and Class Perspectives on Work

Social class In any given setting, a variety of approaches can be taken to capture the concept of social class. Given our purpose, several difficulties confront us. First, on what basis—education, income, occupation, or subjective class identity— should class be defined. We chose occupation, since it seemed that images of work would be most clearly related to what work is being done. Parental occupation was obtained through the following question: “We would like to know your job (for pay or profit)—your main job if you have more than one. IF YOU ARE CURRENTLY NOT WORKING OR IF YOU ARE RETIRED, please describe your usual job. It would help us if you would provide a complete occupational title.” To obtain fuller information, seven examples of complete versus incomplete occupational titles were listed. These occupational titles were converted into the four-digit Canadian Classification and Dictionary of Occupations (CCDO) 1971 (Canada. Manpower and Employment, 1974) codes. The adolescents were also asked about their parents’ occupations. To maximize the number of usable cases, their information was substituted whenever this information was not available from the parents themselves. Second, on what basis should the occupational titles be collapsed into social classes. Defensible arguments can be made for a blue collar-white collar distinction, resting, as it does, on the theoretically important mental/manual criterion. However, Dunk (1991:138) points out that this distinction is misleading since “there are many people who do not wear blue collars to work, yet whose work involves few skills, carries little prestige, and is relatively poorly paid.” Women and youth are disproportionately represented here. Additionally, the aspect of work that seemed most important to us, based on the pioneering work of Kohn (1969) was the extent of control over one’s own work processes. For these reasons, the CCDO codes were collapsed into the Pineo, Porter, and McRoberts (1977) occupational classification scheme. This classification was then dichotomized into working and middle class. We considered an occupation as middle class if it enjoyed substantial autonomy in the work process. This would include the self-employed, professionals and semi-professionals, management and supervisory positions (the first six occupational classes in Table 1). Third, since our unit of analysis is the familial dyad/triad composed of parent(s) and adolescent child, we need to assign a social-class position to the family, a task more difficult than assigning a class position to an individual. Fortunately in two-thirds (68 percent) of our families, the social class position on the basis of the father’s occupation is identical to the one that would be obtained if the mother’s occupation had been used. On distributional grounds (more fathers than mothers were currently in the paid labour market, and the split between working and middle class was somewhat more even), we chose to classify the families on the basis of the father’s occupation. The distribution of occupational positions of both parents is given in Table 1.

45 IJCS / RIÉC

Table 1

Distribution of Parents’ Occupation

Occupational Fathers* Mothers* Classification % N % N

Middle Class Self-Employed Professionals 3 37 0 4 High Level Management 6 65 2 26 Employed Professionals 12 133 13 142 Technical, Semi-Professionals 5 56 13 142 Middle Management, Small Business 9 100 5 52 Supervisors 4 45 3 38

Working Class Foreman 5 57 0 3 Skilled Clerk, Sales/Service 3 33 15 169 Skilled Crafts, Trades 18 201 2 17 Farm Owners, Operators 1 8 0 1 Semi-Skilled Clerk, Sales Service 4 46 23 251 Semi-Skilled, Skilled Crafts, Service 14 158 5 59 Unskilled Clerk, Sales, Service 2 20 7 75 Unskilled Labour 13 145 12 131 Farm Labour 1 7 0 2

Total 100 1111 100 1112

* The occupational classifications of 98 fathers and 97 mothers were not ascertained.

Hypotheses A review of the literature suggests a number of working hypotheses: 1. Prevailing class and gender myths, stereotypes, and actualities will manifest themselves in the various characterizations of the work domains. Class With respect to class differences, it would be expected that working class will be more likely than the middle class to describe their work as: dangerous, boring, tiring, dirty, and routine. These attributes reflect the more manual nature of their work. Conversely, we hypothesize that the middle class will be more likely than the working class to describe work as: secure, respected, pressured, well paying, important to the community, difficult, with flexible but long hours, rewarding, having greater power, and enjoyable. Most, but not all, of these attributes are positive ones, indicative of the privileged position of the middle class. High pressure, difficulty, and long hours are the

46 Generation, Gender and Class Perspectives on Work

stereotypical costs associated with the more intellectual (as opposed to manual) nature of middle-class work. Gender The attributes we expect men more than women to endorse as features of their own work are: dangerous, secure, tiring, respected, pressured, dirty, well paying, of importance to the community, difficult, rewarding, powerful, long hours, and enjoyable. Vice versa, women more than men are expected to state that their job is: boring, routine, and has flexible hours. 2. Gender moderation of class differences. Class differences are experienced and attributed primarily to men’s work. The differences between working- and middle-class mothers’ descriptions of their work for pay will be smaller than the corresponding descriptions of working- and middle-class fathers. 3. Homogenization of work expectations. Class homogenization. Class differences in the work attributes adolescents expect will be minimal. Gender homogenization. Gender differences in the work attributes adolescents expect will be less than those manifest in their parents’ generation. 4. Self-enhancement. Adolescents will perceive parents’ work in less positive terms than parents describe their work, reflecting a difference between actor and observer perspectives. 5. Adolescent optimism. The younger generation expects their own work world to be better than their parents’ work. This is also a form of self-enhancement.

Findings Quartile analysis A preliminary task is to provide the respondents’ cognitive map of women’s and men’s work. How do various family members describe the world of paid work? What terms do they use to describe what does not characterize their work? A first way of approaching these questions is to determine which terms were most, and least, frequently chosen as very descriptive of their work domain. Table 2 provides this information for mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters, separately for working- and middle-class families, in the form of the top quartiles of most and least descriptive attributes. The first two rows of Table 2 show that mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters of both the working- and the middle-class consider the jobs of both parents as important to the community and secure. These are the only two attributes that were in the top quartile in all family members’ ratings. Note that, with the exception of working-class fathers, all family members regard their own job (or, in the case of adolescents, the job they expect to have) as both enjoyable

47 IJCS / RIÉC and rewarding. At the same time, neither working- nor middle- class sons or daughters perceive either parent’s paid work as particularly enjoyable or rewarding. It is the first indication of distinct differences in generational perspectives. These differences are of a kind which support the self- enhancement thesis: parents evaluate their own work more positively than their children do3. In short, with the exception of working-class fathers, all gender, generational, and class groups see their own or their expected work in primarily positive terms. “Good pay” has an interesting pattern that deserves some comment. Middle- class sons and daughters perceive their father’s work as well paying, but middle-class fathers do not rate their pay this way. In contrast, working-class fathers feel their own pay is relatively good, but their children don’t see it that way. This difference suggests the importance of knowing the comparison group for personal assessments. It is unlikely that working-class fathers are comparing their pay with that of middle-class fathers. They likely evaluate their pay relative to others with similar educational achievements and managerial responsibilities. With such a comparison group, they consider their pay to be quite attractive. In the school context, middle-class children can see that their fathers likely make more money than the fathers of working-class children; hence they consider good pay to be a defining feature of their father’s work. Note also that money seems to be more important for adolescent men than for adolescent women, since both the middle-class and the working-class young males expect well-paying jobs, but their female counterparts do not. Turning to what least characterizes the various work domains, there is substantial consensus that it is neither dangerous nor dirty; all groups consider dangerousness as one of the least descriptive attributes of all work domains, and only working-class fathers and their daughters consider his work dirty. Adolescents of both classes and sexes expect work not to be boring, and it is not experienced as boring by their parents. Congruent with both the reality and the stereotype of women’s work, the absence of power features in both middle- and working-class mothers’ experiences (and their children’s perception) of their work. This lack of power is also experienced by the working-class fathers. The work of fathers is neither perceived nor experienced as having flexible hours, although the middle-class fathers do not consider flexible hours as one of the least descriptive attributes. Finally, working-class children describe their mother’s work as not at all routine (although the mothers themselves do not hold this view). In short, there is substantial overlap in the structure of the work domains. Attributes situated in the top quartile in one domain are likely to be in the top quartile of other domains or from the perspective of other groups. Vice versa, those found in the bottom quartile in one domain are also likely to share that position with the other domains. Self-enhancement and Youth Optimism The quartile comparisons have revealed substantial similarities in the experienced, perceived, and anticipated work characteristics. Despite such overall similarity, meaningful and important differences between generation, gender, and class may nevertheless exist in the actual percentages endorsing certain job attributes. By comparing quartiles, we have ignored possible differences in the absolute judgements of women’s and men’s work. We focus now on the absolute percentages themselves.

48 Generation, Gender and Class Perspectives on Work

Table 2

“Very descriptive” and “Not at all descriptive” Response Quartiles Across Work Domains

*W M W M W M W M W M W M W M W M M M S S D D F F S S D D S S D D M M M M M M F F F F F F X X X X

VERY DESCRIPTIVE

Community Importance • •••••••••••• •• Secure • •••••••••••• Enjoy • • • •••• Reward • • • •••• Tiring •••• • • Respect • • • • • • Routine •••• • Pay • • • • • Dirty • • • Long Hours •

NOT AT ALL DESCRIPTIVE

Danger • ••••••••••••••• Dirty • ••••• ••• ••••• Boring • • ••••••••••• Power • •••••• • • Flexible Hours • • • ••••• • Routine • • •

*KEY: 1st character refers to social class: W=Working class, M=Middle class 2nd character refers to respondent: M=Mother, S=Son, D=Daughter, F=Father 3rd character refers to work domain: M=Mother’s, F=Father’s, X=Expected

49 IJCS / RIÉC

Supporting our self-enhancement thesis, the absolute percentages show that teenagers describe their mothers’ work in substantially less glowing terms than the mothers themselves. They are more likely to describe it as boring, fatiguing, routine and less likely to describe it as respected, important to the community, rewarding, or enjoyable (see Appendix Table A1). Although daughters descriptions are quite similar to sons, the two largest differences are that daughters see their mothers’ jobs as more enjoyable and more rewarding. This perception could facilitate sex-specific role modelling and reinforce male devaluation of things feminine. Generation and gender patterns are somewhat more complex with respect to men’s work. Both sons and daughters see their fathers’ job as substantially less rewarding or enjoyable, and more fatiguing, dirty and routine than he describes it. This is congruent with our hypothesis. Yet they are as likely as the fathers themselves to describe his work as respected, well paying and important to the community. A gender effect exists here as well: daughters, more likely than sons, see their dad’s work as fatiguing, stressful and dirty. Indeed, even on the other negative attributes, daughters consistently tend to describe their father’s job more negatively than sons do. Despite such a negative view, they are as likely as sons to see the father’s job as respected, rewarding, enjoyable, and of importance to the community Parental Class Work Cultures Table 3 presents the class differences revealed in parents’ descriptions of their work, and in sons’ and daughters’ perception of the work attributes characterizing their parents’ work. Several patterns are clear. First, the expected class differences exist. They exist in parents’ descriptions of their work, and, in adolescents’ perception of their parents’ work. Of the 96 comparisons contained in Table 3, only nine are in the wrong direction, and, in only one instance, is the reversal by as much as five percent. These figures constitute strong support that class differences in work characteristics, are, on the whole, as expected. Gender Moderation of Class A second pattern in Table 3 supports our hypothesis that the class differences will be stronger for men’s than for women’s work. Specifically, in 42 of the 48 relevant comparisons, the class difference with respect to father’s work exceeds the class difference reported for mother’s work.

50 Generation, Gender and Class Perspectives on Work

Table 3

Class differences in image of parent’s work (Percentage difference between working and middle class)

Teen’s Perception of Attribute Mother’s Father’s Mother’s Work Father’s Work Work Work Son Daughter Son Daughter Working Class Exceeds Middle Class Danger -1a 16 3 1 13 20 Boring 3 4 9 5 2 10 Tiring 4 7 4 4 16 22 Dirty 6 30 2 6 33 17 Routine 16 18 4 5 9 17

Middle Class Exceeds Working Class Community Importance 2 6 7 11 2 7 Secure 13 14 1 6 13 20 Pay -2a 35-1a 11 6 Respect 2 14 0 -2a 21 27 High Pressure 6 7 3 2 9 14 Difficult 1 14 2 3 4 6 Flexible Hours 2 6 3 -1a 2-5a Rewarding 15 26 7 12 20 20 Power -2a 2-2a-2a 10 6 Long Hours 0 1 6 2 3 6 Enjoy 13 21 5 7 12 14

Notes: a A minus sign in front of any percentage indicates that the class difference is opposite to that hypothesized.

Homogenization of youth’s expected work profiles As mentioned in the discussion of the Canadian opportunity structure, work is increasingly polarized into good jobs and bad jobs. The high-school generation can expect their work environment to be even more varied in this respect than that of their parents’ generation. In contrast to this trend, the youth’s culture of work expectation is remarkably homogenous. One way of summarizing this homogeneity consists in comparing the standard deviation of adolescents’ expectations with the comparable attributes they perceive in their parents’ work. To be compatible with the likely opportunity structure, the standard deviations of youth’s expected work attributes should exceed those perceived to characterize the parental generation. The predominant pattern is just the opposite. In 29 of the 32 possible comparisons (16 attributes compared with perceptions of both parents), the standard deviation of youth’s expected work attributes was less than the standard deviation of the corresponding

51 IJCS / RIÉC attribute they perceived in their parents’ work (data not shown). In brief, youth expect a common work environment. The large number of descriptive phrases (16), the contrast between the three task domains (mother’s occupation, father’s occupation, and teenager’s expected occupation), and the necessity of distinguishing between the working and middle classes, requires additional condensing techniques. Pearson correlation coefficients between generation/class/sex group profiles is one possible way to condense such a wealth of comparative information. Here, the cases represent the 16 descriptive words/phrases, and the variables, the different groups. The input data consisted of the percentage of each respondent category who chose “very descriptive” as their response4. This method allows for a summary of the extent of similarity in the work domains between the different generations, classes, and sexes. The numbers in the remainder of the paper refer to such correlation coefficients. Good and bad jobs will likely be distributed on the basis of sex (men obtaining the better jobs) and class (working-class youth will disproportionately end up with the poor jobs). The profiles of youth’s work expectations do not reflect this observation at all. The attributes of work young people expect in their job is neither gendered or class-specific. That is, working-class males’ hierarchy of expected job attributes does not differ from those of middle-class males. The same holds for the middle-class young women and their working-class counterparts. Indeed, the expectations of working-class males closely resemble those of middle- class females and, analogously, the expectations of working-class females are practically the same as those of middle-class males. (The Pearson correlation coefficients for all of the above comparisons exceed 0.93.) Attributed Generational Gap Having established the pervasive homogenization of youth’s expected work culture, the question of how their expected work culture compares with images of their parents’ work must be examined. Three patterns emerge: a) young people expect their work experience to be better than their parents, b) middle- class fathers represent work-role models, and c) working-class fathers are perceived to hold undesirable work. Elsewhere we documented young people’s high expectations with regard to their future work (Looker and Thiessen 1993). Although they may not expect to be upwardly mobile, they expect better work than that of their parents in many of the work attributes. Turning to the work profiles, it is clear that middle-class males essentially serve as work-role models. That is, the hierarchy of work characteristics attributed to middle-class male jobs is moderately compatible with youth’s expectations. It is not particularly surprising that middle-class boys expect the structure of their work to share features with that of their fathers’ generation. What surprises perhaps more is that middle-class daughters also aspire to the same middle-class male work culture. Even more surprising is that the working- class youth of both sexes expect their work environment to be similar to how middle-class youth describe their parents’ work. Youth’s expectations are not gendered when working-class to middle-class comparisons are made. That is, working-class males’ expectations are equally compatible with middle-class

52 Generation, Gender and Class Perspectives on Work teens’ descriptions of the work of their mothers as their fathers. The same conclusion holds with respect to working-class females expectations. These similarities suggest that working-class youth simply aspire to middle-class work, regardless of gender attributes (correlation coefficients range between 0.66 and 0.73 for all sex/class youth profile comparisons with attributed middle-class fathers’ work profile.) In contrast, middle-class youth of both sexes clearly expect a work environment closer to their perception of the father’s work than that of the mother’s. The compatibility with images of mother’s job is decidedly lower, with correlations of 0.55 and 0.34 for daughters and sons, respectively. If the work of middle-class fathers is perceived as most compatible with adolescents’ expectations, that of the working-class fathers is judged as least compatible. Neither sons nor daughters expect their own job to be similar to how they perceive the father’s job (correlation coefficients are 0.20 or lower). This expectation confirms what Sennet and Cobb (1973) have termed the “hidden injuries of class.” Clearly, working-class children recognize that they must distance themselves from their parents, particularly their fathers. In this process they devalue the foundation for his identity. Experiential Generational Similarity The work profiles in the parental generation, as experienced by them, is remarkably compatible with the expected work culture of their offspring. In the middle class, the structure of job characteristics obtained from fathers’ reports resembles the expected job characteristics of both sons and daughters. The descriptions mothers give of their job is similarly compatible with the expected job characteristics of both sons and daughters. The relevant correlation coefficients range between 0.84 and 0.94, and, in all comparisons, are greater than the corresponding figures for the attributed generational similarity. In the working class, how parents describe their own job also compares with the expected job characteristics of their children, but less so for fathers’ than for mothers’ descriptions. How mothers describe their own work is compatible with the expected job attributes of sons and daughters (coefficients of 0.75 and 0.88, respectively). How fathers describe their own work is less compatible with the expectations of both sons and daughters (coefficients of 0.69 and 0.62, respectively). Thus for both sons and daughters, in both working class and middle class, with respect to the work of both mothers and fathers, the attributed generational gap in work culture far exceeds the experienced generational gap. Gender Typing From a methodological point of view, it is gratifying to note that the profile of fathers’ jobs through the eyes of their sons is virtually identical to that obtained through the daughters’ eyes. This is true in both working- and middle-class families. (Pearson correlation coefficients range between 0.95 and 0.97). Despite such overwhelming similarity, the two views are not interchangeable; they have discernibly different relations with teenagers’ own expected job characteristics. Thus, the descriptions daughters provide of their expected job is more compatible with their own descriptions of mothers’ job than it is with sons descriptions of their mother’s job. In the middle class, these coefficients are 0.55 and 0.38 for daughters and sons reports, respectively; in the working

53 IJCS / RIÉC class, 0.38 and 0.19 for daughters and sons reports, respectively. For the sons, the same pattern holds only in the working class. Here the expectations they have for their own job is more compatible with their description of their fathers’ jobs than it is with daughters’ descriptions of the father’s job (Pearson coefficient of 0.20 with the sons’ perceptions versus 0.02 with the daughters’ perceptions). There is no such difference in the middle class, where both sons’ and daughters’ reports of father’s job characteristics have identical coefficients of 0.71 with sons expectations. An analogous interesting pattern is found with respect to opposite-sex parent. Here in both classes the young men describe the mother’s job in such a way that it distances it more from their own expected job characteristics than do the descriptions that the young women provide of the mother’s job. That is, the descriptions young men provide of their expected job is less compatible with how they describe mothers’ jobs than with how daughters describe mothers’ jobs (the coefficients are: for the middle class, 0.34 and 0.48 for sons and daughters, respectively; the analogous coefficients for the working class are - 0.01 and 0.16). The working-class daughters also distance themselves from fathers. That is, they see the work of the fathers as less compatible with their expected jobs than the descriptions sons provide of father’s job (coefficients of 0.00 and 0.16, respectively). This again is not true in middle-class settings, where both coefficients are identical at 0.66.

Conclusion The class similarity of youth’s expectations suggests that a de-industrialized future will not, in itself, create identity problems for Canada’s working-class adolescents. That is, in contrast to earlier studies (Willis, 1977), there is no evidence that Canadian working-class adolescents glorify physically demanding, dirty, manual work. Such glorification seemed to be essential to earlier working-class youth’s identities as “other than” feminine. Although there may be pockets of such definitions as central components to working- class boys’ identities, on the whole the centrality of gender identity differences in the work place seems to have lessened. Thus we may see lessened sex typing of jobs in future generations. Our findings reinforce those of Weis (1990) with respect to young women’s identity and its relation to work. It is quite remarkable that adolescent women described their expected work in terms most comparable to how middle-class fathers jobs are seen. Indeed, young women seem already to take thoroughly for granted that their own work will be most similar to that of a middle-class male. There is no trace of even a lingering gender difference here. Young men are not more likely than young women to expect to obtain a job with all the benefits of middle-class male privilege. Our findings also suggest difficult family dynamics in current working-class homes. In many of these homes the father has a manual, industrial-type job. Their teen-aged sons and daughters seem to see few redeeming features in his work. They certainly do not envision their own future work world to share many of the characteristics of his. Given the historic centrality of work to definitions of self-worth, it is quite unlikely that the children will provide positive reinforcements to working-class fathers’ sense of their worth. Although we have argued that the centrality of gendered work expectations is declining, and will continue to decline in the next generation, there are still powerful manifestations of its existence. The images that sons have of

54 Generation, Gender and Class Perspectives on Work

mother’s work is less compatible with their own expectations than how such work is seen through the eyes of daughters. There are subtle processes of stereotyping going on, which perpetuates boys’ distancing themselves from things feminine. There is no parallel process of daughters distancing themselves from masculine things. Although the stark identification of working-class boys with a male manual culture seems to have disappeared, vestiges, perhaps powerful ones, remain in which boys distance themselves from feminine domains.

Notes 1. Although we found some regional and urban/rural differences in images of work, they were not overwhelming, particularly after social class differences between the three sites were taken into account. To assess such effects adequately is beyond the confines of this paper. 2. The parent questionnaires provided only three response categories: “Very much”, “Somewhat”, and “Not at all.” This difference renders it difficult to compare the responses of parents directly with those of the children, and is one of the reasons for focusing on the profiles of work attributes rather than on dyadic agreement. 3. Parents were not asked to describe the job attributes they expect for their children’s future work. Hence, it is not possible to determine whether a parallel self-enhancement process is at work in adolescents’ work expectations. At the same time, as will be seen later, adolescents’ work expectations are uniformly high, also suggesting a self-enhancement dynamic. 4. We chose to dichotomize the teenagers’ responses into “very true” versus the other three possible responses. Since the parents were given only three response alternatives—“very much,” “somewhat” and “not at all”—the last two responses were collapsed. The different number of response options for parents and teenagers makes some aspects of the generational comparison hazardous.

References Bowles, Samuel and Herbert Gintis. 1976. Schooling in Capitalist America. New York: Basic Books. Bradley, Harriet. 1989. Men’s Work, Women’s Work. Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Braverman, Harry. 1974. Labor and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press. Canada. 1971. Canadian Classification and Dictionary of Occupations. Volumes I and II. Ottawa: Department of Manpower and Immigration. Dunk, Thomas. 1991. It’s a Working Man’s Town: Male Working-Class Culture in Northwestern Ontario. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Game, Ann and Rosemary Pringle. 1983. Gender at Work. Sidney: George Allen and Unwin. Kohn, Melvin. 1969. Class and Conformity: A Study of Values. Homewood, Illinois: Dorsey. Krahn, Harvey. 1991. “The changing Canadian labour market” pp. 15-37 in David Ashton and Graham Lowe (eds.) Making Their Way: Education, Training and the Labour Market in Canada and Great Britain. Toronto: University of Toronto. Looker, E. Dianne, and Victor Thiessen. 1993. Images of Work: Women’s Work, Men’s Work, Housework. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Sociology and Anthropology, Ottawa, June, 1993. Osberg, Lars, Fred Wien and Jan Grude. Forthcoming. Technology, Employment and Social Policy. Toronto: Lorimer. Pineo, Peter, John Porter, and Hugh McRoberts. 1977. “The 1971 census and the socioeconomic classification of occupations”. The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 14:91- 102. Sennet, Richard, and Jonathon Cobb. 1973. The Hidden Injuries of Class. New York: Vintage. Weis, Lois. 1990. Working Class Without Work. New York: Routledge. Willis, Paul. 1977. Learning to Labour. Westmead, England: Saxon House Press. Wills, Ruth. 1861. Lays of Lowly Life. London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co.

55 IJCS / RIÉC

Appendix

Table A1

Percentage of “Not at all descriptive” responses across work domains, Adolescents 1989

W M W M W M W M W M W M W M W M S S D D S S D D S S D D S S D D M M M M F F F F X X X X H H H H Danger 63 69 56 65 15 55 17 52 26 39 47 45 39 41 40 46 Boring 11 16 15 23 18 22 19 30 51 58 63 66 8 12 14 14 Secure 4332323111135533 Tiring 3335122244512111 Respect 52523121610478812 Stress 9788834133546576 Dirty 46 53 43 59 13 49 12 51 34 45 56 54 19 9 19 19 Pay 44962118111257666872 Routine 2425262571211123342 Commun. Import. 85884411122124232416 Difficult 8 5 10 6213241594393 Flexible Hours 17 17 20 21 19 20 23 22 10 6 15 8 20 23 25 30 Reward 7 6 10 7838312026774 Power 22 21 26 24 13 5 15 5546419272027 Long Hours 14 13 12 15 353512415241 Enjoy 12 8 12 6 8 8 12 621111311117

56 Eric Mintz

Two Generations: The Political Attitudes of High School Students and Their Parents*

Abstract The opinions and attitudes of graduating high school students and their parents in a small Newfoundland city were polled over a wide range of political issues. Generally, only weak relationships existed between the attitudes of the two generations, suggesting the limited effectiveness of parental socialization on the attitudes of new generations. Aggregate differences between the two generational groups were not generally large, although a substantial generational shift in opinions on some social issues, particularly the position of women, was found.

Résumé L’auteur a mené un sondage, dans une petite ville située à Terre-Neuve, auprès des finissantes et finissants d’écoles secondaires, ainsi que de leurs parents afin de recueillir leurs opinions et attitudes eu égard à plusieurs questions d’ordre politique. Il ressort de ce sondage que le lien entre les attitudes des deux générations est, en général, faible et que l’influence des parents sur les attitudes de la nouvelle génération est limitée. Dans l’ensemble, les différences entre les deux générations sont faibles bien qu’un écart d’opinion assez important portant sur quelques questions d’ordre social, plus particulièrement, sur la question des femmes a été relevé.

It has often been thought that parents exercise a strong influence on the development of the political attitudes of their children. Not only is parental influence likely to be the earliest source of political socialization, but it is also likely to be more efficacious given its personal nature, its continuity, and its credibility to the child. As well, correspondence between the attitudes of parents and their children may be expected due to the sharing of social and economic circumstances. Parental influence is, however, only one possible source of political socialization. Young persons spend far more time in the classroom and in front of the television than with their parents. And, undoubtedly, peer groups play an important role in the development of youthful attitudes. In fact, studies outside of Canada have indicated that the correspondence in political attitudes between parents and their offspring (with the exception of party identification) is generally weak (Jennings and Niemi 1968; Tedin 1974; Niemi et al 1978; Jennings 1984). Even if parental influence on the attitudes of the young is not generally strong, this does not necessarily mean that different generations have different aggregate distributions of political attitudes. Indeed, some researchers have

International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue internationale d’études canadiennes Special issue / Numéro hors série, Winter/hiver 1993 IJCS / RIÉC found that intergenerational differences are small. Rather than a large “generation gap,” there is a modest tendency for the younger generation to be more liberal than the parental generation (Connell 1972; Jennings and Niemi 1968; Niemi et al 1978). Although there has been some research on the attitudes of young Canadians, our understanding of generational change in Canada has been limited by the absence of studies examining the attitudes of parents and their offspring.

Data and Methodology Questionnaires were administered in a class period to 251 Level III (grade 12) students at the two major high schools serving the Corner Brook, Newfoundland area.1 Telephone interviews were subsequently conducted with both parents of students who completed questionnaires.2 Although the study can be considered reasonably representative of graduating high school students, the exclusion of school drop-outs and their parents (approximately 30% of the population) limits the representativeness of both generations. An examination of the attitudes of graduating high school students (most of whom were 17 or 18 years old) seems particularly appropriate to an understanding of political socialization and generational change. Parental influence on the attitudes of children will normally be of diminishing significance as children leave home to pursue further education or employment. As the young adult prepares to take his or her place in society, a wide range of politically-relevant attitudes are likely to have developed. Of course, the findings based on one community cannot be generalized to the country as a whole, and certainly no claim can be made that Corner Brook is a “typical” Canadian city (although claims that any Canadian community is “typical” seem questionable). Corner Brook was established around a major newsprint mill and has become, as well, a regional service and administrative centre. Although average wages have usually followed closely the national average, the Western Newfoundland region consistently has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. Given their remoteness from both national and provincial centres of power, Corner Brook residents share the experiences and problems of those on the “periphery” of the country. Corner Brook’s population consists almost exclusively of persons of British and Irish descent who share in the distinct cultural identity of Newfoundland.

Hypotheses In examining democratic political cultures, political scientists have typically focused on the attitudes of political efficacy (the belief that a person can be influential and effective in politics) and political trust (the belief that those in government are competent, concerned for those they govern and worthy of respect), the extent and nature of political involvement, and the level of support for the political community. While the declining political efficacy and trust of the population of Canada and other Western democracies has been the subject of considerable discussion, young adults, having less awareness of the realities of politics and a more idealistic outlook on the world, may be more likely to feel efficacious and to be more trustful of those in government (Pammett and Myles 1991). Given the relative recency of modern democracy in Newfoundland (with a past that included a Commission of Government and the semi-authoritarian one-party politics of the Smallwood era) and the recent

60 Two Generations: The Political Attitudes of High School Students and Their Parents

addition of a required “democracy” course to the high school curriculum, it was also hypothesized that the younger generation would be more likely to adopt positions favourable to democratic politics than the older generation. Although other researchers have found young persons less interested in politics (Hudon et al 1991) and less oriented to personal participation, it was hypothesized that younger persons would be more inclined than their parents to be involved in “unconventional” forms of political participation (Barnes, Kaase et al 1979). Studies have found that Newfoundlanders, like French-speaking Quebeckers, are divided fairly evenly between an identification with their provincial community and the national community (Gibbins 1990). It may be argued that because Newfoundland joined Canada only a few decades ago, a strong sense of Newfoundland identity persists, particularly among older generations. It was therefore hypothesized that identification with and loyalty towards Canada would be stronger among the younger generation. There has been considerable interest in Ronald Inglehart’s hypothesis that the value priorities of those raised in the relative affluence of contemporary Western democracies have shifted from the “materialism” of previous generations towards “post-materialism.” Post-materialist values such as self- expression, participation and aestheticism have been viewed as underlying the development of the “New Left” ideology and various new social movements (Inglehart 1977; Bakvis and Nevitte 1987; Nevitte et al 1989). Thus it was hypothesized that the younger generation would be more likely than the parental generation to adopt post-materialist value priorities3 and to adopt “left-libertarian” positions favourable to civil liberties, improving the position of women, protection of the environment, peace and toleration of the French- Canadian minority. Although youth have often been expected to be more “left-libertarian,” a plausible, alternative hypothesis can be made that young persons will be more favourable to a competitive economy and a reduced welfare state than their parents. The political events and dominant ideological currents of the time may affect young persons who are developing their attitudes more than the older generation who have developed more stable and possibly change- resistant attitudes. In particular, the collapse of communist regimes combined with the ideological dominance of “neo-conservatism” in the Anglo-American democracies may have made the younger generation more oriented to free enterprise than the parental generation that matured as the welfare state was expanding and social democratic values were gaining acceptability.

Parent-Student Correspondence The relationships between the attitudes of parents and their offspring were generally quite weak, although in a positive direction.4 Combining clusters of related questions, Table 1 indicates that only civil liberties (R=0.25) and political trust (R=0.20) exhibited more than a weak correspondence.5 In addition, there was a moderate level of correspondence between parents and their offspring in levels of interest in politics (R=0.32).6

61 IJCS / RIÉC

Table 1

Parent-Student Correspondence

Indexes Pearson’s R Weighted N

Efficacy .16 (103) Trust .20** (79) Democracy .12 (106) Participation .10 (78) Post-materialism .17* (102) Civil Liberties .25** (93) Tolerance (French) .06 (126) Feminism .13 (121) Environmentalism .09 (112) Competitiveness .07 (81) Welfare .02 (116)

* significant at the .05 level; ** significant at the .01 level

There was no clear pattern of closer correspondence between young persons and either their mother or father. Nor did mother-daughter or father-son pairs exhibit a pattern of stronger relationships than other pairs. There was a higher level of parent-student correspondence for the civil liberties and post- materialist scales among higher socio-economic status families (as measured by father’s occupation). But for most scales, controlling for socio-economic status made little difference.

Generational Differences Although the younger generation was more efficacious than the parental generation, majorities of both generations provided inefficacious responses to the four scale questions. Neither generation exhibited a high level of political trust. Both parental and student groups appear to have generally favourable attitudes towards democratic ideals with neither group being significantly more democratic in terms of attitudes towards citizen involvement in decision- making.

62 Two Generations: The Political Attitudes of High School Students and Their Parents

Table 2

Attitudes of Parent and Student Groups

Indexes Parents (N) Students (N)

Efficacy 5.3*** (176) 5.9*** (238) Trust 7.1 (150) 7.2 (200) Democracy 5.4 (180) 5.3 (210) Participation 9.5 (136) 9.2 (229) Post-materialism 6.4 (173) 6.4 (219) Environmentalism 6.7* (187) 6.9* (209) Civil Liberties 5.7*** (168) 6.1*** (209) Tolerance (French) 6.5 (202) 6.6 (229) Feminism 6.3*** (201) 7.0*** (227) Competitiveness 4.2** (150) 4.0** (209) Welfare 4.2*** (207) 4.7*** (203)

Note: The potential range of environmentalism, civil liberties, feminism, efficacy, trust, post- materialism and tolerance indexes is 4 to 8; participation, 6 to 12; democracy, competitiveness and welfare, 3 to 6. * significant at .05; ** significant at .01; *** significant at .001

There was a sharp difference in political interest with members of the younger generation more than three times as likely as members of the older generation to respond that they had little or no interest in politics. Although the student generation was slightly less likely to say that it would participate in various political activities if the Canadian government was doing something that it strongly disagreed with, the overall difference was not statistically significant. There was a tendency for the parental generation to be more oriented to “conventional” and the younger generation to be more oriented to “unconventional” activity, but this tendency was not consistent over the range of activities. Thus, in both generations, there was a gap between support for democratic ideals and perceptions about the actual ability of citizens to influence governing decisions with, particularly in the case of youth, an additional gap between democratic ideals and actual interest in politics. The hypothesis that students would identify more with the Canadian political community than their parents was not supported. Indeed, students were slightly more inclined than their parents to think of themselves more as Newfoundlanders than Canadians, with a larger minority of students than parents favouring independence for Newfoundland. However, since this study was conducted at the time of a major, national constitutional crisis (the defeat of the Meech Lake Accord) that involved bitter tensions between politicians representing Newfoundland and other parts of the country, it is possible that the opinions expressed were more a reaction to particular events than a reflection of basic attitudes. Indeed, despite their greater Newfoundland orientation and the nearly unanimous opinion that the province has been

63 IJCS / RIÉC poorly treated by the Canadian government, the majority of the younger generation professed at least some confidence in the Canadian government. Contrary to expectations, there was not a significant difference between the two generations on an index of post-materialist values. With the exception of the higher value placed on fighting crime than developing culture, substantial majorities of both generations appeared “post- materialist” in their value choices. It could be argued that most of the parental generation was raised in the 1950s and 1960s and thus, like the younger generation, had its basic material and safety needs fulfilled. Nevertheless, “modern” levels of education, health, welfare and transportation services were just developing in this “under-developed” province during the childhood years of most of the parental generation. And, the parental generation would have developed its early social and political attitudes at a time when memories of war and severe economic deprivation were still prevalent among parents and teachers. The related hypothesis that the younger generation would be more “left- libertarian” in its issue positions was only partly supported. The younger generation was more likely to adopt “feminist” positions concerning the position of women with the generational shift larger among women than men. For example, among the parental generation, 51% of men and 48% of women agreed that women should be encouraged to stay at home to raise their children. Among students, 19% of males and only 4% of females agreed. More generally, about one-half of young women compared to about one-quarter of their mothers and fathers said that they would use the term “feminist” to generally describe their beliefs.7 The student population also tended to be slightly more favourable towards civil liberties and slightly more peace-oriented than the parental generation. The hypothesis that students would be more environmentally-oriented was only weakly supported as majorities of both generations supported environmentalist positions. Young persons were not significantly more tolerant than their parents in their attitudes on language issues. The hypothesis that the younger generation would be more oriented towards a competitive economy and less oriented to the “welfare state” was not supported. Instead, the younger generation was more favourable to welfare measures and the parental generation was slightly more favourable to greater competitiveness. Differences between the two generations were particularly noticeable in questions concerning welfare assistance to single mothers and the provision of child care. Thus, the greater support for welfare measures among the younger generation may reflect the differing generational views on the position of women.

Conclusion Rather weak relationships were generally found between the attitudes of young persons on the verge of adulthood and the attitudes of their parents. With the availability of a variety of diverse socializing influences and a diminution of the importance of family life in modern societies, it is understandable that parents appear to have only a modest influence on the political attitudes of their offspring. Inglehart’s hypothesis of increasing post-materialism among successive generations was not supported as both generations tended to accept some post- materialist values. Likewise, support for environmentalist positions was only

64 Two Generations: The Political Attitudes of High School Students and Their Parents slightly higher among the younger generation, with both generations being surprisingly supportive of environmentalist positions despite the chronically high unemployment rate and the central position of the paper mill in the local economy. It appears that some post-materialist and environmentalist values have gained broad social acceptance and may no longer be a matter of generational difference. No evidence was found that youth has become more oriented to a competitive economy in response to the ascendance (at least until recently) of the “neo- conservative” ideology in the West and the collapse of communism in the East. It is possible, however, that the collapse of communism was too recent to have had an effect on attitudes towards socio-economic issues. And, the problems of “neo-conservatism” in practice, particularly in a region highly dependent upon government assistance and public sector employment, may have counteracted the possible influence of the “neo-conservative” ideology on the young. There was some evidence of a substantial generational shift in terms of attitudes on issues related to the position of women. Although it is possible that young women, in particular, will adopt more traditional attitudes as they marry and have children, there are reasons to expect that this intergenerational difference will be persistent. Not only have there been major social changes including a dramatic increase in female labour force participation and a drastic decline in the birth rate, but also the feminist movement has had considerable success in placing “women’s issues” high on the popular political and social agenda. Although there appears to be generational change in the attitudes of both men and women, the change appears strongest among women, opening up a “gender gap” in the attitudes toward some gender-related issues among the younger generation (Bibby and Posterski 1992, chapter 3). It is possible that this gap will widen, particularly if young males attribute problems in obtaining educational, employment and promotion opportunities to policies perceived as “reverse discrimination.” Overall, this study found generational change in political attitudes to be modest. As young adults go through “life-cycle” changes, generational differences in political efficacy, interest and participation may well diminish or disappear (Jennings and Niemi 1975). Longitudinal research would be useful to determine whether generational differences on social issues, particularly concerning the position of women, will persist or expand in spite of “life-cycle” effects that may tend to lead in the direction of intergenerational convergence.

Notes * The research for this paper was funded by a Challenge ’90 SEED grant. Research assistance was provided by Kevin Walker and Michael Walsh. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Atlantic Provinces Political Studies Association, St. John’s, October 20, 1990. 1. Questionnaires were administered in all level III classes at Herdman Collegiate (Integrated Protestant) on May 15 and 16, 1990 (N=162) and in four of the five Level III classes at Regina High School (Roman Catholic) on June 1 and June 4, 1990 (N=89). According to the Principal of Regina, the five classes do not differ in their academic or social characteristics. Although Roman Catholic students are slightly under-represented in this study, a comparison of students at the two schools found few differences in attitudes (Mintz 1992). No attempts were made to administer questionnaires to students absent from class. Approximately 65% of all Level III students at the two schools filled out questionnaires.

65 IJCS / RIÉC

2. Of the 421 parents that could be identified from information supplied by students, 251 (66%) were interviewed. Parents not living with their offspring were not interviewed and no substitutions of other relatives or guardians were made. At least four attempts were made to contact each parent. The parental group that was interviewed included 171 mothers and 106 fathers. Interviews were conducted from May 17 to July 3, 1990. 3. Inglehart’s “post-materialism” scale (based on asking respondents to rank the importance of twelve different goals) did not seem appropriate for telephone interviews. Instead, a simple set of four questions involving a forced choice between values Inglehart considers “materialist” and “post-materialist” was developed. 4. To make use of both parent pairs, the results reported in this section were calculated by weighting cases of mother-student and father-student pairs where both were available by 0.5 and weighting cases where only one parent-student pair was available by 1.0. 5. The indexes were created by adding scores to different agree/disagree questions. Those answering “don’t know” to any question were excluded from the calculation of the indexes. These indexes should be treated with caution as there were low levels of inter-item correlations for some of the indexes. 6. While most correlations for specific issue questions were weak, there was a moderate correlation for two high profile issues: abortion (R=0.25) and support for the Meech Lake Accord (R=0.25). About three-fifths of students had the same national and provincial party identification as their parents, but the high level of Liberal party identification among both generations meant that the variability in party identification was limited and parent-student correlations were modest. 7. A list of ideological terms was provided with respondents instructed that they could choose more than one term. Majorities of both generations said that they would use the terms “environmentalist” and “liberal.” 8. Evidence was mixed on traditional leftist positions with the younger generation slightly more likely to be in favour of government ownership of some major industries while the parental generation was more likely to support taxing those with high incomes so as to reduce the difference between rich and poor.

Bibliography Bakvis, H. and N. Nevitte, “In Pursuit of Postbourgeois Man: Postmaterialism and Intergenerational Change in Canada,” Comparative Political Studies 20 (October 1987), 357-389. Barnes, S.H., M. Kaase, et al. Political Action. Mass Participation in Five Western Democracies. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979. Bibby, R.W. and D.C. Posterski. Teen Trends. A Nation in Motion. Toronto: Stoddart, 1992. Connell, R.W., “Political Socialization in the American Family: The Evidence Reexamined,” Public Opinion Quarterly 36 (Fall 1972), 323-333. Gibbins, R., Conflict and Unity. An Introduction to Canadian Political Life, second edition. Scarborough: Nelson Canada, 1990. Hudon, R. et al, “To What Extent Are Today’s Young People Interested in Politics? Inquiries Among 16- To 24-Year Olds,” in K. Megyery, ed., Youth in Canadian Politics. Participation and Involvement. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1991. Inglehart, R., The Silent Revolution. Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. Jennings, M.K., “The Intergenerational Transfer of Political Ideologies in Eight Western Nations,” European Journal of Political Research 12 (September 1984), 261-276. Jennings, M.K. and R.G. Niemi, “The Transmission of Political Values from Parent to Child,” American Political Science Review 62 (March 1968), 169-184. Jennings, M.K. and R.G. Niemi, “Continuity and Change in Political Orientations: A Longitudinal Study of Two Generations,” American Political Science Review 69 (December 1975), 1316- 1335. Mintz, E. “The Attitudes of Newfoundland High School Students: A Comparison of Two Denominational Schools,” The Morning Watch 20 (Fall 1992), 26-33. Nevitte, N. et al, “The Ideological Contours of the `New Politics’ in Canada: Policy, Mobilization, and Partisan Support,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 22 (September 1989), 475- 504. Niemi, R.G. et al, “The Similarity of Political Values of Parents and College-age Youths,” Public Opinion Quarterly 42 (Winter 1978), 503-520.

66 Two Generations: The Political Attitudes of High School Students and Their Parents

Pammett, J.H. and J. Myles, “Lowering the Voting Age to 16,” in K. Megyery, ed., Youth in Canadian Politics. Participation and Involvement. Toronto: Dundurn, 1991. Tedin, K.L., “The Influence of Parents on the Political Attitudes of Adolescents,” American Political Science Review 68 (December 1974), 1579-1592.

Appendix

Selected Survey Results for Parental and Student Groups (proportion agreeing with statement unless otherwise indicated)

Parents Students (N=277) (N=251) Efficacy *1. There’s not much that ordinary citizens can do to affect what governments are doing. 32% 26% *2. Generally, those elected to Parliament soon lose touch with the people. 79% 66% *3. Sometimes politics and government seems so complicated that a person like me can’t really understand what’s going on. 90% 70% *4. Governments don’t seem to care what ordinary citizens think. 62% 53%

Trust *1. Many people in government are dishonest. 50% 49% 2. Most of the people running government are smart people who usually know what they are doing. 36% 57% 3. Generally speaking, would you say that you have a great deal of confidence, some confidence, or almost no confidence in the ability of the Canadian government to do what’s right? great deal 8% 9% some 64 74 almost no 28 17 4. Generally speaking, would you say that you have a great deal of confidence, some confidence, or almost no confidence in the ability of the Newfoundland government to do what’s right. great deal 36% 22% some 57 66 almost no 7 12

Democracy *1. Governments should be able to make major decisions without having to have widespread public discussion of the issue. 25% 13%

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2. All citizens should involve themselves in the discussion of political issues. 91% 81% 3. When developing its policies, do you think that governments should pay the most attention to the opinions of average citizens or to the opinions of experts? average citizens 75% 67% *experts 25 33

Participation Imagine that the Canadian government was doing something that you strongly disagreed with. Do you think that you would engage in any of the following activities? [% saying “yes”] Parents Students 1. Sign a petition 98% 92% 2. Call your member of parliament 86% 50% 3. Participate in a protest march 66% 68% 4. Organize others to vote against the government in the next election 44% 58% 5. Join with others in occupying government offices 22% 30% 6. Join with others in refusing to pay taxes 33% 22%

Post-materialism 1. Over the next ten years, do you think that it is more important for our society to have a high rate of economic growth or to clean up our natural environment? *growth 37% 14% clean environment 63 86 2. Over the next ten years, do you think that it is more important to ensure that order is maintained in our society or to encourage all people to have a say on controversial issues? *maintain order 33% 36% have say 67 64 3. Over the next ten years, do you think that it is more important to create an economy that is internationally competitive or to ensure that all persons in our society are treated equally. *competitive economy 18% 15% equality 82 85 4. Over the next ten years, do you think that it is more important to fight crime or to develop our culture? *fight crime 81% 88% develop culture 19 12

Environmentalism 1. Offshore oil developments, such as Hibernia, should not proceed if there is a risk to the marine environment. 77% 86% *2. Large economic projects that could create employment opportunities should be allowed

68 Two Generations: The Political Attitudes of High School Students and Their Parents

to proceed even if they might endanger some rare plants or animals. 25% 19% 3. People should be encouraged to have fewer children so that there is room for all types of plant and animal life on earth. 27% 34% *4. The paper mill in Corner Brook should not be forced to reduce its pollution because the mill is the backbone of this area’s economy. 9% 14%

Civil liberties *1. The police should be able to wiretap the telephones of persons holding extremist ideas. 51% 36% *2. Homosexual activity should be made illegal. 38% 44% *3. Persons holding communist beliefs should not be permitted to teach in our schools. 57% 44% 4. Do you think that the use of marijuana should be legal or illegal? Parents Students legal 13% 22% *illegal 87 78

Tolerance (French) 1. All students across Canada should learn both English and French. 56% 57% 2. French-Canadian children should be able to receive an education in French anywhere in Canada if at all possible. 84% 84% *3. The Canadian government should operate primarily in English. 56% 43% 4. Special efforts should be made to protect the French language in Canada. 65% 67%

Feminism 1. Employers should be required to hire more women for good jobs. 72% 73% *2. Women should be encouraged to stay at home to raise their children. 49% 12% 3. Universities should be required to reserve one-half of the places for women in programs such as engineering and science to ensure that there will be more women in such professions in the future. 49% 59% *4. If a business has to lay off some workers, the first to be laid off should be women whose husbands have jobs. 43% 17%

Competitiveness 1. Our economy should be made more efficient even if this means laying off some workers. 54% 30%

69 IJCS / RIÉC

2. Do you think that government should try to assist businesses that are facing difficulties or do you think that government should not assist uncompetitive businesses? *assist 74% 84% not assist 26 16 3. Because of the problems in the Newfoundland fishery, do you think that the government should encourage fishermen to find other types of employment or do you think that the government should help fishermen to keep their jobs? other employment 42% 43% *keep jobs 58 57

Welfare *1. Young persons who are able to work should not receive welfare payments from government. 83% 80% 2. Governments should pay most of the costs of child care for working mothers. 25% 57% *3. Unmarried women who have children should not receive welfare payments from government. 23% 5%

Peace-orientation *1. Canada should develop a strong military capability even if this means cutting other government programs. 30% 19% 2. The Canadian government should be generous in providing aid to the poorer countries of the world. 58% 66% *3. Military vessels that may be carrying nuclear weapons should not be invited to Corner Brook. 45% 53%

Support for Canada 1. Do you think of yourself more as a Canadian or as a Newfoundlander? Canadian 49% 40% Newfoundlander 51 60 2. Do you think that Newfoundland is generally well treated or poorly treated by the Canadian government? well treated 21% 10% poorly treated 79 90 3. If the economy of Newfoundland improved would you favour or oppose Newfoundland becoming an independent country? favour 16% 29% oppose 84 71 4. If Quebec were to separate from Canada, would you favour Newfoundland remaining part of Canada, Newfoundland becoming an independent country, or would you favour Newfoundland joining the United States?

70 Two Generations: The Political Attitudes of High School Students and Their Parents

remaining part of Canada 90% 69% becoming independent 3 8 joining the U.S 7 23 5. Do you think that the politicians we elect to represent us in the Parliament of Canada should be concerned primarily with the interests of Newfoundlanders or concerned primarily with the interests of all Canadians? Newfoundlanders 35% 52% all Canadians 65 48

Notes: “don’t know” and “no answer” excluded from the calculations. * scored in reverse direction

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72 Renée Joyal

L’évolution des modes de contrôle de l’autorité parentale et son impact sur les relations entre parents et enfants dans la société québécoise*

Résumé Depuis 1977, l’autorité parentale est définie par le Code civil du Québec comme un ensemble de droits et de devoirs exercés conjointement par les parents à l’égard de leurs enfants, alors que l’ancienne puissance paternelle affirmait les droits du père sur ses enfants, la mère n’exerçant qu’un rôle supplétif. C’est également en 1977 que l’Assemblée nationale adopte une nouvelle Loi sur la protection de la jeunesse, en vue d’assurer la protection par l’État des enfants maltraités, abandonnés ou négligés. Ces changements législatifs marquent une étape importante d’une longue évolution dont le point de départ se situe dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle. En 1869, en effet, la Législature de Québec adopte une première loi en la matière, l’Acte concernant les écoles d’industrie; celle-ci inaugure une évolution qui, s’étendant sur plus d’un siècle, assurera une place accrue à l’État dans la vie familiale et transformera, du même coup, les relations entre parents et enfants.

Abstract Since 1977, the “Code civil du Québec” defines parental authority as a series of rights and obligations exercised jointly by both parents towards their children. Prior to this date, the father held almost exclusive paternal rights over his children, the mother exercising an auxiliary role. It is also in 1977 that Quebec’s “National assembly” passed a new law “Loi sur la protection de la jeunesse” intended to ensure state protection of abused, abandoned or neglected children. These legislative changes marked an important step in a long process that began in the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1869, the “Législature de Québec” passed its first law on this matter, the “Acte concernant les écoles d’industrie”. This law began an evolution–lasting more than a century–which ensured a more important role by the state in family life and, at the same time, transformed the relationship between parents and children.

L’autorité parentale est un concept relativement nouveau en droit québécois. Jusqu’en 1977, en effet, les rapports entre parents et enfants s’organisaient autour de la notion de puissance paternelle. Les modifications législatives alors effectuées1 n’ont cependant pas entraîné qu’un changement de terminologie. Le Code civil définit depuis lors l’autorité parentale comme un ensemble de droits et de devoirs exercés conjointement par les parents à l’égard de leurs enfants, alors que l’ancienne puissance paternelle affirmait les droits du père sur ses enfants, la mère n’exerçant qu’un rôle supplétif. C’est également en 1977 que les mesures de contrôle de l’autorité parentale sont

International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue internationale d’études canadiennes Special issue / Numéro hors série, Winter/hiver 1993 IJCS / RIÉC modernisées. L’Assemblée nationale adopte une nouvelle Loi sur la protection de la jeunesse2, en vue d’assurer la protection par l’État des enfants maltraités, abandonnés ou négligés. Des dispositions prévoyant la déchéance de l’autorité parentale, pour motifs graves et dans l’intérêt de l’enfant, sont par ailleurs intégrées au Code civil3. Cette décennie voit également l’avènement de l’enfant comme sujet de droits, la notion d’intérêt de l’enfant étant alors jugée insuffisante, voire dangereuse d’utilisation dans les décisions concernant des personnes mineures (Joyal, 1991, p. 787). Ces changements législatifs marquent une étape importante d’une longue évolution dont le point de départ se situe dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, plus précisément en 1869. Avant cette date, en effet, il faut chercher ailleurs que dans des dispositions légales les principaux modes de régulation des comportements familiaux. La famille élargie, le voisinage et la communauté villageoise jouent alors à cet égard un rôle primordial, le tout sous l’oeil attentif de l’Église et du clergé (Voisine, Beaulieu et Hamelin, 1971, p. 57; Roy, 1976, pp. 44-45). Sauf quelques exceptions visant des problèmes spécifiques4, les rapports entre parents et enfants ne sont touchés que par les lois générales de police et d’assistance. En 1869, toutefois, la Législature de Québec adopte l’Acte concernant les écoles d’industrie5. Première véritable intervention législative en la matière, cette loi inaugure une évolution qui, s’étendant sur plus d’un siècle, assurera une place accrue à l’État dans la vie familiale et transformera, du même coup, les relations entre parents et enfants. Nous distinguerons deux périodes dans l’étude de cette évolution: la première se caractérise par la présence massive de l’Église et de ses institutions dans le secteur de l’aide à l’enfance, tandis que la seconde marque le retrait de celle-ci au profit des organismes et appareils d’État. Parallèlement à ce transfert de responsabilités, qui ne va d’ailleurs pas sans résistance, les textes législatifs connaissent une évolution, assez lente au départ, qui s’accélère sous la pression des changements sociaux liés à la Révolution tranquille des années 1960.

Sous l’œil vigilant de l’Église (1869-1945) Durant la période qui s’étend de 1869 à la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, l’intervention des pouvoirs publics en faveur de l’enfance malheureuse évolue, somme toute, assez peu. L’Acte concernant les écoles d’industrie est modifié à quelques reprises sans toutefois toucher aux mécanismes qui en assurent l’application. Les institutions chargées de recueillir les enfants visés par la loi demeurent sous le contrôle du clergé et des communautés religieuses. Une tentative de réforme amorcée dans les années 1940 tourne court, mais n’en est pas moins annonciatrice d’un virage majeur. Le caractère limité de l’intervention étatique On peut se demander, d’abord, pourquoi la Législature de Québec sent le besoin d’adopter, en 1869, l’Acte concernant les écoles d’industrie. Cette initiative ne peut certes pas être dissociée des grands changements socio- économiques qui caractérisent l’époque. Bien qu’on ne puisse parler d’industrialisation massive pour le Québec avant le XXe siècle (Poulin, 1955, p.38), une économie capitaliste y est cependant en formation, fondée sur l’établissement de manufactures locales et l’afflux d’une main-d’œuvre immigrante en provenance notamment de l’Irlande (Ryerson, 1972, p. 235). La population est encore rurale à plus de 75 p. 100 (Poulin, 1955, p. 38), mais

74 L’évolution des modes de contrôle de l’autorité parentale

Montréal et Québec sont devenues des agglomérations importantes. Des conditions de travail pénibles comme le « sweating system » s’y développent, alors que les saisons mortes et les crises économiques entrainent chômage et misère (Hamelin et Roby, 1971, p. 307). Il n’existe aucune mesure sociale pour soulager ces maux. Hôpitaux, hospices et crèches recueillent les orphelins, ainsi que les malades et les vieillards indigents. Pour le reste, il faut s’en remettre à la charité privée, aux oeuvres paroissiales et aux sociétés de bienveillance et de secours (Hamelin et Roby, 1971, p. 302). Toutes ces mutations, et la désorganisation sociale qui s’ensuit, ont des répercussions sur la vie familiale. Le nombre des enfants errants ou abandonnés augmente, surtout en milieu urbain. L’Acte concernant les écoles d’industrie6 assurera la prise en charge de ces enfants perçus comme des délinquants potentiels et, donc, comme une menace à l’ordre social. L’Assemblée adopte cette loi à la suite de plusieurs pétitions qui émanent surtout de personnalités ecclésiastiques tant de Montréal que de Québec7.En réponse aux questions qui lui sont adressées par des membres de la Législature, l’Honorable Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau explique que le « bill » vise à protéger les enfants et à leur éviter les dangers qui conduisent à une vie immorale8. Au moment de la présentation de celui-ci, il avait indiqué qu’il avait pour objet de permettre l’envoi des jeunes délinquants dans des maisons de réforme privées établies par des personnes charitables, comme en Angleterre9. Il convient de remarquer ici que l’Acte concernant les écoles d’industrie fut présenté et adopté au même moment que l’Acte concernant les écoles de réforme10, ce qui illustre l’étroite association que les parlementaires faisaient entre le placement en école de réforme, qui visait le redressement des jeunes délinquants et le placement en école d’industrie, dont le but était de prévenir la délinquance chez les enfants errants ou abandonnés. L’Acte concernant les écoles d’industrie s’applique aux enfants de moins de 14 ans trouvés errants ou en compagnie de voleurs, aux orphelins et aux enfants dont le père a été condamné à une peine de prison ou de travaux forcés. Toute personne peut conduire un enfant qui se trouve dans une telle situation devant un magistrat qui, après une enquête sommaire, peut ordonner son placement en école d’industrie. Un père de famille ou le directeur d’une institution de charité peut également se prévaloir de ce mécanisme dans le cas d’un enfant « incontrôlable » ou « réfractaire ». Les écoles d’industrie sont approuvées par le lieutenant-gouverneur en conseil après inspection. Elles sont tenues d’instruire et d’élever l’enfant ainsi que de pourvoir à sa subsistance. L’ordonnance de placement constitue un ordre de détention pour une durée déterminée et le fait de quitter l’école sans autorisation est considéré comme une évasion et, dans certains cas, puni comme tel. Après une certaine période d’hébergement, l’enfant peut être autorisé à loger à l’extérieur ou être placé en apprentissage, le tout sous la supervision des autorités de l’école. Le financement de ces institutions est en partie à la charge de la Législature et en partie à la charge des municipalités concernées. Dans certains cas, les parents sont tenus à une contribution. La nomenclature des enfants visés par la loi de 1869 témoigne du fait que le souci du législateur d’alors en était d’abord un de sécurité publique. Il s’agissait de combattre l’oisiveté, les mauvais compagnons et l’esprit de révolte susceptibles d’affecter les enfants qui, pour une raison ou une autre, vivaient hors du cercle familial et de pourvoir à leur redressement par l’imposition d’un cadre de vie rigide et l’apprentissage d’un métier.

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Cette approche ne sera sérieusement remise en cause que dans les années 1940. Toutefois, dans l’intervalle, s’ajoutera à la liste des enfants concernés par la loi, de nouvelles catégories qui témoignent de l’apparition d’une plus grande compassion à l’égard de l’enfant. Ainsi, à partir de 188411, les enfants « en besoin » de protection à cause de la maladie continuelle, de l’extrême pauvreté, de l’ivrognerie ou des « habitudes vicieuses » de leurs parents seront-ils couverts par la loi. En 191212, on y ajoutera les enfants « habituellement battus ou traités cruellement » par leurs parents ou gardiens. L’Acte concernant les écoles d’industrie, malgré quelques ajouts qui traduisent une préoccupation nouvelle pour l’enfant, ne peut être vu comme un mécanisme de contrôle de la puissance paternelle. À l’exception de cas d’une extrême gravité, ce texte législatif vient au contraire renforcer l’exercice de la puissance paternelle à l’égard d’enfants jugés « incontrôlables » ou « récalcitrants ». On ne relève donc à l’époque aucune tentative sérieuse des pouvoirs publics pour percer une brèche dans cette « institution ». La famille patriarcale, soumise à l’autorité toute-puissante du père et du mari, ne sera pas remise en question avant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale. L’émergence d’une volonté de réforme Les années 1940 constituent en effet un moment significatif de l’histoire de la protection de l’enfance et de la jeunesse au Québec. L’année 1944 voit même l’adoption de la Loi de la protection de l’enfance13, qui se démarque radicalement de la législation applicable jusqu’alors. C’est dans la foulée du rapport de la Commission d’assurance-maladie de Québec14, instituée par l’Assemblée législative en 1943, que ce texte législatif prend forme. À la suite de seize décès survenus parmi les jeunes enfants fréquentant des garderies privées de la région de Montréal, cette Commission est invitée à faire enquête sur le problème des garderies et de la protection de l’enfance. Après avoir tenu quinze auditions publiques au cours desquelles ils entendent soixante-et-onze personnes représentant plus de cent dix communautés religieuses et organismes de charité15, les commissaires déposent un rapport qui reconnaît l’existence des besoins affectifs de l’enfant et traduit une volonté marquée de responsabiliser les pouvoirs publics face au bien-être de l’enfance. Dans une société devenue urbaine à plus de 65 p. 100 (Poulin, 1955, p. 38), fortement industrialisée et qui demeure marquée par la Grande dépression des années 1930 et son cortège de misères, nombreux sont ceux, politiciens, clercs et membres de diverses professions, qui croient en la nécessité d’une prise en charge accrue par l’État de certains problèmes sociaux (Joyal et Chatillon, 1994). Faisant siennes les positions soutenues par les tenants de ce courant moderniste, le rapport de la Commission d’assurance-maladie de Québec propose un avant-projet de loi de protection de l’enfance qui est présenté comme projet de loi à l’Assemblée législative le 10 mai 1944. La nomenclature des enfants concernés par ce texte législatif rejoint sensiblement celle que l’on retrouve à l’époque dans la Loi des écoles d’industrie16 telle qu’elle a été modifiée au fil du temps. Mais le projet de loi se démarque de la législation antérieure surtout sur le plan des structures proposées. Il prévoit, au niveau local, la création de sociétés de protection de l’enfance ayant pour fonction de conduire devant un juge tout enfant visé par la loi et, le cas échéant, de voir à l’exécution de l’ordonnance rendue par le tribunal. Ces sociétés sont supervisées par un Conseil supérieur de la

76 L’évolution des modes de contrôle de l’autorité parentale

protection de l’enfance, composé de douze membres, dont dix de religion catholique romaine et deux de religion protestante. L’ensemble du système est sous la responsabilité d’un directeur de la protection de l’enfance agissant sous l’autorité d’un ministre. Les décisions rendues par le tribunal à l’égard d’un enfant peuvent être de plusieurs ordres : remise de l’enfant à ses parents sous la surveillance d’une société de protection de l’enfance, attribution temporaire ou permanente de la garde de l’enfant à une telle société, qui en devient alors la tutrice et peut le placer dans un foyer nourricier, dans une institution ou encore en apprentissage ou en service domestique. Ce projet législatif, qui conférait de larges pouvoirs à des sociétés de protection de l’enfance placées sous le contrôle de l’État, qui élargissait l’éventail des mesures applicables à un enfant touché par la loi et qui limitait l’exercice de la puissance paternelle, n’allait pas manquer de soulever de vives protestations. Au moment de la présentation de ce projet de loi, la plupart des institutions recevant des enfants étaient dirigées par le clergé ou des communautés religieuses (Bourgeois, 1947, p. 240). Plusieurs représentants du milieu clérical et les politiciens conservateurs qui y étaient associés ne pouvaient manquer de voir l’adoption de cette loi comme une menace aux institutions religieuses et à la famille patriarcale traditionnelle. La composition « mixte » du Conseil supérieur de la protection de l’enfance était également loin d’emporter leur assentiment (Joyal et Chatillon, 1994). Malgré ce fort courant d’opposition, la Loi de la protection de l’enfance est adoptée par l’Assemblée, le 3 juin 1944, sous le gouvernement libéral et réformiste d’Adélard Godbout. Toutefois, quelques mois plus tard, ce gouvernement est défait et le retour au pouvoir de Maurice Duplessis, en août 1944, suspend à jamais la mise en application de ce texte législatif. Le domaine de la protection de l’enfance en demeure donc au statu quo. L’idéologie conservatrice triomphe et la Loi des écoles d’industrie continue de s’appliquer. Il faut toutefois se garder de croire que la réflexion sociale entreprise autour de la Loi de 1944 n’aura eu aucune retombée. Il est vrai qu’à court terme, le seul changement à intervenir en la matière est la création, en 1946, du ministère du Bien-être social et de la Jeunesse17, dont le rôle, au départ, semble avoir été limité à la gestion des allocations sociales (Vaillancourt, 1988, p. 132). Cependant, une nouvelle loi et surtout de nouvelles pratiques devaient bientôt voir le jour en la matière et contribuer à l’effacement progressif des institutions religieuses au profit de l’État dans ce domaine névralgique.

L’inéluctable avancée de l’État (1945-1977) En 1950, une nouvelle législation est adoptée. À défaut de s’inspirer du courant moderniste à l’origine de la Loi de la protection de l’enfance de 1944, elle pave cependant la voie à des changements notables. Dans les années qui suivent, le cadre social traditionnel éclate en même temps que s’affirment les nouveaux professionnels de l’intervention sociale. Cette effervescence atteint son paroxysme dans les années 1960; c’est également à ce moment que se développe la théorie des droits. La Loi sur la protection de la jeunesse de 1977 sera le fruit de ces profondes mutations.

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Une législation de type paternaliste La Loi relative aux écoles de protection de la jeunesse18, adoptée en 1950, étend la protection de l’État à tout enfant de plus de six ans et de moins de dix- huit ans « particulièrement exposé à des dangers moraux ou physiques, en raison de son milieu ou d’autres circonstances spéciales ». Les termes très généraux de cette formulation ouvrent la porte à un contrôle accru, et potentiellement arbitraire, de la puissance paternelle, jusque là peu menacée par les pouvoirs publics. Le nouveau texte législatif ménage cependant les appréhensions des gens d’Église, puisqu’il demeure centré sur le placement des enfants concernés dans les écoles spéciales qu’ils dirigent. Le magistrat présidant l’enquête doit, s’il est satisfait de la preuve qui lui est présentée, adresser au Ministre du Bien-être social et de la Jeunesse un rapport recommandant le placement de l’enfant. Il revient au ministre d’ordonner ce placement, de le prolonger et, le cas échéant, de donner son congé à l’enfant. La Loi des tribunaux judiciaires est modifiée la même année par la Loi instituant la Cour de bien-être social19. À partir de cette date, les magistrats appelés à présider les enquêtes relatives aux cas de protection appartiendront progressivement à ce tribunal spécialisé. L’année suivante, la Loi des écoles de protection de la jeunesse est modifiée de manière à s’appliquer à tous les enfants de moins de dix-huit ans; l’éventail des mesures applicables à ceux-ci est en outre élargi. « Le magistrat peut alors, suivant les circonstances et après consultation, s’il y a lieu, avec une agence sociale reconnue par le ministre, laisser l’enfant en liberté surveillée, le confier à toute agence sociale, société, institution, recommander son placement dans une école, ou prendre toute autre décision dans le meilleur intérêt de l’enfant ».20 Ce changement n’est pas négligeable, puisqu’il entraîne la reconnaissance légale des divers organismes qui oeuvrent dans le domaine de la protection de l’enfance. Cependant ces organismes sont, pour la plupart, formés sur une base diocésaine et assujettis à l’autorité ecclésiastique, du moins en milieu canadien-français (D’Amours, 1982, p. 22). Si elle autorise l’intrusion de l’État dans la vie privée de l’enfant et de sa famille, l’ouverture législative ainsi effectuée ne heurte cependant pas de front les intérêts du milieu clérical. Sans établir un véritable système intégré de protection de l’enfance, les lois de 1950 et de 1951 assurent la diversification des mesures susceptibles d’être recommandées ou ordonnées à l’égard des enfants visés par la loi et font une place officielle aux organismes de protection de l’enfance. La Cour de bien- être social est créée, quoique, dans bien des cas, ce tribunal n’ait qu’un pouvoir de recommandation au ministre. Le cadre de procédure dans lequel il intervient manque de formalisme et de rigueur; les droits de l’enfant et de ses parents ne sont nulle part explicitement énoncés. Les agences sociales reconnues par le texte législatif à partir de 1951 seront toutefois le ferment d’une approche renouvelée de la protection de l’enfance. La conjonction de nombreux facteurs de changement À la forte croissance économique de l’après-guerre s’ajoute, pour le Québec, une importante poussée démographique. En 1961, la population atteint cinq millions d’habitants et est urbaine à près de 75 p. 100 (Linteau, Durocher..., 1986, pp. 187 et 256). Malgré le conservatisme politique caractérisant le gouvernement de Maurice Duplessis, au pouvoir de 1944 à 1959, de puissants courants réformistes se manifestent, souvent véhiculés par les nouvelles élites

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que sont les professeurs, journalistes, économistes et spécialistes en sciences humaines. La vague d’immigration de l’après-guerre et l’ouverture sur le monde que favorisent les médias, notamment la télévision, contribuent à l’effondrement des valeurs toutes faites de la société québécoise traditionnelle. En 1960, le parti libéral de Jean Lesage arrache le pouvoir à l’Union nationale de Maurice Duplessis, décédé en 1959. Le Québec est mûr pour un grand changement : la Révolution tranquille. Cette expression désigne aussi bien le bouleversement des valeurs et des mentalités qui se fait jour à cette époque que les grandes réformes politiques et structurelles entreprises à partir de 1960 par le gouvernement de Jean Lesage et ceux qui lui ont succédé. Ce processus, qui implique la prise en charge par l’État d’institutions jusqu’alors dominées par des groupes privés, notamment l’Église catholique, vise prioritairement les secteurs de l’éducation, de la santé et des affaires sociales. (Linteau, Durocher..., 1986, p. 394). Dans le domaine de la protection de l’enfance, le milieu francophone a diversifié ses modes d’intervention, puisque, à partir de 1950, des agences diocésaines de services sociaux sont rapidement mises sur pied dans l’ensemble du territoire du Québec (D’Amours, 1982, p. 22). En plus d’assurer la distribution de certaines allocations sociales, ces agences visent la protection de l’enfance et la solution des problèmes de la famille. En 1963, elles se regroupent pour former la Fédération des services sociaux à la famille du Québec. Elles recrutent en partie leur personnel parmi les diplômés des Écoles de service social fondées à l’Université de Montréal et à l’Université Laval dans les années 1940 (Joyal et Chatillon, 1994). Ces nouveaux professionnels contribuent sans conteste à renouveler l’approche des problèmes sociaux et sont partie prenante aux réformes entreprises à cet égard dans la foulée de la Révolution tranquille. C’est également durant les années 1960 que s’accentue l’affirmation collective des femmes et que sont mis sur pied d’importants groupes de pression. La Fédération des femmes du Québec et l’Association féminine pour l’éducation et l’action sociale voient respectivement le jour en 1965 et en 1966 (Dumont, Jean..., 1982, pp. 449 et ss.). Ce mouvement d’émancipation aura des répercussions sur le plan législatif. Il y aura d’abord, en 1964, l’adoption par l’Assemblée législative du bill 1621, qui consacre l’égalité juridique des époux; puis, en 1969, le bill 1022 est adopté, qui fait de la société d’acquêts le régime matrimonial légal, en lieu et place de l’ancienne communauté de meubles et acquêts, laquelle, dirigée par le mari, était difficilement compatible avec le principe d’égalité consacré en 1964. La transformation des rapports hommes-femmes, l’avènement du pluralisme et l’émergence de nouvelles élites, entre autres éléments déterminants, rendent nécessaire la révision des lois alors en vigueur en matière de protection de l’enfance et contribuent à façonner le nouvel ensemble législatif qui prend corps durant les années 1970. L’enfant, les parents et l’État : une nouvelle dynamique L’une des premières préoccupations de l’État à l’époque consiste en l’élaboration d’un cadre qui permette une meilleure planification et une coordination plus efficace des services sociaux. La diversification ethnique et religieuse de la population s’accommode par ailleurs difficilement d’un système qui relève en grande partie des autorités ecclésiastiques. À la suite du Rapport de la Commission d’enquête sur la santé et le bien-être social,

79 IJCS / RIÉC l’Assemblée nationale adopte la Loi sur les services de santé et les services sociaux23. Cette loi a pour effet de créer des Centres de services sociaux régionaux, qui assument alors les fonctions des anciennes agences. Le réseau est désormais étatisé. Au même moment, la Loi de la protection de la jeunesse est vivement critiquée. On lui reproche notamment de recourir au système judiciaire exclusivement, alors que plusieurs interventions sur une base volontaire auprès de l’enfant et de sa famille pourraient relever des services sociaux. Plusieurs personnes et groupes déplorent aussi l’absence de reconnaissance explicite des droits de l’enfant dans la législation alors applicable. C’est dans ce contexte que s’ouvre un débat social de cinq ans autour d’une réforme législative en la matière. Le processus, amorcé en 1972, voit le dépôt successif à l’Assemblée nationale de trois propositions législatives qui font l’objet d’autant de commissions parlementaires au cours desquelles citoyens et organismes s’expriment abondamment sur la question (Joyal et Provost, 1993). Dès 1974, l’Assemblée nationale décide de légiférer sur un aspect particulier de cette problématique et adopte la Loi concernant la protection des enfants soumis à des mauvais traitements24. Il s’agit d’une solution d’urgence destinée à calmer une opinion publique en alerte à la suite de la médiatisation de plusieurs cas d’enfants battus. Le système mis en place par cette loi sert en même temps de projet-pilote pour la réforme globale en cours. Celle-ci aboutit à l’adoption, en 1977, d’une nouvelle Loi sur la protection de la jeunesse25 qui énumère les situations dans lesquelles l’État s’estime fondé à intervenir dans la sphère familiale pour la protection d’un enfant; le nouveau texte législatif favorise le règlement volontaire de ces situations et le respect des droits des enfants concernés, tout en établissant de nouvelles structures d’intervention dans le domaine (Joyal et Provost, 1993). Chaque Centre de services sociaux26 est en effet doté d’un D.P.J., fonctionnaire responsable de services de réception et d’orientation des situations de protection énumérées par la Loi27. Des mesures volontaires peuvent être proposées à l’enfant et à ses parents en vue de mettre fin à la situation constatée; cependant, seul le tribunal est habilité à trancher les conflits susceptibles de survenir entre l’enfant, ses parents et le D.P.J. C’est à celui-ci qu’est par ailleurs confiée l’exécution des décisions rendues par le tribunal. Un organisme provincial, le Comité de la protection de la jeunesse28, assure le respect des droits des enfants reconnus à la Loi. À partir d’un signalement qui peut être effectué par toute personne, mais qui émane le plus souvent de professionnels dont les activités les amènent à travailler auprès des enfants, l’État dispose donc désormais, à travers l’action concertée de ses appareils administratif et judiciaire, de puissants outils de contrôle de l’exercice de l’autorité parentale. La même année, cette réforme trouve son écho dans le Code civil, où la puissance paternelle est remplacée par l’autorité parentale, qui comporte le droit et le devoir de garde, de surveillance et d’éducation29. Désormais, le père et la mère exercent conjointement ces responsabilités; le législateur consacrant ainsi le principe d’égalité reconnu par ailleurs dans les rapports entre époux. L’autorité parentale peut faire l’objet d’une déchéance, pour motifs graves et dans l’intérêt de l’enfant. Ce mode de contrôle de l’autorité parentale s’ajoute à ceux prévus à la Loi sur la protection de la jeunesse. Produisant des effets majeurs sur la relation parents-enfant et pouvant même conduire dans certains

80 L’évolution des modes de contrôle de l’autorité parentale

casàl’adoptiondecelui-cipardestiers,ladéchéanceneseraprononcéequ’en dernier ressort.

* * * * *

ÀpartirdelaRévolutiontranquillesedessinentdoncdesrapportsdifférents entrelescitoyensetl’État.Unenouvelleculturelaïqueetbureaucratique s’impose.Lafamilleserepliesurelle-mêmedansl’anonymatdesgrandes villes.Lacommunautéenvironnanten’existepluscommeinstancede régulationdescomportementsetstructuredesoutiendanslesépreuves.L’État aprislerelaisdel’Églisedanslessecteursdel’éducation,delasantéetdes servicessociaux.Lathéoriedesdroitsconnaîtundéveloppementsans précédentquimarquetouteslesnouvelleslégislations:droitdesfemmesà l’égalité;droitdesenfantsàlasécuritéetaudéveloppementainsiqu’àdes servicesadéquats;etdroitdetouslescitoyensàlaprotectioncontreles interventions arbitraires ou abusives de l’État. Lapuissancepaternellepouvaitjadiscomptersurl’appuidel’Étatetdu systèmejudiciaire;désormaisl’autoritéparentalepasseaucribledesnouvelles normessocialesetlesparentsexercentleursresponsabilitéssousl’oeilde l’AdministrationautantquedelaJustice.Autrefoiscentréessurl’autoritédes parents,notammentcelledupèredefamille,lespolitiqueslégislativessont maintenantaxéessurlaprotectiondel’enfant.L’émergencedelathéoriedes droitsafaitdetouslesmembresdelafamilledeségauxfaceàl’Étatetàses appareils de régulation (Durant-Brault,1991, p. 136). Àlafamillepatriarcalesoumiseàl’autoritédupèreetsujetteàdesmodesde régulationinstitutionnelsetcommunautairesasuccédélafamilleégalitaire,où lesenfantssontassujettisàl’autoritéconjointedeleurspèreetmère,etoù parentsetenfants,àleurtour,sontassujettisàl’État,organesuprêmede normalisationetdecontrôle.Lafonctionparentale,dansuntelcontexte, devientpérilleuse,d’autantplusquelespouvoirspublics,enprenantlerelais desanciennesinstancesnormatives,n’ontpassujusqu’àmaintenant remplacer les structures de soutien d’antan.

Notes * Cetexteaétéélaboréetrédigédanslecadred’unprojetderecherchesubventionnéparle ConseilderecherchesenscienceshumainesduCanadaetdirigéparRenéeJoyal;Me Carole Chatillon,Mme LouiseChauvetteetMe MarioProvostontlargementcontribuéàla recherche documentaire. 1. Loi modifiant le Code civil, L.Q. 1977, c. 72. 2. Loisurlaprotectiondelajeunesse,L.Q.1977,c.20.Cetteloin’estentréeenvigueurdanssa totalité que le 15 janvier 1979. 3. Loi modifiant le Code civil, préc., note 1. 4. Voir,parexemple,enmatièredevagabondage:Actepourremédierplusefficacementà diversabuspréjudiciablesàl’améliorationdel’Agriculture,etàl’industriedanscette Province,etpourd’autresobjets,StatutsprovinciauxduBas-Canada,1824,c.33,art.30;en matièrededélinquancejuvénile:Acteconcernantlesprisonspourlesjeunesdélinquants, Statuts du Canada, 1858, c. 88. 5. Acte concernant les écoles d’industrie, S.Q. 1869, c. 17. 6. Préc., note 5. 7. Débats de l’Assemblée législative, 1867-1870 (reconstitution), pp. 171, 192, 204 et 211. 8 Idem, p. 218. 9. Idem, p. 176.

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10. Acte concernant les école de réforme, S.Q. 1869, c. 18. L’Angleterre s’était en effet dotée, durant les années 1850, d’un système d’éducation correctionnelle pour les personnes mineures délinquantes ou sujettes à le devenir. Voir, à ce sujet, Mario PROVOST, Le mauvais traitement de l’enfant: Perspectives historiques et comparatives de la législation sur la protection de la jeunesse, (1991) 22 Revue de Droit, p. 1. 11. Voir, à ce sujet, l’Acte pour amender l’Acte 32 Victoria, c. 17, concernant les écoles d’industrie, S.Q. 1884, c. 23. Cette loi avait également pour objet d’abaisser l’âge des enfants visés de quatorze à douze ans. L’âge de quatorze ans a été rétabli en 1894. 12. Voir, à ce sujet, Loi amendant les Statuts refondus, 1909, concernant les jeunes délinquants, S.Q. 1912, c. 39. Le titre de cette loi illustre une fois de plus l’association qui est encore faite à cette époque entre les jeunes délinquants et les jeunes placés en école d’industrie. 13. Loi concernant la protection de l’enfance, S.Q. 1944, c. 33. 14. Commission d’assurance-maladie de Québec, 1er Rapport. Cette commission est issue de la Loi instituant une Commission d’assurance-maladie, S.Q. 1943, c. 32. 15. Les commissaires reçoivent en outre les mémoires de dix-neuf autres personnes ou organismes qui préfèrent ne pas témoigner devant la Commission: Commission d’assurance-maladie de Québec, 1er Rapport, p. 3. 16. Loi concernant les écoles d’industrie, S.R.Q. 1941, c. 39. 17. Loi constituant le département de bien-être social et de la jeunesse, S.Q. 1946, c. 22. 18. Loi relative aux écoles de protection de la jeunesse, S.Q. 1950, c. 11. 19. Loi instituant la Cour de bien-être social, S.Q. 1950, c. 10. 20. Loi modifiant la Loi des écoles de protection de la jeunesse, S.Q. 1950-51, c. 56. 21. Loi sur la capacité juridique de la femme mariée, L.Q. 1964, c. 66. 22. Loi concernant les régimes matrimoniaux, L.Q. 1969, c. 77. 23. Loi sur les services de santé et les services sociaux, L.Q. 1971, c. 48. 24. Loi concernant la protection des enfants soumis à des mauvais traitements, L.Q. 1974, c. 59. 25. Loi sur la protection de la jeunesse, L.Q. 1977, c. 20. 26. Depuis la récente réforme des services de santé et des services sociaux, ces Centres n’existent plus. Une grande partie de leur mission est maintenant exercée par les Centres de protection de l’enfance et de la jeunesse. 27. Les articles 38 et 38.1 de la Loi actuelle énumèrent de façon limitative les situations pouvant donner lieu à l’intervention publique. 28. Le nom de cet organisme a été modifié en 1989 pour celui de Commission de protection des droits de la jeunesse. 29. Loi modifiant le Code civil, L.Q. 1977, c. 72.

Bibliographie BOURGEOIS, Charles-Édouard, Une richesse à sauver: l’enfant sans soutien, Trois-Rivières, Éditions du bien public, 1947. D’AMOURS, Oscar, Survol historique de la protection de l’enfance au Québec de 1608 à 1977, annexe au Rapport de la commission parlementaire spéciale sur la protection de la jeunesse, Éditeur officiel du Québec, 1982; texte également publié à la Revue Service social, 1986, vol. 35, p. 386. DELEURY, Édith, Michèle RIVET et Jean-Marc NAULT, « De la puissance paternelle à l’autorité parentale, une institution en voie de trouver sa vraie finalité », (1974) 15, Les Cahiers de Droit, p. 779. DELEURY, Édith et Michèle RIVET, « La protection de l’enfant en droit social québécois », (1978) 9, Revue de droit de l’Université de Sherbrooke, p. 16. DUMONT, Micheline, Michèle JEAN, Marie LAVIGNE et Jennifer STODDART, L’histoire des femmes au Québec depuis quatre siècles, Montréal, Quinze, 1982. DURAND-BRAULT, Ginette, « La Charte et la famille, du nivellement des droits au nivellement des rôles », (1991), Apprentissage et socialisation, vol. 14, no 2, p. 135. FECTEAU, Jean-Marie, Un nouvel ordre des choses: la pauvreté, le crime, l’État au Québec, de la fin du XVIIIe siècle à 1840, Montréal, VLB Éditeur, 1989. HAMELIN, Jean et Yves ROBY, Histoire économique du Québec (1851-1896), Montréal, Fides, 1971. JEAN, Dominique, Familles québécoises et politiques sociales touchant les enfants de 1940 à 1960: obligation scolaire, allocations familiales, travail juvénile, thèse de doctorat (Histoire), Université de Montréal, Faculté des études supérieures, 1989. JOYAL, Renée, Précis de droit des jeunes, t. 2, Cowansville, Les Éditions Yvons Blais Inc., 1988.

82 L’évolution des modes de contrôle de l’autorité parentale

JOYAL, Renée, « La notion d’intérêt supérieur de l’enfant. Sa place dans la Convention des Nations-Unies sur les droits de l’enfant » (1991) 62, Revue internationale de droit pénal, 785. JOYAL, Renée et Carole CHATILLON, « La loi québécoise de protection de l’enfance de 1944. Genèse et avortement d’une réforme » (à paraître à la Revue Histoire sociale, 1994) JOYAL, Renée et Mario PROVOST, « La loi sur la protection de la jeunesse de 1977. Une maturation laborieuse, un texte porteur », (1993) 34, Les Cahiers de Droit, p. 635. LAPLANTE, Jacques, Prison et ordre social au Québec, Ottawa, Les Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1989. LINTEAU, Paul-André, René DUROCHER, Jean-Claude ROBERT et François RICARD, Histoire du Québec contemporain,vol.2«LeQuébec depuis 1930 », Québec, Boréal Express, 1986. MEYER, Philippe, L’enfant et la raison d’État, Paris, Seuil, 1977. MONGEAU, Serge, Évolution de l’assistance au Québec, Une étude historique des diverses modalités d’assistance au Québec des origines de la colonie à nos jours, Montréal, Éditions du Jour, 1967. PARIZEAU, Alice, Protection de l’enfant: échec?, Montréal, Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1979. POULIN, Gonzalve, L’assistance sociale dans la province de Québec, 1608-1951, Québec, Commission royale d’enquête sur les problèmes constitutionnels, 1955. PROVOST, Mario, « Le mauvais traitement de l’enfant: perspectives historiques et comparatives de la législation sur la protection de la jeunesse », (1991) 22, Revue de droit, 1. ROY, Jean-Louis, La marche des Québécois: le temps des ruptures 1945-1960, Montréal, Leméac, 1976. RYERSON, Stanley B., Le capitalisme et la Confédération, Montréal, Éditions Parti-Pris, 1972. VAILLANCOURT, Yves, L’évolution des politiques sociales au Québec, 1940-1960, Montréal, P.U.M., 1988. VOISINE, Nive, en collaboration avec André BEAULIEU et Jean HAMELIN, Histoire de l’Église catholique au Québec (1608-1970), Montréal, Fides, 1971.

83 Denise Lemieux et Léon Bernier

La transmission intergénérationnelle dans les projets de procréation : une approche qualitative et subjective des changements démographiques au Québec

Résumé Les études démographiques ont établi la convergence des comportements sociodémographiques et les tendances à la baisse de la fécondité dans les pays occidentaux au cours des dernières décennies. Si ces phénomènes renvoient à des facteurs conjoncturels plus ou moins analogues des économies contemporaines, qui se répercutent sur les modes de vie et en particulier sur l’entrée dans la vie adulte, l’analyse de récits de vie permet de situer dans les expériences vécues dans la famille d’origine, la transmission ou le rejet d’un héritage familial dont certains éléments sont redéfinis dans les contextes nouveaux où s’actualisent les projets de procréation. Les données analysées sont tirées d’une enquête par récits de vie sur Le désir d’enfant: du projet à la réalisation*, chez des femmes et des hommes du Québec contemporain.

Abstract Demographic studies have established a convergence between sociodemographic behaviour and a trend towards low fertility in western countries over the past decades. In part, this phenomenon reflects the impact of current economic conditions which in turn affect life styles and especially entry into the adult world. However, an analysis of the stories reported in this study helps to show how events experienced in the family of origin affect the transmission or the non-transmission of a family heritage, certain elements of which are redefined given the new contexts in which procreation projects are realized. The data analyzed in this article is drawn from a survey of stories of life experience as told by women and men of contemporary Quebec regarding their desire to have children.

Un peu partout dans les sociétés occidentales, les trois dernières décennies ont donné lieu à une accélération du long déclin de la fécondité amorcé au cours du XIXe siècle dans le sillage de l’industrialisation. Dans la conjugaison des facteurs associés au déclin du nombre d’enfants par famille, on évoque les transformations des structures familiales en rapport avec les changements de l’organisation du travail et les phénomènes culturels qui y sont associés. Avec l’industrialisation, le salariat s’est généralisé, ce qui suscite une division des rôles familiaux selon un modèle pourvoyeur-ménagère et un nouveau statut de l’enfant dans la famille par l’entremise de sa mise à l’écart du travail et de son assignation à l’univers scolaire. Ce modèle, apparu à la fin du XIXe siècle, s’est peu à peu diffusé dans la plupart des milieux, et la famille moderne semble avoir connu son apogée après la Deuxième Guerre mondiale.

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Les changements rapides des dernières décennies découlent de phénomènes analogues liés au contexte économique de l’ère postindustrielle, où figurent au premier rang l’accroissement du travail des femmes et leur scolarisation plus poussée. En outre, certains changements techniques ont modifié les modes de vie, en particulier l’apparition de moyens contraceptifs efficaces qui rendent possibles une entière liberté face aux grossesses et l’émergence de nouveaux styles de vie personnels et familiaux. La cohabitation hors mariage, les maternités de plus en plus tardives en certains milieux, les ruptures conjugales plus fréquentes et les formes diversifiées de familles qui en résultent sont les caractéristiques les plus visibles d’une mutation des comportements familiaux. Celle-ci renvoie également aux changements des normes et des valeurs dans le nouveau contexte : nouvelles significations de l’enfant et du couple; idéal égalitaire concernant la division des tâches domestiques et éducatives; et nouveaux modèles de parentalité (Dandurand, 1988, Lapierre- Adamcyk, 1987, Lemieux et Mercier, 1990). Les portraits sociodémographiques de la fécondité des années 1980-1990 permettent d’établir à quelles caractéristiques des individus et de leurs modes de vie renvoient les variations du nombre d’enfants par famille, qui oscille désormais autour de un ou deux enfants ou plus rarement trois (Peron et al. 1987; Rochon, 1989, 1990). Ces changements s’inscrivent dans des tendances plus ou moins semblables des pays occidentaux et se traduisent par une diminution des indices synthétiques de la fécondité (Henripin, 1989; Lapierre- Adamcyk, 1988; Romaniuc, 1984). Au Québec, de l’indice 4 au cours des années 1950, on est passé à 1,5 en 1983. (Romaniuc, p. 17). Les analyses et les explications de ces changements demeurent, de l’avis de tous, insuffisamment développées. Si la recherche s’est attardée davantage aux aspects conjoncturels et personnels qui entourent la prise de décision, certains chercheurs dirigent l’attention vers le phénomène du changement des modèles culturels avec l’arrivée des générations, issues des familles d’après-guerre, qui accèdent à l’âge adulte dans une conjoncture moins favorable à leur établissement. Étudiant la modification des modèles parentaux sous l’angle des ruptures et des continuités, Vern L. Bengston (1987) attribue à l’écart entre les modèles et les valeurs élaborés au cours de l’après-guerre et les particularités de la conjoncture des années 1960-1970, l’émergence de plusieurs mouvements sociaux qui contribueront à définir des enjeux normatifs appropriés au nouveau contexte, qu’il s’agisse de l’écologisme, du pacifisme, de la libération sexuelle ou du féminisme. Dans La famille incertaine (1989), Louis Roussel élabore une explication du même genre au sujet des changements de la fécondité en Europe et en Amérique. Dans cette version sociologique des explications cycliques de la fécondité, l’accent est mis sur la privatisation du couple et la remise en question de l’institution matrimoniale. À partir des données concernant la fécondité au Québec, le démographe Jacques Henripin examine tour à tour dans Naître ou ne pas être (1989) les explications économiques des cycles de la fécondité depuis la guerre et les interprétations sociologiques de N. Keyfitz et L. Roussel, qui font place au travail des femmes et aux transformations des rapports de sexe. Il évoque l’outillage meilleur de la contraception (Marcil-Gratton, 1987, 1988) et son incidence sur la définition du couple et de la maternité. Selon Henripin, les explications du changement démographique des dernières décennies demeurent mal étayées empiriquement, et le cas québécois, sans être bien différent de celui des autres sociétés occidentales, présente des

86 La transmission intergénérationnelle dans les projets de procréation caractéristiques qui demandent à être expliquées et semblent renvoyer à des composantes culturelles. La résistance au changement jusqu’aux années 1960 fait ressortir, pour le Québec, la rapidité du déclin qui s’ensuit et où se devine peut-être aussi une amplification de la réaction au traditionalisme de la période précédente. Des données partielles d’une enquête qualitative et rétrospective réalisée au Québec dans les années 1991-1992, nous permettront d’explorer l’influence des phénomènes intergénérationnels vécus dans la famille sur le désir d’enfant et sur les projets de procréation. Sans écarter l’incidence des facteurs techniques ou économiques propres aux conjonctures récentes sur les comportements conjugaux et reproducteurs des jeunes adultes, nous avons voulu examiner ces phénomènes au niveau microsociologique, à partir des expériences subjectives et des interprétations qu’en donnent les acteurs. Quelle place occupent les projets de procréation ou leur absence dans l’ensemble des projets de vie personnels d’hommes et de femmes confrontés aux nouveaux contextes d’existence? Quels en sont les antécédents et les conséquents? Tel est l’objet de la recherche sur Le désir d’enfant: du projet à la réalisation d’où sont tirées les données de cet article. Une centaine de récits de vie ont été recueillis auprès d’hommes et de femmes dans la vingtaine et dans la trentaine, récits où les acteurs livrent l’interprétation de leurs cheminements et de leurs décisions. L’approche du récit de vie (Bertaux, 1981; Bertaux et Kohli, 1984; Desmarais et Grell, 1986) permet de situer les processus et les stratégies des acteurs dans les diverses séquences de vie évoquées rétrospectivement, mais elle permet aussi d’explorer les trajectoires en tenant compte de la dynamique des rapports interpersonnels et des relations intergénérationnelles dans les familles. L’enquête ne vise pas à dégager des observations généralisables à toute une population mais, à partir de l’analyse attentive de cas particuliers, à mieux examiner le faisceau enchevêtré des éléments mentionnés comme ayant joué sur les trajectoires individuelles, pour en dégager quelques interprétations. Le présent article ne porte que sur les femmes et étudie principalement l’influence des expériences familiales vécues dans la famille d’orientation sur les projets et comportements des individus. Certes, la démographie n’a pas ignoré la composante générationnelle des comportements de fécondité, dont elle suit attentivement l’évolution pour des cohortes de naissances ou des promotions de mariages successives. Fréquemment citée, la théorie d’Easterlin (1978), axée sur les effets économiques des niveaux de fécondité, postule des ajustements cycliques des comportements reproducteurs, la forte fécondité d’une période produisant, par un effet de saturation des places sur le marché du travail, le malthusianisme d’une période ultérieure. La démonstration s’appuie sur des données à l’échelle macrosociale. Notre analyse explore plutôt l’existence de tels phénomènes au niveau microsociologique en examinant, dans les discours, les traces d’une transmission de certains aspects des cultures familiales de la génération des parents (parfois des grands-parents) à la génération des filles interviewées. Il s’agit donc de comprendre à partir d’une série de cas particuliers, comment et par quels mécanismes psychosociologiques, le modèle familial tel qu’il a été vécu dans l’enfance (rapports conjugaux et parentaux; dimension de la fratrie; climat et densité des échanges intra et extrafamiliaux) a pu se transmettre et servir de modèle ou de contre-modèle dans le projet familial des personnes rencontrées. Les sujets sélectionnés (53 répondantes dans la vingtaine ou la trentaine rencontrées au cours de 1991-1992 soit à Montréal et sa banlieue, soit

87 IJCS / RIÉC dans une région limitrophe et dans une région périphérique) illustrent bien par leurs récits qu’elles sont enfants de leur époque et donc de conjonctures socio- économiques spécifiques, mais aussi que leurs destins s’imbriquent, par des ramifications économiques, sociales et psychologiques complexes, dans ceux de leurs parents. Ceux-ci sont urbains de première ou de seconde génération, ouvriers, employés, professionnels et petits entrepreneurs de grande ville ou de petites villes; quelques-uns sont des villageois ou des agriculteurs. Leurs âges varient énormément de même que les modèles familiaux qu’ils ont mis en oeuvre. Ces modèles familiaux, tirés des récits rétrospectifs sur l’enfance et l’adolescence, serviront à retracer certains traits de l’héritage familial des répondantes. Le découpage retenu distingue a posteriori des modèles de familles enracinés dans des milieux sociaux et des périodes historiques différentes; le nombre d’enfants y apparaît comme une caractéristique significative, sans en être l’élément principal de définition. À travers des histoires individuelles et familiales, c’est donc une page d’histoire de la famille québécoise qui se manifeste, histoire faite de continuités et de ruptures, ainsi qu’on peut l’observer par ailleurs à travers les statistiques récentes. Il s’agit aussi d’histoires singulières d’héritages, acceptés ou refusés, toujours remaniés au sein d’adaptations et d’échanges réciproques entre générations, qu’on ne peut saisir et analyser qu’en faisant appel aux témoignages, (Sévigny, 1979; Ferrand, 1991; Bertaux-Wiame, 1991; Gaulejac et Aubert, 1990). Nous sommes particulièrement redevables aux personnes interrogées d’avoir entrouvert la porte sur l’univers secret des phénomènes de reproduction dans la société actuelle. Les cas évoqués seront présentés avec de légères modifications de détails pour assurer l’anonymat.

Des femmes bien de leur temps : désir d’enfant et faible fécondité Les personnes rencontrées pour les fins de cette enquête ont été choisies selon un mode non aléatoire, au sein de deux cohortes correspondant aux groupes d’âge où se concentrent principalement les naissances, soit la vingtaine et la trentaine. Chaque cohorte comprenait une proportion égale de personnes ayant déjà un ou plusieurs enfants et de personnes n’en ayant pas. Outre la provenance géographique relevant de trois régions dont un grand centre, les critères de sélection visaient une diversité de professions, de niveaux de scolarité et de conditions de vie. Les origines sociales et familiales des sujets nous étaient révélées au cours de l’entrevue. Ce thème constituait un volet du récit de vie, suivi de l’histoire scolaire, professionnelle, de l’histoire amoureuse, conjugale, contraceptive et, le cas échéant, reproductrice et parentale. Puisque cet article ne traite que des femmes, soulignons que la plupart d’entre elles exprimaient le désir d’avoir un jour un enfant, bien que ce désir, faible ou intense selon les individus, et parfois tout nouveau dans leur existence, ne se traduisait pas dans tous les cas par un projet précis à court ou à long terme, ou, ce qui découle de toute façon de l’échantillonnage, par une procréation déjà réalisée. Malgré des situations personnelles fort variées, les récits des mères comme ceux des non-mères se rejoignent singulièrement pour tracer les paramètres assez similaires du contexte qu’elles jugent idéal, voire nécessaire, pour envisager de mettre un enfant au monde, aujourd’hui. La plupart des répondantes subordonnent en effet leur projet de procréation à la réalisation d’un certain nombre d’objectifs personnels, qui leur permettent de vivre d’abord leur jeunesse : études, voyages, établissement de relations affectives et sexuelles heureuses, et sortie de la famille d’orientation. Elles évoquent aussi, comme préalables essentiels, la rencontre de critères qui

88 La transmission intergénérationnelle dans les projets de procréation

touchent l’établissement dans la vie adulte et les conditions jugées nécessaires à l’actualisation d’un projet parental : création d’une relation conjugale suffisamment stable, avec un conjoint capable d’accepter la paternité, d’en assumer les responsabilités et de partager les tâches de la vie quotidienne et de la parentalité Ces préalables supposent, pour les femmes autant que pour les hommes, un emploi qui leur permette de faire vivre une famille et de manifester qu’elles ne sont pas « juste une mère ». À l’intérieur de ce portrait idéal, relativement uniforme, de la vie familiale (qui reflète, vraisemblablement, à la fois l’effet de contraintes situationnelles et « l’esprit du temps », deux aspects conjoncturels importants), les projets de fécondité demeurent peu élevés, n’allant jamais au delà de deux ou trois. Un certain nombre de femmes optent même pour un seul enfant, hésitent ou se résignent à ne pas enfanter, puisque l’une ou l’autre des exigences qu’elles posent ne sont pas réalisées. Aux extrêmes de cette variation des projets de procréation (soit l’expression d’un désir d’enfant fortement ressenti et accompagné de 2 ou 3 enfants projetés, ou au contraire un désir très faible ou absent, accompagné parfois d’un enfant imprévu, accepté ou non), on décèle pour les deux cohortes, l’influence très nette de l’héritage familial. Cet héritage désigne non pas le simple nombre d’enfants dans la famille d’origine, bien que ce nombre semble une composante de l’héritage, mais surtout l’expérience d’enfance, le climat affectif perçu au sein du couple parental, le rapport à la parenté et les relations parents-enfants remémorées avec leur dominante de bonheur ou de malheur, d’antagonisme poussé ou de conflits normaux aux phases d’individuation de l’adolescence. Un examen plus attentif à partir d’un certain nombre de cas situera ces dimensions de l’héritage symbolique dans leur retentissement sur une trajectoire individuelle où se manifestent tout autant, bien sûr, des effets de conjonctures et de maturation peu traités dans le présent article (Bernier, 1980; Attias-Donfut, 1988).

Les générations familiales en présence : deux cohortes de filles, plusieurs cohortes de parents Si les femmes rencontrées appartiennent à deux cohortes d’âge ayant vécu leur enfance dans les années 1950 et 1960, et leur adolescence dans les années 1970 ou 1980 environ, leurs parents n’appartiennent pas seulement à deux cohortes de naissance. À titre d’exemple, parmi les femmes dans la trentaine, on trouve une mère née en 1919, une autre en 1940. Ces différences d’âge dans la génération des parents se traduisent aussi par une diversité des modèles familiaux d’où proviennent les répondantes. Certaines sont issues de familles qu’on peut caractériser de « traditionnelles », tant par le nombre d’enfants que par la prégnance des valeurs religieuses et le mode de vie. D’autres, surtout parmi celles de la cohorte des femmes dans la vingtaine, ont vécu leur enfance ou leur adolescence dans un milieu familial qui offrait déjà les caractéristiques de ce que l’on a par la suite appelé les « nouvelles familles»:laréduction du nombre d’enfants, la dissociation plus grande du conjugal et du parental, et une certaine symétrie des rôles parentaux. Entre les « familles traditionnelles » tardives et les « familles nouvelles » en émergence, s’intercale un troisième modèle, celui des « familles modernes », qui s’est développé au Québec surtout dans la période de croissance de l’après- guerre et du baby boom, consacrant la spécialisation des rôles de pourvoyeur et de ménagère et constituant l’enfance en un mythe moderne et la maternité en une occupation spécialisée et exercée à plein temps au profit d’un nombre moyen d’enfants (Lemieux et Mercier 1989; Houle et Hurtubise, 1991; Ricard, 1992).

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Même si, dans leur complexité et leur singularité, les portraits de famille tracés par les répondantes peuvent parfois chevaucher plus d’un modèle, la répartition des différentes histoires familiales entre ces trois catégories met en évidence certains aspects des processus de transmission et leur influence sur les projets de procréation. À travers les souvenirs qu’elles en gardent, qu’elles remanient ou réinterprètent à la lumière des normes des années 1990 et de leurs étapes de vie actuelles, les portraits de famille de la génération des parents sont souvent explicitement reliés, dans l’entrevue, aux projets familiaux et procréateurs des informatrices et, en certains cas, au refus de procréer. L’évocation de ces phénomènes de transmission n’a pas pour objet de faire de la transmission du modèle familial d’origine un déterminisme des destins personnels. Il s’agit plutôt de saisir, au moyen de l’approche biographique, quelques bribes d’explication de ce qu’on a appelé la « seconde transition démographique » (Léridon, 1987) qui, au delà du déclin de la fécondité, renvoie aux significations de la parentalité et à la place de l’enfant dans les projets de vie.

Dans l’ombre des familles nombreuses du Québec traditionnel La recherche historique féministe a modifié le portrait des familles québécoises du début du XXe siècle en rappelant l’existence, derrière les moyennes de six enfants et plus par mère, de femmes sans enfants ou de mères de petites familles (Lavigne, 1983). Dès la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, des familles bourgeoises, et même quelques familles ouvrières avaient commencé à limiter leur descendance (Lemieux et Mercier, 1989; Bradburry, 1993). À toutes les époques cependant, les familles nombreuses ont produit beaucoup plus que leur part de l’ensemble des enfants, d’où les proportions relativement élevées d’individus qui ont vécu dans une nombreuse fratrie. Notre étude révèle les traces, à côté de familles de cinq enfants ou moins, parmi les familles d’origine, de plusieurs familles de six enfants et plus (pour des résultats similaires voir Carmel, 1990). Cette catégorie de familles avait constitué le cadre de l’enfance de presque la moitié des femmes dans la trentaine, mais de seulement trois des 24 femmes dans la vingtaine. Sur ces trois cas, deux familles provenaient de l’extérieur du Québec et l’autre appartenait à une secte traditionnaliste qui favorisait la natalité. Les femmes nées dans les années 1950 comptaient donc souvent une nombreuse fratrie, alors que le phénomène semble tout à fait exceptionnel dans les années 1960. Dans la cohorte née dans les années 1960, on trouve davantage de petites familles et de familles d’enfants uniques, quoique les quatre ou cinq enfants y existent également. Les familles très nombreuses proviennent pour la plupart de régions rurales ou périphériques, mais des familles de six ou sept enfants vivaient aussi en milieu urbain. Peu importe les milieux de vie, les souvenirs qu’en gardent nos témoins révèlent un modèle familial basé sur l’entraide (on y observe des mères qui travaillent, soit sur la ferme, soit dans l’entreprise familiale), modèle devenu difficile à maintenir sur le plan économique, alors que son cadre de développement initial s’était modifié. Vivre dans une famille de douze enfants dans les années 1960 peut même sembler un anachronisme. Il n’est pas étonnant que l’une des femmes ayant connu cette situation soit une des dernières-nées d’une famille villageoise et qu’elle soit aussi la plus âgée des femmes rencontrées. Cette femme raconte que sa mère départageait sa vie et sa famille en deux, désignant les six premiers enfants comme « les enfants de l’amour » et les six derniers comme « les enfants de la religion ». Pour compléter le revenu de son conjoint, tiré d’une petite entreprise artisanale,

90 La transmission intergénérationnelle dans les projets de procréation cette mère tenait un petit commerce, et sa fille la désigne comme le « patron » de la famille. Tous les enfants ont travaillé dans l’une ou l’autre des entreprises familiales, et diverses stratégies furent mises en oeuvre pour assurer la scolarisation de chacun. Gardienne des enfants de sa soeur pendant son enfance et scolarisée dans une profession traditionnellement féminine, l’informatrice dit avoir accueilli bien facilement des bébés qu’elle savait soigner et « brasser » depuis longtemps. Elle eut trois enfants sans trop d’interruption, ce qui s’avéra difficile quand le premier manifesta des retards graves de développement. Malgré une transmission des valeurs de maternage, des conflits mère-fille au niveau des valeurs religieuses transparaissent et se manifestent en particulier lors du divorce de la répondante. L’histoire d’une autre famille de douze enfants apparaît particulièrement dramatique. La mère, suite à une maladie du père, est obligée d’assumer la direction des travaux de la ferme où vit la famille et de retourner travailler à l’extérieur. Une des dernières nées, l’informatrice conserve le souvenir de la longue maladie, puis du décès de son père, survenu alors qu’elle était adolescente. Les parents, surtout la mère, possédaient une éducation au-dessus de la moyenne et la parentèle comprenait plusieurs religieux, religieuses et monseigneurs. La transmission du capital scolaire a pu se réaliser avec un succès impressionnant. Financée par le travail des aînés et les bourses d’études, la scolarisation de la génération suivante a pu être assurée par l’austérité du mode de vie, une forte discipline, le travail précoce des enfants et les pratiques d’entraide. Quant à la fécondité, vraisemblablement maintenue à un niveau élevé par les valeurs religieuses dans la génération des parents, elle périclite à la génération suivante. L’informatrice souligne que parmi les douze enfants de sa fratrie, la seule à s’être rendue à trois rejetons « passe pour l’héroïne de la famille ». Elle-même dit avoir développé une forte aversion pour la vie grégaire de son enfance au sein de « la tribu » et avoir entretenu avec sa mère un rapport teinté de conflits profonds et d’admiration secrète. Après un cheminement difficile et des réalisations professionnelles, elle devient mère à son tour, d’abord par accident, puis par choix. Abandonnée alors qu’elle est enceinte, elle précise que son amour des enfants a joué sur sa décision de poursuivre une grossesse survenue dans une situation de couple en crise. Sa condition actuelle de célibataire, s’ajoutant à une vie professionnelle aux horaires difficiles et au revenu précaire, ne lui permet pas cependant, pour l’instant, de s’imaginer donnant à nouveau la vie. Le modèle de la famille nombreuse est plus explicitement rejeté quand les femmes perçoivent leur mère comme ayant été dominée ou rendue malade par ses grossesses. Un témoignage fait état d’une famille de neuf enfants où la mère attendit que les enfants les plus jeunes aient grandi pour demander le divorce. Gardant le souvenir d’une « famille unie sauf le père », l’informatrice raconte avoir quitté très jeune la maison familiale et abandonné ses études en pleine révolte. Cependant, à vingt ans, ayant épousé un homme plus âgé qu’elle, elle accepte, gagnée par le désir de paternité de celui-ci, de mettre au monde un enfant sans vraiment l’avoir elle-même désiré. Grâce à la présence du père, qui assure également le bien-être matériel du couple, cette maternité ne l’empêche pas de retourner aux études et de terminer son cégep. Contrairement à sa mère, le fait d’avoir un enfant en bas âge ne l’empêche pas non plus de divorcer quelques années plus tard, alors qu’elle poursuit des études universitaires. Tout en ayant rompu avec le modèle de stabilité du couple tel que l’a vécu la génération de sa mère, elle reproduit néanmoins dans le rapport avec sa fille, l’héritage d’un fort sentiment d’obligation parentale

91 IJCS / RIÉC qui, s’il ne l’a pas empêchée de divorcer, a néanmoins contribué à subordonner sa vie amoureuse à son rôle de mère. Dans un autre témoignage, une jeune femme d’origine européenne raconte avoir repoussé pendant dix ans après son mariage la décision d’avoir un enfant. Pour expliquer ce report, qui répondait aux difficultés d’établissement de ce couple d’immigrants, elle précise avoir voulu aussi signifier à son père sa liberté de procréer, lui reprochant d’avoir imposé une série de cinq grossesses rapprochées à sa mère. L’expression d’une opposition aussi manifeste est cependant assez exceptionnelle parmi les témoignages entendus. C’est davantage par allusions que les informatrices d’origine québécoise évoquent les grossesses successives de leur mère, son travail sans fin, certaines exprimant leur désaccord par une insistance sur le dévouement excessif de leur mère et sa consécration trop exclusive à son rôle maternel. Pour demeurer implicites, ces jugements transparaissent néanmoins par rapport au désir d’enfant. Ainsi, deux informatrices, une provenant d’une famille de sept enfants dont le père était fréquemment en chômage et buvait, et une autre d’une famille de neuf dont le père s’est suicidé à la suite de difficultés financières, disent n’avoir jamais éprouvé de désir d’enfant. Les deux sont toutefois devenues enceintes « par accident » et, pour des raisons bien différentes, ont gardé l’enfant inattendu, qu’elles ont « découvert » ensuite avec émerveillememt. Dans les deux cas, se révèle, par ailleurs une admiration secrète pour la mère et une expérience vécue de prise en charge par la communauté au moment de l’enfance, l’une ayant été élevée par sa grand- mère, l’autre souvent confiée à ses soeurs. De cet héritage provient leur modèle actuel de maternage, reformulé cependant dans une version bien contemporaine voulant qu’on ne soit pas « juste une mère ». Sans doute pourrait-on nuancer ces portraits des familles très nombreuses, pour ainsi dire attardées dans les années 1960-1970, en y joignant quelques familles davantage favorisées au plan socio-économique et qui sont arrivées à maintenir une vie familiale plus agréable aux yeux de la génération qui en est issue. Des variantes urbaines d’un modèle qualifié de « traditionnel » et surtout défini par les rapports intensifs de sociabilité au sein des parentés ont été observées dans les milieux montréalais par Nicole Gagnon au début des années 1960 (Fortin, 1987). Les cas cités jusqu’ici permettent d’entrevoir qu’un modèle familial qui comportait les mécanismes traditionnels de transmission de l’amour des enfants, entre autres l’apprentissage précoce du maternage, se répercutait à la baisse sur le nombre d’enfants « désirés » s’il était perçu comme problématique pour la mère ou contraignant pour les membres de la fratrie. Plusieurs familles très nombreuses de notre corpus semblent avoir suscité un faible désir d’enfants chez les filles, qui en rejettent le mode de vie; si elles deviennent enceintes par accident, elles puisent cependant dans cette culture familiale traditionnelle, parfois même dans le soutien direct des parents, des dispositions ou « habitus » (Bourdieu, 1980) qui facilitent la maternité.

Dans la foulée des familles modernes d’après-guerre Les souvenirs que certaines femmes gardent d’une vie familiale au sein d’une fratrie relativement importante, mais de dimension plus compatible avec les conditions de vie prévalentes à partir des années 1950, semblent évoquer des situations plus propices à l’émergence du désir d’enfant et à l’établissement d’une norme idéale autour de deux ou trois enfants. Dans les récits, l’évocation de la génération des parents relève davantage ici des rôles de pourvoyeur-

92 La transmission intergénérationnelle dans les projets de procréation ménagère, qui consacrent la présence de la mère à la maison dans l’enfance et connotent souvent l’absence du père reliée à ses activités professionnelles. La division sexuelle des rôles parentaux, présente depuis le début du siècle, s’accentue dans le modèle de la famille d’après-guerre. Il comporte une spécialisation plus marquée de la mère autour de ses activités éducatives et domestiques, et met davantage l’accent sur le lien mère-enfant qui, selon les normes sociales appuyant ce modèle, requiert sa présence à la maison. Dans ce type de famille, il y a peu de mères qui travaillent et celles qui le font par nécessité économique essaient de n’en laisser rien paraître. Une des informatrices dit ne pas s’être rendue compte que sa mère travaillait parce qu’elle était toujours présente à son retour de l’école. Habituellement critiques de ce modèle de spécialisation des rôles selon les genres, modèle peu conforme aux normes actuelles de conjugalité et aux insertions des femmes dans le marché du travail, plusieurs informatrices parlent avec plaisir des fêtes d’enfants et des vacances en famille, mais aussi d’un climat de surprotection à l’égard des enfants jugé parfois étouffant. Voyons d’abord certains cas un peu mitoyens entre la famille traditionnelle et la famille d’après-guerre. Les parents d’une jeune femme, dont le père était petit fonctionnaire en région, ont élevé sept enfants tout en gardant une grand- mère à domicile. Ici, le modèle familial, accompagné d’une valorisation forte de l’entraide et d’une sociabilité intensive à l’égard de la parenté, s’est transmis à la génération actuelle qui modifie cependant les rôles conjugaux pour faire place à des rapports de compagnonnage et au nouveau modèle de paternité active des années 1990. L’informatrice, après avoir fait le récit du monde chaleureux de son enfance, ajoute qu’elle occupe maintenant la maison bâtie par son père où elle vit à son tour dans le voisinage immédiat de ses parents à la retraite, qui partagent l’éducation de leurs petits-enfants. Mariée, elle ne travaille pas et son conjoint exerce aujourd’hui le même emploi qu’occupait son beau-père. Trois enfants sont déjà nés et, malgré un idéal de quatre enfants, ce couple a eu recours à la stérilisation en raison de leur situation économique. Sous-jacents à ce cas plutôt exceptionnel de transmission d’un héritage non seulement symbolique mais matériel se devinent des apprentissages précoces : dès l’âge de 12 ans, la répondante avait pris en charge un petit frère, faisant l’apprentissage d’un rôle où elle se reconnaît aujourd’hui comme une véritable réplique de sa mère. Une transmission de l’héritage familial peut s’effectuer dans un contexte de redéfinition des modèles beaucoup plus poussée (Bengston, 1987). « J’ai une famille nombreuse, je suis née dans une famille nombreuse et eux sont nés dans une famille nombreuse », dit une professionnelle du secteur culturel soulignant que le fait d’avoir vécu dans une famille unie de six enfants lui a donné le goût d’avoir une famille. Elle établit un lien entre le couple de ses parents mariés, peu scolarisés mais ouverts à l’éducation, et son propre couple non marié qui a vécu l’époque et les valeurs de la contre-culture. Comme ses parents qui, chaque été, les emmenaient au bord de la mer, eux-mêmes ont le goût de l’étude et des voyages et veillent à ne pas exclure les enfants de leurs activités. Une conception très libre, à la fois personnelle et communautaire, de l’éducation des enfants, qu’elle accepte de partager avec d’autres adultes, renvoie explicitement à l’éducation reçue des parents. L’héritage parental a été considérablement remodelé, non sans conflits des générations, mais le nouveau modèle est présenté dans la continuité avec celui qu’on a vécu dans l’enfance.

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De petits entrepreneurs, des employés et des ouvriers arrivaient tant bien que mal dans les années 1960-1970 à faire vivre six ou sept enfants. Des familles de quatre ou cinq enfants sont sans doute plus fréquentes, mais certaines répondantes se définissent encore comme faisant partie d’une famille nombreuse. C’est le cas d’une famille de quatre enfants vivant en banlieue de Montréal, dans un « village » où logent les oncles et tantes, ainsi qu’une grand- mère qui occupe toujours l’ancienne demeure. La fratrie des parents des deux lignées est nombreuse, et cet environnement communautaire de l’enfance, doublé de liens étroits dans la fratrie actuelle, semble transmettre un ethos familial qui fait de l’enfant un acteur intégré à la vie familiale. Malgré ce climat favorable à la présence d’enfants, le temps que cette jeune femme a mis à s’établir, à voyager et à parfaire sa formation, des exigences très élevées, partagées avec son conjoint, quant à la présence des parents auprès de l’enfant ont résulté en une maternité tardive et ne laissent prévoir qu’une famille de deux, bien que trois enfants soit jugé le nombre idéal pour une famille. Pour d’autres, en dépit d’une enfance très heureuse dans une famille à l’aise de six enfants, on semble incapable de se résoudre à quitter la liberté et les agréments d’une vie de couple sans enfant. Mariée après une longue cohabitation, une femme dit aimer les enfants et entretenir des liens étroits avec des neveux et nièces, dont elle s’est beaucoup occupée. Ici, l’engagement professionnel semble avoir retardé la réalisation de projets plus personnels vers lesquels elle se tourne par le loisir. Arrivée au milieu de la trentaine, elle hésite toujours à procréer dans un contexte où il est difficile d’être une mère aussi parfaite que l’était sa mère, sereine et calme au milieu de ses enfants, image qu’elle oppose aux jeunes mères essoufflées qu’elle observe parmi ses compagnes de travail. Dans un contexte de changements touchant aussi la génération des parents, les mères de certaines de nos répondantes n’ont pas été sans remettre en question leur confinement au rôle de mère au foyer. Par exemple, une mère de cinq enfants a précipité le départ de trois de ses filles pour ne garder auprès d’elle que les deux plus jeunes, en menaçant de quitter la maison, si la répondante y demeurait, comme elle en avait exprimé le désir. Le rejet ressenti par celle-ci enclenche un itinéraire chaotique qui l’entraîne dans la marginalité : pensées suicidaires, drogue et promiscuité sexuelle. Elle est rescapée du désespoir et de la pauvreté par un oncle qui la soutient dans la réalisation d’un projet de travail et par une soeur qui la reçoit temporairement chez elle. Après des cheminements qui la rapprochent de ses études et d’un choix professionnel peu éloigné de la profession de son père, elle connaît aussi une vie de couple plus heureuse. Dans cette situation meilleure, elle accepte une grossesse imprévue; un deuxième enfant viendra, un peu plus tard, pour procurer un compagnon au premier. Même évoquée avec un brin de nostalgie, l’enfance heureuse au sein des familles modernes des années cinquante, qui dans l’ensemble apparaît propice à l’émergence du désir d’enfant et s’affirme à l’arrière plan de la norme idéale des trois enfants, peut aussi sembler impossible à reproduire dans le contexte actuel, où les femmes mariées travaillent. Par ailleurs, certaines filles perçoivent comme étouffante, leur enfance bien surveillée quand la mère se dévouait, sans être elle-même satisfaite de son rôle. Une dépression de la mère révélant son insatisfaction à l’égard de la maternité, l’alcoolisme ou l’infidélité de leur père, en incitent quelques-unes, malgré une enfance heureuse, à craindre les difficultés conjugales et à reporter longuement ou indéfiniment des projets de maternité.

94 La transmission intergénérationnelle dans les projets de procréation

Dans le contexte des familles en transformation Au cours des années 1950, mais encore plus au cours des années 1960, les familles ouvrières, de classe moyenne ou bourgeoise, auront davantage recours à une contraception désormais un peu plus acceptée et réduiront ainsi les naissances. Certes, plusieurs de nos répondantes sont nées avant 1965 et donc avant l’apparition de contraceptifs efficaces. Ce facteur a cependant pu contribuer à limiter la descendance finale de leurs parents. Par ailleurs, les changements normatifs concernant l’institution du mariage s’amorcent vers cette période (Dandurand, 1988; Lemieux et Mercier, 1992) et modifient le cours de certains mariages de la génération des parents. On décèle peu de cohabitations hors mariage dans la génération des parents, mais quelques situations de conceptions prénuptiales se devinent chez des mères mariées à vingt ans, à dix-huit ans et, pour l’une d’entre elles, à quinze ans. Dans chaque cohorte se retrouve aussi une mère qui choisit de garder son enfant tout en étant célibataire. Situation difficile à vivre dans les années 1960, la monoparentalité célibataire devient relativement acceptée dans les années 1970. Ces différences révèlent une évolution dans l’acceptation des maternités célibataires vers la fin des années 1960 (Massé et al., 1981). Dans la génération des parents, l’abandon du conjoint et le divorce interrompent la constitution de quelques familles. Les divorces des parents sont relativement fréquents dans la cohorte née dans les années 1960, (9 sur 23 familles des femmes dans la vingtaine et 4 sur 29 familles pour la cohorte dans la trentaine). Bien qu’il soit encore peu répandu, ce troisième type de familles d’origine révèle un modèle de conjugalité qui fait davantage place à l’expression des sentiments, à une libéralisation de la sexualité et au partage des tâches domestiques. Des formes plus démocratiques d’éducation des enfants se dessinent et, à l’adolescence, la transmission de savoirs de la mère à la fille à travers l’éducation sexuelle est parfois une occasion d’établir des rapports plus égalitaires, bien que la vie amoureuse de l’une ou de l’autre génération puisse occasionner des conflits. Une plus grande participation de la part des mères dans des activités professionnelles semble caractériser ces familles plus petites. Il est toutefois difficile d’y départager l’effet des facteurs économiques, familiaux (monoparentalité) ou culturels (changements de valeurs) qui s’y trouvent sans doute plus ou moins amalgamés. À mesure qu’on s’approche des années 1970, donc parmi les familles des répondantes dans la vingtaine, on trouve davantage de mères qui travaillent dès le temps de l’enfance des informatrices. Cette situation est évoquée par une femme qui, venant d’une famille de trois enfants, a passé son enfance dans une banlieue. Sa mère travaillait comme infirmière, tandis que son père exerçait un emploi peu lucratif et plutôt pénible, d’où son désir de promouvoir l’instruction des enfants. Une grande tante, habitant la même maison, prolongeait en quelque sorte la surveillance attentive des parents pendant leur absence au travail. Poussée aux études par ses parents et sa tante, cette jeune femme s’est d’abord tournée vers la réussite professionnelle, se permettant de vivre en secret des aventures et prenant ainsi distance d’une éducation très encadrée et du modèle de conjugalité des parents. Après des déceptions vécues au travail et dans sa vie amoureuse, elle envisage un mode de vie et un type d’emploi qui lui permettront de concilier succès professionnel et vie familiale. Un second récit dépeint un mode de vie où les deux parents travaillent dans la même entreprise. Le père, d’abord employé, en devient copropriétaire; la mère

95 IJCS / RIÉC y travaille comme collaboratrice. Enfant unique, l’informatrice évoque sa grand-mère qui la gardait et qu’elle préférait à sa mère au point de refuser de voir cette dernière. Ensuite, elle décrit son goût de la solitude, mais aussi ses activités avec ses parents, faisant ses devoirs tandis que ceux-ci rangeaient les factures de la journée. Elle évoque aussi les sorties agréables de fin de semaine et son plaisir d’être avec des adultes plutôt que des enfants. Malgré le désir de ses parents de la voir poursuivre des études, elle va plutôt choisir un travail de même type que celui de ses parents (Ferrand, 1991, Bernier, 1986). Ce récit de reproduction familiale des aptitudes au travail des parents plutôt que de leurs aspirations scolaires fait état d’un parcours extrêmement précoce d’insertion suivie de postes de gérance obtenus avant la vingtaine. À vingt ans, cette jeune femme cohabite avec son conjoint au sous-sol de la maison familiale et prépare son mariage en envisageant la venue d’enfants. Des mères exerçant des professions traditionnellement féminines, enseignantes, secrétaires ou infirmières, orientent leurs filles vers des professions plus récemment accessibles aux femmes. Des pères encouragent aussi ces choix professionnels. Les nouveaux projets de carrières, dont témoigne la féminisation de la formation universitaire menant aux professions libérales telles que le droit, la médecine et la comptabilité (Dandurand, 1990) ou l’accès à des métiers traditionnellement masculins, semblent s’enraciner dans la transmission d’un modèle de mère au travail ou des aspirations à la mobilité transmises de mère en fille ou de père en fille (Attias-Donfut, 1988). Les choix de carrière des filles peuvent parfois s’éloigner des aspirations parentales, à mesure qu’elles découvrent leurs goûts et aptitudes personnelles. Une artiste, qui se demande encore comment elle s’était retrouvée dans un secteur scientifique, effectue dans un second temps un choix de carrière plus conforme à ses goûts et qui s’apparente à la profession d’oncles et tantes proches d’elle. Son projet de plusieurs enfants, inspiré d’une enfance heureuse et d’une situation d’enfant unique qu’elle ne veut pas reproduire, l’amène à écarter pour un temps l’exercice d’une carrière bien engagée mais difficile à concilier, estime-t-elle, avec l’éducation des enfants. D’autres cas de mères au travail dans la génération des parents semblent favoriser une activité professionnelle qu’on envisage de mener de concert avec les études et la procréation, tandis que des complicités se tissent entre mère et fille autour de liens d’emploi. Il arrive par ailleurs qu’on critique des parents accaparés par leur travail qui délaissent leurs rôles familiaux; un père qui sait seulement donner de l’argent pour exprimer son affection; ou une mère qui n’assume pas ses responsabilités et reporte sur sa fille des travaux domestiques, l’élevage des plus petits et les confidences de ses déboires conjugaux. Ces récits témoignent cependant d’une compassion et d’une admiration pour les mères au travail qui, dans une situation de monoparentalité, ont dû jouer le rôle du père et de la mère, une situation que personne n’envisage de reproduire. L’alcoolisme du père ou de la mère, la mésentente des parents, parfois la violence, se répercutent presque toujours négativement sur les projets de procréation de plusieurs jeunes femmes qui portent sur les épaules le poids du désarroi de la génération précédente et parfois celui de leurs frères et soeurs. Si le refus d’enfant, donnant parfois lieu à des avortements, se retrouve presque toujours dans le sillage des situations familiales marquées de désorganisation, peu importe le nombre d’enfants dans la famille d’origine, la reconstruction d’une famille éclatée autour d’une fratrie est un phénomène assez fréquent. Une jeune femme issue d’une famille violente et désunie dira que ses deux

96 La transmission intergénérationnelle dans les projets de procréation soeurs sont devenues les piliers de la famille, quand ses parents se sont séparés. Rejetant pour elle-même les unions stables et engagée dans une longue série d’aventures, elle refuse la maternité au point d’envisager de donner l’enfant en adoption si une erreur de contraception survenait. À l’horizon, persiste l’image de la famille de sa soeur, présentée comme la réalisation d’un véritable conte de fée. Un autre récit expose une situation où se chevauchent en quelque sorte des expériences de vie familiale relevant de modèles familiaux qui appartiennent à des périodes fort diverses, car la transmission d’un héritage familial fait le saut d’une génération. Le récit d’une enfance en milieu rural au début des années 1960 raconte d’abord l’adoption de la première-née par les grands-parents paternels, sous l’influence d’un jeune père qui considérait sa femme de dix- huit ans trop jeune pour élever l’enfant. Ayant eu ensuite deux autres filles, les parents, qui migrent à Montréal, les confient pour des périodes assez longues aux grands-parents maternels. Suivant en cela des modèles déjà pratiqués au début du siècle par les ruraux en migration, ils effectuent avec des aller-retour et des délégations de leurs rôles parentaux à leurs propres parents, une transition au milieu urbain où tous deux s’insèrent dans le marché du travail. Comme promis, dès l’achat d’une maison, ils reviennent chercher leurs trois filles qui vont vivre le reste de leur enfance et leur adolescence à Montréal. Dans ce récit, la période vécue à la campagne renvoie à une enfance heureuse et choyée, sous la surveillance des grands-parents indulgents, à laquelle succède une tout autre expérience de vie familiale, auprès de parents alcooliques qui se querellent durant les fins de semaines et travaillent beaucoup le reste du temps. C’est dans ce contexte que les trois soeurs apprendront à se débrouiller en l’absence d’une mère qui sait leur imposer des règles de surveillance strictes et à développer une solidarité à toute épreuve qui leur permettra de vivre le divorce de leurs parents comme un repos et de traverser l’enfance et l’adolescence sans problème majeur. Devenues adultes, leur projet familial procède d’un désir d’enfants conditionnel à la présence d’un « nouveau père » et où se profile un modèle de vie familiale ayant peu en commun avec celui de leurs parents. Ici, le lien de transmission n’est pas intergénérationnel, mais transgénérationnel. Passant par le relais d’une solidarité fraternelle compensatoire, l’héritage familial transmis et reçu n’est pas celui des parents, mais des grands-parents.

Reproduction, rejet et réinvention de l’héritage familial : vers une explication partielle des changements de la fécondité Notre analyse d’une cinquantaine de cas, non représentatifs mais diversifiés, d’itinéraires de femmes âgées, en 1990, entre vingt et quarante ans, livre quelques pistes d’interprétation sur les processus intergénérationnels et personnels qui ont mené aux comportements procréatifs observés au Québec au cours des dernières décennies. Il va sans dire que cette analyse, axée sur l’intergénérationnel dans les familles, met entre parenthèses la dimension conjoncturelle du modèle de conjugalité et de parentalité qui prévaut en 1990, ainsi que les conditions présentes ou non de sa réalisation, deux dimensions également révélées dans ces discours. Si nos informatrices, de quelque milieu qu’elles proviennent, s’entendent sur un modèle idéal de couple et de parent et sur un nombre idéal d’enfant qui converge autour de deux ou trois enfants, mais qui aboutit pour l’instant à un peu moins pour nombre d’entre elles, elles n’y arrivent pas par de semblables chemins. En examinant leur parcours familiaux depuis l’enfance, tels qu’elles en gardent le souvenir, nous avons

97 IJCS / RIÉC cherché à dégager des portraits d’enfance et d’adolescence vécues dans les années 1950-1960 et 1970-1980 qui se rattachent à des sous-périodes historiques différentes et révèlent des situations familiales multiples. Ces situations, regroupées a posteriori pour en dégager une typologie, relèvent en partie de conjonctures historiques révolues mais toujours présentes dans les choix des jeunes femmes d’aujourd’hui; elles n’en sont pas le déterminant unique, puisque l’étude retrace les étapes de cheminements personnels et conjugaux en constante évolution. Familles nombreuses en des versions exceptionnelles et un peu attardées d’un modèle « traditionnel » surtout présents dans les régions rurales et périphériques du Québec. Familles encore relativement nombreuses en des versions adaptées d’un modèle d’après- guerre, où survit une culture de l’entraide et familles moyennes de la seconde décennie du baby boom exaltant la mère au foyer et auxquelles sont venues s’ajouter de nouvelles normes médicopsychologiques relatives au maternage. Petites familles en mutation, formées à une époque d’accessibilité plus grande de la contraception et d’accès croissant des femmes au marché du travail. Toutes ces familles se sont engagées en même temps dans une période qui, sous plusieurs aspects, remettait en question les balises de l’univers culturel autour du mariage et de la condition féminine. Ce qui s’est passé au Québec, avec comme résultante un déclin rapide de la fécondité, correspond dans son ensemble à des tendances similaires observées dans d’autres pays. Il est possible cependant de saisir certains des processus socioculturels au sein desquels de nouvelles normes et de nouvelles pratiques ont été forgées; la famille, mettant en présence diverses générations, se situe au coeur de ces changements qui, par ailleurs, n’ont pas été vécus semblablement par les femmes et par les hommes. À partir du concept de générations sexuées, Attias- Donfut (1988) met en relief que les changements sociaux et en particulier les changements des rapports de sexe amorcés au cours des années 1960 ont eu des répercussions sur les rapports intergénérationnels vécus dans les familles et dans les milieux de travail. Dans les sociétés anciennes, la relation mère-fille, lieu d’ancrage des identités sexuelles primaires et relais important des identités sociales de genre, assurait la reproduction du maternage et la division sociale du travail selon les sexes. Dans le nouveau contexte, « il y a décrochage entre les identifications sexuelles précoces et les identifications sexuelles sociales, par brouillages de ces dernières » (Attias-Donfut, p. 123). Dans notre corpus, ce rapport mère-fille s’affirme singulièrement et semble au coeur des processus psychosociologiques qui mènent aux choix de procréation. Il est modelé différemment selon le type de famille et les expériences de chacune. L’expérience d’une enfance dans une « famille traditionnelle », lorsque vécue dans une conjoncture inadaptée à ce type de famille, comme ce fut le cas des familles très nombreuses, semble avoir été propice à l’intériorisation des normes de maternage et à la reproduction de l’« esprit de famille », en même temps qu’inhibitrice du désir d’enfant. La « famille moderne », centrée sur le couple pourvoyeur-éducatrice, a été au contraire un modèle générateur du désir d’enfant en plus d’avoir contribué à l’établissement d’une norme qui a fixé la dimension idéale de la famille à deux ou trois enfants. Dans le contexte de la famille moderne, se sont opérées certaines ruptures intergénérationnelles par rapport notamment à la division sexuelle des rôles. Tout en ayant hérité du désir d’enfanter, les femmes issues de ces familles affirment presque toutes leur refus de reproduire le modèle de la femme au foyer.

98 La transmission intergénérationnelle dans les projets de procréation

La « famille postmoderne », conjuguant de multiples changements concernant, en particulier, l’insertion des mères dans le marché du travail, la dissociation de la conjugalité et de la parentalité, et parfois l’instabilité du couple parental, introduit une grande diversité des conditions de transmission tant matérielles que symboliques entre les générations. Le travail des mères n’est pas sans incidence sur les projets professionnels des filles et l’allongement de la scolarisation de ces dernières. L’impact du modèle familial d’origine sur les projets de procréation peut être à la fois direct et indirect. L’héritage des jeunes femmes issues des « nouvelles familles » comprend par ailleurs le recours largement accepté à la contraception et une définition du projet d’enfant comme une dimension parmi d’autres d’un projet de vie qui comprend également la carrière, la vie de couple et l’épanouissement personnel. La transmission ou non du désir d’enfant à la nouvelle génération semble plus directement fonction du climat familial et plus particulièrement de la nature harmonieuse ou conflictuelle des relations dans le couple parental. Concernant la transmission symbolique d’une identité familiale, le rôle des grand-parents ou des membres de la fratrie peut parfois compenser les difficultés associées à la mouvance du couple parental. Les données présentées ne prétendent pas épuiser la diversité des itinéraires possibles qui ont mené à la situation démographique et familiale contemporaine, mais elles permettent d’explorer le déroulement de ces changements par l’examen des relations entre les générations et leurs échanges et, en certains cas, leurs affrontements dans les familles. Les éléments hérités ne représentent qu’une partie des modèles et savoirs à partir desquels les couples, à chaque génération, réécrivent les scénarios de la geste familiale. Si les données rétrospectives analysées laissent apparaître des éléments de transmission, qui se ramènent le plus souvent à un climat familial, à une présence acceptée des enfants dans le milieu environnant et à des activités précoces de maternage nécessitées par la présence de nombreux enfants, beaucoup d’obstacles à la transmission se dessinent aussi dans ces entrevues et en particulier le contraste entre le modèle idéal de la famille actuelle et les situations et modèles observés au cours de l’enfance.

Notes * Étude subventionnée par le CQRS et réalisée à l’Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture par Renée Dandurand, Léon Bernier, Denise Lemieux et Germain Dulac.

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Pierre Bourdieu, Le sens critique, Paris, Les éditions de minuit, 1980, 475 p. Bettina Bradbury, Working Families, Age, Gender, and Daily Survival in Industrialising Montreal, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart Inc., 1993. Marlène Carmel, Ces femmes qui n’en veulent pas. Enquête sur la non-maternité volontaire au Québec, Montréal, Les Éditions Saint-Martin, 1990, 159 p. Renée Dandurand, Le mariage en question, essai sociohistorique, Québec, Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture, 178 p. Pierre Dandurand, « Démocratie et école au Québec : bilan et défis », dans L’éducation 25 ans plus tard! et après?, Fernand Dumont et Yves Martin, dir., Québec, IQRC, 1990, p. 37-60. Danielle Desmarais et Paul Grell (sous la direction de), Les récits de vie, théorie, méthode et trajectoires types, Montréal, Les Éditions Saint-Martin, 1986, 180 p. R.A. Easterlin, « What Will 1984 Be Like? Socio-economic Implications of Recent Trends in Age Structure », Demography, vol. 15, no 4, novembre 1978. Michèle Ferrand, « Le goût de l’école : la transmission des “dispositions scolaires” dans des récits biographiques », Bernadette Bawin-Legros et Jean Kellerhals, Relations intergénération- nelles. Parenté-Transmission-Mémoire, actes du colloque de Liège, 1990, Liège, Étienne Riga, 1991, p. 175-184. Andrée Fortin, « La famille ouvrière d’autrefois », Recherches sociographiques, vol. XXVIII, no 2-3, 1987, p. 273-294. Vincent de Gaulejac et Nicole Aubert, Femmes au singulier ou la parentalité solitaire, Paris, Éditions Klincksieck, 1990. Jacques Henripin et al., Les enfants qu’on n’a plus au Québec. Montréal, Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1981, 412 p. Jacques Henripin, Naître ou ne pas être. Québec, IQRC, 1989, 140 p. (Coll. « Diagnostic », no 10). Gilles Houle et Roch Hurtubise, « Parler de faire des enfants, une question vitale », Recherches sociographiques. Femmes et reproduction, 32, 3 (sept.-déc. 1991): 385-414. Évelyne Lapierre-Adamcyk, « Les “causes” de la sous-fécondité des sociétés industrialisées », L’Action nationale, 78, 5 (mai 1988): 239-247. Évelyne Lapierre-Adamcyk, « La cohabitation au Québec, prélude ou substitut au mariage? Les attitudes des jeunes Québécoises », Couples et parents des années quatre-vingt, sous la direction de Renée B. Dandurand, Québec, Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture, 1987, p. 27-46. Marie Lavigne, « Réflexions féministes autour de la fertilité des Québécoises », Nadia Fahmy-Eid et Micheline Dumont (sous la direction de), Maîtresses de maison, maîtresses d’école, Montréal, Boréal Express, (1983): 319-338. Henri Léridon, La seconde révolution contraceptive. La régulation des naissances en France de 1950 à 1985, INED, Paris, PUF, 1987, 378 p. Denise Lemieux et Lucie Mercier, « Les relations familiales dans une perspective temporelle: socialisation, phénomènes d’âges et de générations », Éducation familiale et intervention précoce, sous la direction de Stéphanie Dansereau, Bernard Terrisse et Jean-Marie Bouchard, AIFREF, Montréal, Éditions Agence d’arc, 1990, p. 44-54. Denise Lemieux et Lucie Mercier, « La formation du couple et ses rituels: l’analyse des changements de la période 1950-1980, à travers des récits de vie », Comprendre la famille, sous la direction de Gilles Pronovost, Québec, Les Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1992, p. 53-70. Denise Lemieux et Lucie Mercier, Les femmes au tournant du siècle, âges de la vie, maternité et quotidien, Québec, IQRC, 1989, 398 p. Sara McLanahan et Larry Bumpass, « Intergenerational Consequences of Family Disruption », AJS, vol. 94, no 1, July 1988, p. 130-152. Nicole Marcil-Gratton, « Le recours précoce à la ligature des trompes au Québec: des suites indésirables? », Sociologie et sociétés, 19, 1 (avril 1987): 83-96. Nicole Marcil-Gratton, « Vingt ans de révolution contraceptive au Québec: de l’aléatoire à l’irréversible », L’Action nationale, 78, 5 (mai 1988): 248-257. Jacqueline C. Massé, Micheline St-Arnaud et Marie-Marthe T. Brault. Les jeunes mères célibataires. Montréal, Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1981, 150 p. Anne Muxel, « Mémoire familiale et projet de socialisation de l’enfant, des obstinations durables », Dialogue, p. 46-78. Anne Muxel, « La mémoire familiale », Singly, François de et al., La famille. L’état des savoirs, Paris, Éditions la Découverte, 1991, ch. 25. Nancy E. Moss et Stephen I. Abramovitz, « Development Stakes: Cross-disciplinary Perspective on Parental Heritage », Journal of Marriage and the Family, May 1982, p. 357-366. Yves Peron, Évelyne Lapierre-Adamcyk et Denis Morissette, « Le changement familial: aspects démographiques », Recherches sociographiques, vol. XXVIII, 2-3, (1987), p. 317-340. François Ricard, La génération lyrique. Essai sur la vie et l’oeuvre des premiers-nés du baby- boom, Montréal, Boréal, 1992, 280 p. Madeleine Rochon, « La vie reproductive des femmes aujourd’hui. Le cas du Québec », Cahiers québécois de démographie, 18, 1 (printemps 1989): 15-62.

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Madeleine Rochon, « La fécondité dans le Québec d’aujourd’hui », Denise Lemieux (sous la direction de), Familles d’aujourd’hui, en collaboration avec le Musée de la Civilisation, Québec, IQRC, (1990): 43-54. Anatole Romaniuc, La conjoncture démographique. La fécondité au Canada: croissance et déclin. Ottawa, Statistique Canada, 1988, p. 17. Louis Roussel, La famille incertaine, Paris, Éditions Odile Jacob, 1989, 282 p. Robert Sévigny, Le Québec en héritage. La vie de trois familles montréalaises, Montréal, Éditions coopératives Albert Saint-Martin, 1979, 278 p.

101 Marta Dvorak

Nino Ricci’s “Lives of the Saints”: Walking Down Both Sides of the Street at the Same Time

Abstract A large part of the writing produced in Canada today is being done by immigrants and by the children of immigrants. Torn between the dominant culture and the history and traditions of their parents, to whom they desire to pay hommage, these writers adopt modes of representation ranging from the elegiac to the ironic. Although Canadian-born, in Lives of the Saints, Nino Ricci chooses to focus on the ethnic roots of the work’s child narrator. His work is stamped with the fluctuation and paradox of a double allegiance. He first sets up a world of duality, a solid, dichotomous structure organized around the juxtaposition of binary opposites, but then subjects them to a shifting perspective, a paradoxical double positioning. His treatment of history, myth, time and space, and his complex negotiations between different planes of meaning, prove him a master of ambivalence and paradox.

Résumé Une grande partie de la littérature canadienne d’aujourd’hui est produite par des immigrés ou par des enfants d’immigrés. Déchirés entre la culture dominante dans laquelle ils évoluent, et l’histoire et les traditions de leurs parents à qui ils éprouvent le besoin de rendre hommage, ces écrivains adoptent un éventail de modes de représentation allant de l’élégiaque à l’ironique. Bien que né au Canada, Nino Ricci choisit de centrer son roman Lives of the Saints (L’Oeil bleu et le serpent en traduction française) sur les racines ethniques de son jeune narrateur. Son oeuvre est faite de paradoxes et de fluctuations. Il met en place un univers dichotomique, une structure solide organisée autour de juxtapositions d’oppositions binaires, mais il les soumet ensuite à un glissement de perspective, un positionnement paradoxal et double. Sa manière de traiter l’histoire et le mythe, le temps et l’espace, ses négociations complexes entre dimensions différentes du sens, font de lui un maître de l’ambivalence.

It is now commonplace that a large part of the writing produced in English- speaking Canada is being done by immigrants and by the children of immigrants. This phenomenon is qualitatively different from that experienced by past generations. From Susannah Moody to Frederick Philip Grove, newly- arrived immigrants to Canada wrote principally to record their experience of pioneering; the groups they represented and gave a voice to were primarily the dominant Anglo-Saxon and Germanic cultural communities. It was not until 1957, with John Marlyn’s Under the Ribs of Death, that a novel confronted the public with the hardships of a more recently-arrived immigrant population (in this case Hungarian) and gave a voice to ethnic cultures outside the Canadian

International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue internationale d’études canadiennes Special issue / Numéro hors série, Winter/hiver 1993 IJCS / RIÉC

“mainstream.” Not until the seventies did a writer of South Asian descent (Michael Ondaatje) attain official, critical acclaim in the form of the Governor General’s Award. The past decade has witnessed an explosion in publishing of multiple voices trying to come to terms with their past, with the generations of their parents and grandparents, and with the lands they left behind. A number of these artists of foreign origin choose to continue to write in the language of their parents, and are only then published in English translation.1 Writers from all corners of the globe,2 belonging to both visible and invisible minorities, have forged for themselves a wide and loyal reading public. The postmodern assessment valuing diversity and plurality is undoubtedly linked to the visible role that ethnic and racial minorities play in Canadian culture today. From a centralizing culture identifying the concept of centre with that of the universal and the eternal, there has been a shift to reassert the local, the regional, the non-totalizing, through a flux of contextualized identities, defined in terms of difference and specificity.3 Since ethnic and racial minorities can neither totally assimilate nor entirely separate from the dominant culture, torn between the old generations and the new, they resort to complex, creative cultural negotiations designed to confront that dominant force with the history and traditions of their parents. For these writers, working within minoritized groups, Janice Kulyk Keefer suggests that Janus, the Roman deity with two heads looking in opposite directions, would be a particularly appropriate daemon4.

A Literature of Exile In Splitting Images, Linda Hutcheon observes that the modes of representation of these writers range from the elegiac to the ironic, from nostalgic yearning devoid of any distance, to ambivalence and paradox, and beyond to the distance and separation an ironic mode implies.5 Joseph Pivato points out that Canadian writers of Italian origin who continue to write in their native language generate a literature of exile, tending to focus less on the contrast of the two cultures than their nostalgia for the homeland they left behind.6 Filippo Salvatore goes further to claim that Italian-Canadian writing belongs to the elegiac mode of loss and mourning whether the writing be in the old language or in the new: Whether the language is in English, French, or Italian, these writers of Italian origin feel the need to speak of their mothers and fathers in their works. This is our generation’s confession of love and affection to our parents, and a way of remaining faithful to our roots.7 However, in Lives of the Saints, which focuses on the ethnic roots of its child narrator, particularly on his attachment to his mother, Canadian-born Nino Ricci does take sufficient distance to stamp his work with ambivalence and paradox. In a process he continues in the sequel, A Glass House, he first sets up a world of duality, a solid dichotomous structure organized around the juxtaposition of binary oppositions, but then subjects them to a shifting perspective, a paradoxical double positioning. The text is based on an accumulation of opposites that set immigrant generations in Canada against the ancestors that have been left behind. We find the juxtapositions : east/west, town/country, medieval/modern, agricultural/ industrial, public/private, saint/sinner. But the major oppositions seem to be

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those concerning space and time. The Old World/New World contrast corresponds to the past/present juxtaposition. The hot July day in the year 19608 corresponding to the narrator’s childhood and the beginning of the narrated events contrasts with the implicit narratorial present. The narrator as voice, an older voice (as opposed to the narrator as character), is made explicit through tense only rarely: in the first line of the first chapter: If this story has a beginning , or in the first paragraph of the last chapter: I made a face to make it laugh, but its small grey eyes– they were not yet the vivid blue they would become–seemed to stare right through me9. But the narrator’s discoursive practice often fluctuates from the deliberately limited point of view of the naïve narrator to the perspective of an older, wiser speaker, as illustrated by the use of religious imagery among the sophisticated metaphors and similes in his lyrical descriptions of the land of his fathers: The sun was just rising over Colle di Papa, round and scarlet, sucking in dawn’s darkness like God’s forgiveness, the mountain slopes slowly changing from a colourless grey to rich green and gold. (58) This shifting back and forth on the axe of temporality occurs again and again in the narrative itself, both on a historical plane and a mythical one, in order to depict and magnify a common generational experience. The narrator abounds with tales of past migrations to America, his grandfather’s own father leaving Italy and his family, wandering through Africa, then Argentina before heading on to North America, where he promptly disappeared. Those left behind can but muse on the new generations that may be multiplying on the other side of the ocean: a brood of creamy-brown cousins who prayed in African but swore in Italian (160). On the historical plane, a distinction is made between the migration before World War II, when after an absence of months or years the father would come back home with his foreign earnings, and the subsequent one-way departures: The men left, and a few years later wives and children and sometimes ageing parents followed, land and livestock sold off, clothes and old pots packed up in wooden trunks made by the village carpenter, houses left abandoned, their doors and windows boarded up. (161) Although the new Americans are still attached to their roots, sending back money to their families, financing projects in their community (made possible by money from America is a recurrent leitmotif in the novel), and even come back to visit on special occasions such as the annual festival of their village’s patron saint, it is evident that the attraction of the New World implies the death of the Old. Allusions abound to what amounts to an exodus to the west, the new, the future, leaving behind images of decline, decay and rot: Some of the houses were deserted, their owners gone to America, the shutters nailed closed and the doors boarded up, walls beginning to crumble, roofs caved in from rot and termites. (85)

Paradise Lost The historical decline finds its parallel in the mythical dimension the narrator creates for the land of his ancestors. As Claude Lévi-Strauss points out in his Anthropologie structurale,10 all myth refers to past events (before the creation of the world, or at the dawn of humanity: in any case, “a long time ago”). But the intrinsic value attributed to myth derives from the fact that these events, that allegedly occurred at some moment in time, form a permanent structure

105 IJCS / RIÉC that refers simultaneously to the past, the present and the future. Myth, like political ideology, actually has a double structure: both historical and a- historical, as demonstrated by the reaction of the first-generation English Romantics to the French Revolution, both the event and promise of regeneration (best illustrated by Wordsworth’s famous line, Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive11). Nino Ricci’s use of myth, as we shall see, performs this double function, allowing generations of children listening to tales at their grandfather’s knee to connect with their remote ancestors, allowing generations of immigrants to bridge the gap with those removed in space, and operating for both groups in an anticipatory and prophetic fusion that attempts to make sense of both old- and new-land experience, the better to confront their respective futures: Once, my grandfather had told me, long before the time of Christ, the land around Valle del Sole had all been flat, unpeopled jungle, rich and fertile, the trees a mile high and the river a mile wide. At last a giant named Gambelunghe had come down from the north and cleared the land with his two great oxen, then planted his crops – a thousand hectares of grain, a thousand hectares of vineyards, a thousand hectares of olives, a thousand hectares of vegetables, and a thousand hectares of pasture for his sheep. But in the winter, when Gambelunghe was asleep, wolves came and broke into his stores, then fell finally on Gambelunghe himself and tore him apart, his head dropped into the river, where it floated down to the sea, and his limbs scattered pell-mell across the countryside. In the spring, a strange thing happened – the fingers on Gambelunghe’s severed hands began to grow, those on the left growing into five women, those on the right into five men. When they were fully grown the men married the women and began to farm Gambelunghe’s land, one couple for each field.(52-3) The double dimension, historical and a-historical, can be perceived in the references to a historical/chronological temporality, that of a pre-Christian era, events occurring even during specific seasons, the historicity reinforced by the geographical precisions (from the north). Yet simultaneously, we are confronted with an a-historical lexis evoking a vague past (once, long before), a pre-Adamic Eden characterized by dimensions larger than life (the trees a mile high, the river a mile wide), an age of giant beings equal to the task of creating a culture commensurate with the superlatively bounteous nature. With its incantatory repetition of a thousand hectares of (sign of unlimited plenty rather than numerical precision), the pentad of variations (grain, vineyards, olives, vegetables, pasture) signalling opulence, the legend, in fact, relates the creation of the Garden. It differs from the Biblical account in that there are five Adams and five Eves in an Eden that has already known violence and death, and no longer offers all that is desirable: But soon jealousy broke out among them: the one with the sheep was jealous of the one with the grain, for though he had meat and wool, he had no bread; the one with the grain was jealous of the one with the vineyards, for though he had bread, he had no wine (53) and so on throughout the pentad. The legend is in effect the story of Paradise Lost, a paradise that is actually lost twice: lost a first time through external agents (wolves), then rebuilt, but already less than perfect, unity having given way to division and deprivation, and the extraordinary to the ordinary (one

106 Nino Ricci’s Lives of the Saints: Walking Down Both Sides of the Street at the Same Time giant replaced by ten humans); then lost a second time through an internal agent (invidia). The fighting that follows results in divine intervention, but rather than expelling Adam from Eden, God destroys the Garden itself: to punish them He caused mountains and rocks to grow up out of the ground, and made the soil tired and weak. (53) The myth actually structures the perspective that the narrator gives us of the country of his parents, providing the framework for lyricism, a nostalgic yearning for a golden past, a complaint for a society that is at once timeless and yet a pale shadow of its former splendor. If Ricci’s work does belong to the elegiac mode of Italian-Canadian writing, as claimed by Salvatore, the mourning over the loss of roots, the sorrow for the distance now separating two irrevocably different generational experiences, is magnified to include mourning for a different loss: sorrow for the tarnishing of archetype, caused by the new perspective of his adopted land. Double allegiance? Lucidity of the immigrant gaze? We cannot help but remark the omnipresence of decline and degradation. The mythical dimension finds its historical equivalent in the narrator’s “factual” description of the neighbouring town of Rocca Secca, which had once been a great centre, renowned for its goldsmiths and bronzeworks. But in recent times its fortunes had declined. The a-historical has given way to the historical, with its economic and political lexis: the wolves have been replaced by tax-collectors, law-makers and industries. It is because people now want to buy things made in the city by machines rather than things made by hand that whole sections of the town stood abandoned (60). Ricci once more depicts a particular, generational experience by relating the “true” story (reinforced through historical details: in the 1890s, during the war in Abyssinia, after the Italian defeat, just after the first war) of the last member of the Giardini family, a powerful landowner who served as an officer in the war in Abyssinia, wandered home as a beggar (the Odyssean parallel is nonetheless striking), then proceeded to remodel the grounds of his estate in the image of a primal paradise, importing tropical trees, flowers, shrubs and building a great conservatory to house them in winter, beginning next on the fauna, monkeys, gazelles, strange tropical birds, until he had turned his hill into a small piece of Africa, the air at night resounding with strange jungle sounds. (61) As to be expected, the primal paradise, having been rebuilt through human, not divine intervention, is lost again, and at Giardini’s death, the property falls into decay. The contrast between the present participles enumerating human acts, the various steps in “setting up” the paradise (remaking, importing, building, beginning), and the subsequent accumulation of past participles to form passives (abandoned, left to ruin, overgrown, left to warp, allowed to grow unchecked) suggests that striving is vain, since there is no future generation to carry on. The estate functions as a synecdoche, representing Italy, a nation in decline because she is losing her children to the New World, but representing as well a mythical Golden Age and a world of traditional values doomed to a process of degradation, yet always just tantalizingly out of reach. Our narrator, we learn at the end of the novel, is relating his story from that part of the New World his village calls the Sun Parlour, i.e. a new part of America called Canada (162). The term is ironic for a landscape that reveals itself to be

107 IJCS / RIÉC rather barren as our hero rides off into the sunset with his new-found father in a coal-dust-filled train, rolling across a desolate landscape , bleak and snow- covered as far as the eye could see (234). A whole ocean now separates him from the land of his birth, the enormity of distance explaining the undercurrent of the elegiac mode throughout the novel. There is a constant dialectic between the lyricism of the pastoral descriptions of the homeland as garden, with its allusions to fertility: spring day, thick carpets of green, river swollen from the rains, wet translucent skirt clinging to thighs, cave with mouth receding into darkness, small stream flowing out of it, etc.(32), and the matter-of-fact references to the slums, sooty factories and bug-infested shacks (162) of America. On the one hand the sublime, the natural, on the other the trivial, the artificial. The outside, the world of scarlet suns and golden wheat (food in its natural state), is contrasted with the inside, the world with telephones in every room, whose greatest gift to mankind is houses so warm you can walk around in your socks even in the middle of winter (163), where the bread (food transformed by the manufacturing process), tasteless and so further adulterated by the addition of sugar, sticks in your mouth like glue (163). The lyrical tone applied to the Old World, the world of his parents, associates female sexuality with water, at times allusively: At the river, which was swollen from the rains, we waded for a while along the shore, the hem of my mother’s skirt catching the water and clinging to her thighs, translucent (32) at times simply and naturally, the warm water of the hot spring gushing out of the entrails of the earth evoking simultaneously the womb and the origins of primeval life: My mother and I bathed together in the pool, my mother letting her dress fall casually to the cave floor and standing above me for a moment utterly naked, smooth and sleek, as if she had just peeled back an old layer of skin, before climbing into the water beside me (33). What a contrast between this private bathing scene in a natural setting, and the public, even perverse, situation of the modern North American bathroom: Fabrizio, ready with facts on any subject, had told me once that in America everyone lived in houses of glass. `When you’re taking a bath anyone can come by and look at you. You can see all the women in their underwear. People look at each other all the time, over there, because nobody believes in God.’ (163) And what a contrast between the narrator’s mother, another Eve, mother of mankind, naked, smooth, and sleek, her womb swollen with life, and the women in America, all walking around in underwear and socks! (No wonder the author has to kill her off during the voyage to Canada and have her buried at sea – her element – for he can not reconcile the antithesis.) The frequent use of pathos in the novel, the passage from poetic diction to prosaic terminology, from the sublime to the trivial, derives from the narrator’s double allegiance and thus double positioning. The pathetic process can be at the expense of his adopted land or of the land of his fathers. Ricci generally sets up a dichotomy, but then blurs the borders. There is constant shifting of perspective, resulting in ambivalence and paradox. The narrator’s village, for example, has still not been endowed with electricity. But thanks to money that American relatives have donated to make the annual festival a triumph, the

108 Nino Ricci’s Lives of the Saints: Walking Down Both Sides of the Street at the Same Time village has obtained a rock band with electrical equipment. When they turn on the lights, Valle del Sole’s medieval square is transformed into a pocket of rich modernity (99). The villagers, in shock, speak of la luce (term with Biblical resonances) as magic,amiracle,anoracle. The author chooses to deflate the exalted description through the use of the rhetorical figure of anti-climax, parallel to a shift in point of view. It is Cristina, the narrator’s mother who, standing out from the beginning with her superior education and cosmopolitan world view, deflates the effect with her remark: As if no one has ever seen a light bulb before (99). What indeed can be more trivial and lowly than a light bulb, and what could be more ridiculous than a society that elevates it to the rank of the divine? Throughout the novel, the explicit message of the discourse is that Italy is the land of the marvellous, the magical, the miraculous. The cult of the saints is but one such manifestation, the schoolteacher affirming to her pupils that: the saints were not merely the ghosts of some mythical past but an ever-present possibility, the mundane and everyday verging always on the miraculous – ‘Who knows,’ she’d said once, ‘if there isn’t a saint among us right now?’ (40) It is on this plane that the reader is to receive the parallels drawn between the narrator’s mother (whose name Cristina, particularly the diminutive Cristi, already suggests a female Christ figure12), and Saint Cristina, who was persecuted for breaking the conventions and defying the superstitions of her time, proving herself as defiant and irrepressible as our heroine. To reinforce this dimension, parallels are suggested by a figure of supreme religious authority, the bishop, who points out the shame Mary must have endured on account of her extramarital pregnancy, the hardships she had to undergo, and the mother’s pain she must have felt when her first-born son was maltreated.13 The comparison becomes explicit in an ironic remark that the narrator “overhears”: ‘Still holding her nose up like a queen,’ I overheard Maria Maiale say at Di Lucci’s. ‘Quella Maria ! Maybe it’s a virgin birth.’ ‘Maybe it’s the other Mary, Magdalena, you’re thinking about,’ Di Lucci said.14 The irony is a double one, for the verbal irony deliberately intended by the speaker is counteracted by the dramatic irony of the narrative discourse, perceived only by the reader: who knows, indeed, if this is not the incarnation of the ever-present possibility, the saint among us now.

Constant Flux The opposition made between saint and sinner, yet the simultaneous blurring of borders, the constant flux, is part of the continuous interplay of text and countertext. On an explicit plane, the narrator’s grandfather and community set themselves up in opposition to the generations that have exiled themselves in godless America. Yet on the undercurrent, implicit level, we can remark that their relationship with their patron saints is a purely commercial one. We learn that the villagers, jealous that Castilucci’s patron, St. Joseph, had been more powerful than their Michael, had applied to Rome for a change of saints. As their replacement they chose the Virgin, who had a long

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history of successful intercessions with a God who was sometimes distant and unapproachable; and though Rome had denied their request, they had finally made the change on their own authority (73). A saint is but a consumer product: if you are dissatisfied, you exchange it for a better model. In the same way, the society of the narrator’s birth seems on the surface to be permeated with religious values. Religion functions even as a measurement of time. Events are referred to, not according to the calendar, but according to saints’ days: the narrator’s father’s father, we learn, dropped stone dead on la festa di San Giuseppe (26); when the narrator challenges a friend to tell him what day it is, the latter answers It’s the feast of St. Bartholomew (64). Language is studded with invocations to the Deity (per l’amore di Cristo, per l’amore di Dio), sermons (I swear by God,orby Jesus, Joseph and Mary or I pray to God that). Even the swearing is of a blasphemous nature (Gesù Crist’e Maria,orGesù bambino!); in other words, it is a violation of the Biblical prohibition against pronouncing the name of God.15 Breaking the linguistic taboo, which is acknowledged in the act of defiance, in itself demonstrates a preoccupation with the sacred. But let us look more closely at the circumstances in which God is invoked. As Benveniste points out, society requires the name of God to be invoked in solemn circumstances – this is the sermon: CAR LE SERMENT EST UN SACRAMENTUM, UN APPEL AU DIEU, TÉMOIN SUPRÊME DE VÉRITÉ, ET UNE DÉVOTION AU CHÂTIMENT DIVIN EN CAS DE MENSONGE OU PARJURE. C’EST LE PLUS GRAVE ENGAGEMENT QUE L’HOMME PUISSE CONTRACTER ET LE PLUS GRAVE MANQUEMENT QU’IL PUISSE COMMETTRE, CAR LE PARJURE RELÈVE NON DE LA JUSTICE DES HOMMES, MAIS DE LA SANCTION DIVINE.16 How odd then, that this most serious commitment that a human being can make, this most solemn sacred promise, should be so consistently linked to violence: I swear by God I’ll throttle you with my bare hands (182) so help me God, I’ll pray every day of my life that you rot in hell (182) I swear I’ll kill her, even if I have to rot in hell for it (109) I pray to God that he wipes this town and all its stupidities off the face of the earth (184) If we pierce through the religious veneer, we find that the world of the ancestors is not a paradise, but a world of superstition, ignorance, bribery and corruption, poverty, hatred and envy, a world of violence. Violence is present at all levels of society, present within the family, within the community and among communities. Husbands beat and mutilate their wives, fathers routinely whip their sons, neighbours do not hesitate to shoot a fellow citizen’s hand off in a quarrel over a chicken, mothers come to blows over the quarrels of their children, children brutalize their schoolmates to the point of driving them to self-violence (one boy, bullied over his one green eye and one brown one, takes a stick and puts out his own eye). The community attacks non- conformists, those who, like Cristina, transgress the social code (they like to see a person destroyed (56)). When they learn electricity will be brought to another town but not extended to them, townspeople go on the rampage and set

110 Nino Ricci’s Lives of the Saints: Walking Down Both Sides of the Street at the Same Time fire to all the machinery. Even their God is violent: the grandfather’s death is described as an act of God : some invisible fist strikes him down just as he is about to strike his wife with a fire-poker (26-7). In the narrative discourse, we can notice the abundant recurrence of a lexis based on the verb “to kill,” with all possible variations: break heads, throttle, crack skulls, slit throats, cut out eyes, destroy, etc. The greatest concentration, ironically enough, is to be found in the stories of the lives of the saints, who are systematically mutilated, their breasts cut off and their tongues torn out, skinned alive, beheaded, pounded to death in a marble mortar, torn to pieces with iron hooks, or thrown into tubs of boiling oil. This is Nino Ricci’s countertext at work, counterbalancing the paradise of the elegiac mode of representation with the depiction of a violent, repressive society, a hell. The latent theme becomes explicit when Cristina sets off with her son for Canada, crying defiantly, The only mistake I made was that I didn’t leave this hell a dozen years ago, when I had the chance (184). It is reinforced when the focalization shifts to the child narrator at the moment of departure: At last the people on the pier had become a single undulating wave, their shouts barely audible, and as the ship slipped away from them I felt a tremendous unexpected relief, as if all that could ever cause pain or do harm was being left behind on the receding shore, and my mother and I would melt now into an endless freedom as broad and as blue as the sea. (200-201)

A NEW EDEN The place where Cristina has decided to take her son and unborn child is not only an Eden before the Fall (an unfallen world without mountains or rocky earth (162)), but an Eden that extends into the future, an Eden that will never know a Cain and Abel. Canada is a land where violence actually abates: the narrator’s father, whose only method of communication in Italy was with the back of his hand (95), has been transformed – the black-haired ogre has become a tired-eyed man (234). That Canada, the Sun Parlour, is a land where people learn to live together in peace and harmony, is illustrated by an allegorical little anecdote: Before the war two men from our region, Salvatore Mancini of Valle del Sole and Umberto Longo of Castilucci, had smuggled themselves across the ocean and settled there – and it was the first time in history, people said, that a man from Valle del Sole and one from Castilucci had been able to work together without slitting each other’s throats – and now one by one their relatives had begun to join them, every year the tide increasing (161-62) Canada, throughout the years, drew into her fold people of different allegiances, different generations. Do these people cohabitate here in peace because they share a bond, the courage of having left behind the familiar comfort of family and village for an uncertain destiny across the sea (163)? Or is it because they, like the narrator, accept paradox, are capable of double positioning, acknowledge that there are two Americas: the first a world of hard work and economic realities, the other more a state of mind than a place, a paradise that shimmered just beneath the surface of the seen, never entered into but always looming around as a possibility (162). For the generations of immigrants having arrived and still to arrive, as well as for their children, the New World, not the Old, is the true place of myth. America, independently of

111 IJCS / RIÉC its national components Canada or USA, is a word that conjures up a world like a name uttered at the dawn of creation (160), a world that belongs to yet transcends history. It evokes a mythical past with all of eternity in front of it (Genesis), and a glorious future (Corinthians)17. Its double structure, historical and a-historical, the seen and the unseen, the surface and the depths, that allows the past, the present and the future to coexist, is what makes it an “always potential” paradise for future generations. What could be more natural than that such a land should produce a writer master of ambivalence and paradox, yearning yet rejecting, adept at shifting modes of representation and bridging states, who actually manages to walk down both sides of the street at the same time?

NOTES 1. Josef Skvorecky, who emigrated to Canada from Czechoslovakia in 1968, has his own Czech-language publishing house in Toronto. 2. To name but a few of these well-known figures: Nino Ricci, Mary di Michele, Pier Giorgio di Cicco (Italy), Neil Bissoondath, Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke (the Caribbean), Andrew Suknaski, George Faludy, Josef Skvorecky (Central and Eastern Europe), Rienzi Crusz, Michael Ondaatje, Ven Begamudre, and Bharati Mukherji (South Asia), Joy Kogawa, Roy Miki, Fred Wah (Japan and China). 3. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, Routledge, New York, 1988, pp. 57-73. 4. Janice Kulyk Keefer, From Mosaic to Kaleidoscope,inBooks in Canada, XX:6, Sept. 1991. 5. Linda Hutcheon, Splitting Images: Contemporary Canadian Ironies, Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 53-4. 6. Joseph Pivato, A Literature of Exile: Italian Language Writing in Canada, in Pivato, ed. Contrasts: Comparative Essays on Italian Canadian Writing, Montreal, Guernica, 1985, pp. 169-88. 7. Filippo Salvatore, The Italian Writer of Quebec: Language, Culture, and Politics, trans. David Homel, in Contrasts, p. 201. In Nino Ricci’s Lives of the Saints, the author’s dedication For my parents bears witness to this statement. 8. Nino Ricci, Lives of the Saints, Dunvegan, Cormorant Books, 1991, p. 7. All subsequent quotations refer to this edition. 9. L.S. pp. 7 and 236 respectively. 10. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale, Paris, Éditions Plon, 1958, p. 231. 11. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book Eleventh, line 108 in English Romantic Writers, ed. by David Perkins, Harvard University, Harcourt, Brace & World Inc., 1967. 12. One amusing illustration is Nino Ricci’s use of the mirror image (which by definition is the same but opposite), when the narrator’s description of his mother in the hospital evokes Christ on his cross flanked by the two thieves: she stood out like a flower in a bleak landscape, and flanking my mother’s bed on either side were two old women with grey, wrinkled skin. The equivalent (albeit reversal in female form) of the “good” thief was lost in prayers, her hand fingering the beads of a rosary, the other lay with eyes closed and mouth half-open (31) 13. It is interesting to note that the key elements of comparison are emphasized by italics in the text (p. 81) 14. The italics are in the text (p. 156) 15. As the linguist É. Benveniste points out, l’interdit du nom de Dieu (ou l’adjuration inversée où “Dieu” peut être remplacé par un de ses parèdres “Madone, Vierge”, etc) refrène un des désirs les plus intenses de l’homme: celui de profaner le sacré... On blasphème le nom de Dieu, car tout ce qu’on possède de Dieu est son nom. Par là seulement on peut l’atteindre, pour l’émouvoir ou pour le blesser: en prononçant son nom. Émile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale II, Paris, Gallimard, 1974, pp. 255-57. 16. É. Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale II, p. 255-56. 17. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: I Corinthians 13:12.

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Bibliography Benveniste, Émile, Problèmes de linguistique générale I, Paris, Gallimard, 1966. Benveniste, Émile, Problèmes de linguistique générale II, Paris, Gallimard, 1974. Genette, Gérard, Figures III, Paris, Éd. du Seuil, 1972. Greimas, A.J., Sémantique structurale, Paris, Larousse,1966. Greimas, A.J., Du Sens, Paris, Éd. du Seuil, 1970. Hutcheon, Linda, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, New York, Routledge, 1988. Hutcheon, Linda, Splitting Images: Contemporary Canadian Ironies, Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1991. Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Anthropologie structurale, Paris, Éditions Plon, 1958.

113 Mark T. Cameron

Justice and the New Generation Gap

“Or for that matter, do you really think we enjoy hearing about your brand new million dollar home when we can barely afford to eat Kraft Dinner sandwiches in our grimy little shoe boxes and we’re pushing thirty? A home won in a genetic lottery, I might add, sheerly by dint of having been born at the right time in history? You’d last about ten minutes if you were my age these days, Martin. And I have to endure pinheads like you rusting above me for the rest of my life, always grabbing the best piece of cake and putting barbed wire fence around the rest. You really make me sick.”1

Abstract The question of justice between generations is a particularly important one in Canada because of the ongoing legal debates around section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the demographic phenomena of the baby boom and baby bust, which have upset many traditional expectations around employment and income security. Starting with a review of the existing debate over mandatory retirement, the author suggests that liberal justice does permit a policy of mandatory retirement, as a liberal approach to justice requires one to consider how policies affect one’s life as a whole, not at an isolated moment in time. Expanding on this point, the author introduces what he calls a “Lifespan Neutral Discrimination Principle” (LNDP) as a means to assess whether a policy which discriminates on the basis of age is unjust, in light of one’s prospects over one’s lifespan. The author criticizes current public policy, which tries to solve the problem of transfers between age groups but ignores the often more serious problem of transfers between birth cohorts, as inconsistent with the LNDP. Public pensions in Canada and the United States are singled out as a particularly discriminatory example of a public policy which hurts certain birth cohorts.

Résumé La question de la justice entre les générations est particulièrement importante au Canada à cause des débats concernant l’article 15 de la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés et à cause du phénomène démographique des « baby boomers » et des « baby busters » qui a perturbé les attentes traditionnelles relatives à la sécurité d’emploi et de revenu. Dans la première partie de l’article, l’auteur passe en revue la question de la retraite obligatoire pour ensuite suggérer qu’une justice « libérale » permet une politique de retraite obligatoire, puisqu’une approche libérale nécessite un examen de la façon dont les politiques influent sur toutes les étapes d’une vie et non sur un moment précis dans une vie. L’auteur élargit cette perspective en avançant un principe qu’il nomme le « Lifespan Neutral Discrimination Principle » (LNDP) [Principe de discrimination neutraliste basé sur la durée d’une vie] comme

International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue internationale d’études canadiennes Special issue / Numéro hors série, Winter/hiver 1993 IJCS / RIÉC moyen d’évaluer si une politique établit une discrimination basée sur l’âge qui est injuste compte tenu des perspectives d’avenir d’une personne durant toute sa vie. L’auteur critique les politiques gouvernementales actuelles, qui tentent de solutionner le problème du transfert entre groupe d’âge mais laissent de côté le problème plus sérieux du transfert entre cohortes, en soulignant que ces politiques sont incompatibles avec le « LNDP ». Les régimes de retraites publics au Canada et aux États-Unis servent d’exemples de politiques gouvernementales discriminatoires qui portent atteinte à certaines cohortes.

What does it mean to speak of justice between generations in the design and implementation of government policy? This question is raised with particular acuteness in Canada for two reasons. First, Canada is in the midst of an ongoing effort to bring its laws into conformity with the right of equality before and under the law without discrimination, including discrimination based on age, guaranteed under section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Second, Canada has an unusual demographic distribution of age groups within its society, which means much of the conventional wisdom regarding appropriate policies for different age groups may have to be re- evaluated in light of changing demographic realities. Specifically, the socio- economic consequences of an aging population, with a very large bulge of people currently in the middle age brackets (the Baby Boomers) and a much smaller group in the younger age brackets (Generation X), must be explored. In this paper, I will examine both of these aspects of intergenerational justice in Canada. I will attempt to define precisely what conditions constitute unjustified age discrimination that should be prohibited under the Charter, and I will examine whether, in light of Canada’s demography, some current policies may in fact be unjust and discriminatory between generations according to this definition.

Towards a Definition of Age Discrimination Much of the legal and academic debate over age discrimination in Canada has focused on the question of whether mandatory retirement policies are a type of unjustified age discrimination. While this is an important and interesting aspect of the age discrimination debate, it is only a small part of the question of justice between generations. To answer the question of what constitutes unjustified age discrimination, we must look at fundamental questions of justice and equality. The question of mandatory retirement will be discussed, but a successful definition of age discrimination must extrapolate from this example to reach broader conclusions. Discrimination has been defined as when “someone’s preference is defeated in a given case... In such a case we shall say that the discriminatory policy ‘decides against’ that person.”2 Obviously, if defined this broadly, no form of discrimination per se can be inherently unjust or forbidden by the Charter. Most political decision making involves discriminating for or against certain individuals or groups, although one hopes in relatively benign ways. For instance, governments establish subsidies for farmers, and tax preferences for certain businesses and not others. In these cases, governments are making prudential decisions against certain economic practices and practitioners in favour of others in hopes that society as a whole will benefit. Similarly, criminal law discriminates against criminals. On the individual level, when two or more persons are competing for a job, the employer will generally hire

116 Justice and the New Generation Gap the most qualified candidate, despite the fact that in doing so the employer discriminates against less qualified candidates. Generally, what is taken to distinguish justifiable from unjustifiable discrimination is the moral relevance or merit of the criteria used to discriminate. Whether or not characteristics are morally relevant depends on context. For example, in trying to decide whether or not to hire a teacher, sex or religion should generally not be considered morally relevant factors, and merit in terms of teaching ability, academic competence and experience should prevail. However, if a school board is looking to hire a boys’ physical education teacher, or if a Catholic school board wishes to hire a religious education teacher, sex or religion may become relevant considerations. Some would argue that, in order to count as discrimination, in addition to deciding against a person’s preference on morally irrelevant grounds, a policy must cause harm or deny benefit to a person in a real sense, and thus some forms of age discrimination that do not cause harm are justifiable. For example, parental discipline, and many laws, deny children’s preferences for the sake of children’s long-term benefit. According to Wedeking: “Paternalistic treatment of children includes a large class of cases where no harm results from age discrimination,” such as compulsory schooling laws, and minimum driving and drinking ages. “Discrimination of this sort, though based on age, cannot be considered unfair; since the child is not harmed, there is not even a prima facie case that equity is denied.”3 Others would deny that paternalistic policies based solely on age, even benevolent ones, are ever justifiable. Hillary Rodham Clinton, for instance, argues with respect to children’s rights that “the first thing to be done is to reverse the presumption of incompetency and instead assume that all individuals are incompetent until proven otherwise,” but laments that “...the law basically treats all...children, at their dissimilar stages of life, as incompetent.”4 Just as some laws in previous centuries which discriminated on the basis of race or sex were not motivated by malice but by a benevolent paternalism towards “inferior” women or slaves, many would argue that paternalistic laws designed to “protect” children or the very old (say, by denying drivers licenses to people under sixteen or over seventy-five) are similarly misguided. Paternalistic laws based on age, race or sex, even if putatively beneficial, offend the deeply held value acknowledged by Wedeking of “the importance of autonomy, the role of agency in our conception of the good life.”5 If even benevolent paternalism seems unacceptable as a rationale for age discrimination, can there be any justification for laws which are clearly not intended for the good of the person the policy decides against, such as mandatory retirement at age sixty-five or the denial of certain expensive medical treatments to older persons? Many feel that mandatory retirement laws are precisely analogous to a discriminatory policy denying employment on the basis of race or sex. If a worker is still capable of performing a job, perhaps more capable than a newcomer because of years of valuable experience, then to terminate that worker’s employment simply because he or she has turned sixty five seems morally arbitrary. It is a policy based on what Justice Brennan of the United States Supreme Court described as an “immutable characteristic determined solely by accident of birth which bears no relationship to the individual’s ability to perform or contribute to society.”6 One way in which the apparent violation of the individual right not to be discriminated against on the basis of age might be justified is in reference to the

117 IJCS / RIÉC collective rights of younger generations. As Samuel LaSelva points out, most people accept that the principle of merit implies that “an employee who performs his job satisfactorily deserves (merits) to keep it....”7 He further argues that in addition to this explicit assumption, there is an implicit assumption in arguments against mandatory retirement that such policies “raise only questions of individual justice”8 as opposed to collective rights. The individual’s right to keep his or her job must be balanced against the collective right of a generation to have fair opportunities for employment compared to other generations. While La Selva makes a strong moral argument for upholding mandatory retirement in the name of intergenerational justice, he defines intergenerational justice in terms of collective rights. While the debate between the claims of individual versus collective rights is an important one, it is beyond the scope of this paper. For better or for worse, the language of individual rights is the predominant currency in both legal and academic debates over equality and discrimination. Robert Drummond objects to the ascription of collective rights to generations. “If intergenerational justice requires collective, rather than individual rights, it creates more problems than it solves. Jobs are sought and held by individuals, not generations. Liberal rights generally inhere in individuals, not collectivities.”9 To Drummond, the correct question to ask is not one of collective but rather of comparative justice. In this case, “birth cohort or generation is not a collective attribute, but a characteristic of individuals, not unlike age.”10 The claims of a person denied employment because he or she reaches retirement age must be balanced with the competing claims of a member of a younger generation denied employment because he or she is entering the workforce at a time when jobs are scarce due to members of older generations holding most of the available jobs. It seems wise to treat generation as an individual characteristic like age, rather than as a collective right, for several reasons. For analytic clarity, it is easier to compare two similar rights claims, and individual rights are more easily discussed within the framework of liberal justice than claims to collective rights. Furthermore, section 15(1) of the Charter only protects individuals from discrimination, thus generations could not claim illegal discrimination as a whole, but only as individual members of generations. Drummond’s approach also reveals another important distinction for discussions of intergenerational justice and age discrimination: the distinction between age group and birth cohort. Norman Daniels makes this distinction even more explicit. An age group refers to “people who fall within a certain age range or are at a certain stage of life.”11 Children, teenagers, and senior citizens are all examples of age groups. A birth cohort is a group born during the same time period, and forms “a distinct group of people with a distinctive history and composition.”12 The Lost Generation of the 1920s, the Baby Boomers and Generation X are all different birth cohorts. While the court cases and public discussion of age discrimination have generally been concerned with laws differentiating between age groups, birth cohorts raise separate claims which may be even more troubling. As Daniels notes, in matters of intergenerational justice, age group and birth cohort must be carefully distinguished: For example, special questions of fairness may arise because of particular facts about the socioeconomic history and composition of particular birth cohorts. The notion of an age group abstracts from the

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distinctiveness of birth cohorts and considers people solely by reference to their place in the lifespan.13 Drummond analyses the claims of age groups and birth cohorts with regards to employment, and concludes that “liberal justice requires no more than an equal opportunity to compete for available jobs, and does not provide a right to have jobs vacated (on the basis of age) so that one can compete for them.”14 But beyond ensuring this neutrality in competition for available jobs, liberal justice seems unable to interfere. Mandatory retirement does not simply allow equal competition for available jobs, it violates one person’s right based on merit to continuing employment as long as performance is satisfactory. The younger worker who takes the job does not have a right to that job, but only the right to compete on an equal footing for any available jobs, not a right to a particular job already held by someone else on the basis of merit. Drummond’s reasoning seems airtight given his premise that individual rights to continuing employment based on merit cannot be trumped by the collective rights of less privileged generations. Drummond’s reasoning is revealed as flawed, however, even on liberal rights grounds, when one considers his failure to regard persons as beings with long- term interests and goals. Rather than examining the fairness of mandatory retirement as a social policy from the perspective of an individual’s entire lifetime in the context of intergenerational competition, Drummond opts to “select a single point in time at which to assess the treatment of generations.”15 A liberal theory of justice, however, cannot be limited to the immediate desires of a given individual at a particular time. Instead, it must consider the rights of a person qua person, which Rawls defines “as a human life lived according to a plan.”16 In Rawls’ account, the principles of justice which would be agreed to in his original position would be neutral with regards to time preference, for “rationality implies an impartial concern for all parts of our life.”17 A liberal approach to intergenerational justice cannot simply examine relations between generations at a given point in time to determine their fairness. It must inquire what policies individuals would choose in a neutral bargaining situation, like the original position, given the data of competition for scarce resources (such as jobs) between generations and an impartial concern for all parts of each person’s life. Drummond implies, without providing justification, that the only rational choice of principle would be what Rawls calls “natural liberty”: the principle that careers should be open according to talents.18 Leslie Jacobs has called this the principle of formal equality of opportunity.19 Rawls argues, however, that bargainers in the original position would choose the principle of fair equality of opportunity, which implies that “those with similar abilities and skills should have similar life chances.”20 Given Rawls’ constraint that bargainers in the original position “have no information as to which generation they belong,”21 they are more likely out of prudence to choose the fair over the formal principle. This probability is heightened if we follow Brian Barry’s suggestion and envision the original position not merely as a contracting situation between contemporaries of an unknown generation, but between anonymous members of different generations.22 Even without the device of the original position, it seems probable that, in designing principles of liberal justice which take seriously the existence of persons over a lifespan and the competition of generations within the lifespan of each birth cohort, the principle of natural liberty would be rejected as arbitrary without at least some version of Locke’s spoilage principle (that as much and as good be left for others) or Rawls’ just

119 IJCS / RIÉC savings principle (that each generation has the responsibility to save for future generations), which Drummond does not seriously entertain. Norman Daniels develops an account of intergenerational justice from a Rawlsian perspective employing what he calls a “Prudential Lifespan Account.” The central intuition of the Prudential Lifespan Account is that age differs fundamentally from sex or race as a category for the simple reason that persons age. “Age is different. Remember the banal fact: We grow older, but we do not change our race or sex.”23 Since each person usually passes through each age group and stage of life, prudent bargainers in the original position will wish to design social institutions that protect their interest in basic goods equally at all stages of life. People may agree to be treated unequally at different stages of life in order to achieve more equal treatment over their entire lifespan. Seen in this way, programs that treat the young and the old differently should not be interpreted as transfers of wealth between persons, but transfers within the lifespan of a single person which are mediated by social institutions. From the perspective of the original position, designing institutions like public schooling and retirement pensions is essentially the same as deciding to subsidize youth and the elderly out of the surplus they earn during their highly productive middle years. In this way, policies which differentiate by age may be fundamentally different from policies which differentiate by race or sex. As Daniels says, If we treat people differently by race or sex, then we risk violating the principles governing equality among persons. Treating the young and old differently, however, may not mean treating people unequally. Over a lifetime, such differential treatment may still result in our treating people equally.24 Mandatory retirement may be a just policy from this lifespan perspective, if persons feel that they will benefit from such a policy over their entire lifespan. Laws that restrict the liberty of children may also be justifiable, as those laws may now be understood as the long-term choice of an individual over the course of one’s lifespan, not simply a paternalistic denial of the rights of one person by others. What makes such restrictions permissible is not, as Wedeking suggests, that the policies prevent harm from coming to children, but that the children themselves, if they were in a position to consider their whole lives as persons, would choose them. Thus, the principle of autonomy that would make paternalistic laws to protect women or aboriginals unacceptable is not denied. There are possible objections to a time neutral consideration of the life of a person, on the grounds that the concept of persons as ongoing beings with coherent life plans and an equal interest in all parts of their lives is a metaphysical abstraction, whereas in reality one only experiences persons as the subjects of immediate desires. If the person is not conceived of as a unified being over a lifespan, but only a bundle of immediate and contingent desires, then as Hume said, “is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”25 A recent, sophisticated version of this reductionist claim—that one not ought to regard persons as unified wholes over their lifespan—has been presented by Derek Parfit.26 But if one adopts Hume’s or Parfit’s view of the person, then the language of rights will have little meaning. The idea of rights seems to imply a strong sense of the person: it is hard to see how a mere concatenation of contingent desires could possess genuine rights. Furthermore, even if the reductionist view of persons is

120 Justice and the New Generation Gap metaphysically true, Daniels offers compelling reasons why the view of persons as beings unified over time ought to be adopted as a prudential principle to allow for social co-operation in the planning of institutions.27 It seems that for Drummond or others to adopt the language of rights implies an acceptance that principles of justice ought to be selected in a way that is neutral as to time preference over a person’s lifespan. We are now in a position to provisionally define what would count as age discrimination under principles of liberal justice. A policy should only be considered unjustified age discrimination if it violates what may be called a Lifespan Neutral Discrimination Principle (LNDP), which may be defined as: Any policy that defeats a person’s preference solely on the basis of a person’s age, that a person would not rationally select in a neutral bargaining situation as likely to improve his or her past and future life prospects if considered over the course of that person’s lifespan constitutes unjustified age discrimination. Using this rule of the LNDP, mandatory retirement could be considered to be perfectly acceptable as public policy, at least in the weak sense that it would be permissible as a means to solve intergenerational inequity, if not positively required by justice. This approach to age discrimination, by considering institutions that transfer between age groups from the perspective of a person’s entire lifespan, would also imply different treatment for age discrimination cases under the Charter. In the mandatory retirement cases that have gone before the court so far, both sides have accepted that requiring people to retire at age sixty-five is discriminatory under section 15, but governments have argued that mandatory retirement laws may be permitted under the “reasonable limits” provisions of section 1. However, if the LNDP was accepted as a tool for assessing age discrimination, mandatory retirement would not be seen as a violation of equality rights in the first place.

The Problem of Birth Cohorts While Daniels’ Prudential Lifespan Account gives us a way of conceptualizing transfers between age groups as actually being transfers within lives, and the proposed Lifespan Neutral Discrimination Principle allows us to redefine discrimination to account for this idea, both concepts still leave open the question of justice between birth cohorts. The very institutions that allow for transfers within lives are threatened if some birth cohorts receive disproportionately more or less of the planned transfers over their lifespans due to demographic changes or historical contingencies like war or depression. Some critics of existing social security and health care policies have argued that they have benefited certain birth cohorts disproportionately. For example, current retirees receive far more pension benefits than they paid for in taxes, and are supported by the large Baby Boomer cohorts currently in the workforce. The Baby Boomers, when they retire, will likely receive far less in benefits than they contributed in taxes, and will have to rely for support on the contributions of much smaller birth cohorts. This has led for calls in the countries that have experienced dramatic baby boom and bust phenomena (especially Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand) for public pension programs to be either radically reformed or even scrapped in the name of intergenerational equity. Daniels argues that the problem of justice between birth cohorts is secondary to the problem of transfers between age groups, because all birth cohorts are

121 IJCS / RIÉC held to have a strong interest in solving the problem of economic transfers within their lifespans. All cohorts have an interest in distributing scarce resources, like income, employment opportunities and health care, in a way that will benefit them at all stages of their lives. Daniels argues that the interest of all cohorts in solving the age group problem implies a willingness to share risks in the case of unforeseen circumstances. While equal benefit from social security programs should be the target of public policy, “Since, however, different cohorts must be willing to share risks, they must also tolerate errors, or departures from approximate equality.”28 This approach seems problematic, however, because the inequity caused by the problem of birth cohorts threatens to undermine the justification for differential treatment of age groups. Policies that discriminate on the basis of age—student loan programs, conscription, mandatory retirement, restrictions on health care for the aged, economic benefits for retired persons—can be justified under the LNDP if they may be expected to benefit all persons approximately equally over their lifespans. However,if unanticipated problems affect particular birth cohorts, they may not receive the expected benefit of the policy. Why, then, should they accept unequal treatment according to age group in the knowledge that such unequal treatment will not benefit them over their lifespans? What would have been a tolerable age differentiation reverts to unjustified age discrimination if it hurts a particular birth cohort disproportionately. A utilitarian argument that, over the long run, transfers between age groups will provide the greatest benefit to the greatest number will not suffice according to the Rawlsian principles inherent in the LNDP, and which Daniels claims underlie his own Prudential Lifespan Account. As Rawls’ states: The principles of justice apply to the basic structure of the social system and to the determination of life prospects. What the principle of utility asks is precisely a sacrifice of these prospects. We are to accept the greater advantages of others as a sufficient reason for lower expectations over the whole course of our life. This is surely an extreme demand.29 In Daniels’ Prudential Lifespan Account, differential treatment of age groups is transformed conceptually from a transfer between persons to transfers within the lives of individuals. If this is true, then institutions designed to solve the age group problem are not institutions designed to achieve justice, but to maximize utility over a person’s individual life. Policies mandating transfers of goods between age groups are founded on utility, not justice. Serious issues of justice may still arise between birth cohorts if one particular cohort benefits or suffers unduly from utilitarian policies meant to solve the universal age group problem. Surely, under the LNDP, the theoretical interest of all cohorts in finding a stable, utilitarian solution to the age group problem does not overrule the genuine injustice that results from differential treatment of birth cohorts. Given the threat which the problem of birth cohorts poses to the Prudential Lifespan Account solution for the problem of age groups, there seems to be two possible solutions which would restore justice among different cohorts. The first solution is a libertarian approach, in which governments do not act as aggregators of prudential lifespan decisions, and where age-specific benefits like health insurance and pensions are left to individual planning and discretion, while age-discriminatory laws like mandatory retirement are also

122 Justice and the New Generation Gap eliminated. This approach would follow Drummond’s suggestion of abolishing mandatory retirement and would be acceptable under the LNDP as it would also require the abolition of all other age-specific laws and programs. Under these circumstances, few people would agree that mandatory retirement was likely to benefit them over their lifespan, as they would have no guarantee of any income after retirement. The second approach is to acknowledge with Daniels that the institutions established to solve the age group problem are valuable to all persons and birth cohorts; they would not be considered untouchable features of the social contract, but as pragmatic, flexible instruments for solving the problem of age groups and possibly in need of frequent adjustment to account for the prior problem of justice between birth cohorts. Daniels’ approach of treating the age group problem as prior to the birth cohort problem does not meet the requirements of justice. The priority of the age group problem may still be said to exist in the sense that a general, long- term strategy for dealing with transfers between age groups must be developed prior to its application in specific situations. That strategy, however, must be flexible enough in practice to adjust to the specific situations of different birth cohorts to prevent injustice. The first approach to solving the inequity between birth cohorts would be to privatize the system. Economist Rita Campbell demonstrated in a 1978 study that under the American social security system, “healthy young persons entering the system today and who are taxed under today’s legislation may, depending on relative increases in wage rates and in the cost of living, find that they can buy an annuity of the same amount for less than they now pay in social security taxes.”30 With subsequent increases in pension contribution levels in Canada and the U.S., Campbell’s observation is even more justified today. Yet the libertarian approach, while possibly more equitable to younger cohorts, may lead to other problems. Libertarian policies would mean that people would select private insurance plans during their early adulthood, which might lead to people overly discounting the interests of childhood which is behind them and of old age in a distant future to protect the interests of their younger and middle aged selves. The age group policy would worsen, without any guarantee of compensatory solutions for the birth cohort problem, which would be left to market forces. The only advantage would be to avoid government discrimination against birth cohorts, but at the cost of losing all government assistance in solving the age group problem. From the point of view of justice, however, it is probably preferable that people be allowed to take their own risks rather than be forced to risk sacrificing their individual welfare to the public good by an inflexible government program. While not ideal, the libertarian approach would still be more just under the LNDP than interventionist government policies oriented solely towards solving the problem of transfers between age groups. A superior solution than either the libertarian or the pure age group transfer approach, however, would be a flexible policy approach that weighs both the age group and birth cohort problems. Policies governing mandatory retirement ages, health care regulations for different age groups, and pension benefit and contribution levels should be adjusted frequently to ensure that all cohorts benefit to roughly the same extent from government programs. To implement this policy, the government might review all programs designed to transfer income and social benefits between age groups and calculate whether all cohorts presently living and projected cohorts for the next fifty years or so will benefit with approximate equality from the programs. If not, adjustments

123 IJCS / RIÉC should be made to equalize the programs as much as possible, without taking retroactive measures or causing major losses in income levels to particular groups (say, changes causing more than a five percent loss in anticipated income to a particular cohort in any one year). This kind of periodic review would probably enhance the credibility of government programs like the Canada/Quebec Pension Plan and Medicare, because younger contributors and taxpayers would be confident that they and their children would stand to benefit from the programs as much as current recipients, making taxation or contribution increases more acceptable. This policy would recognize everyone’s common interest in distributing benefits over a lifespan, without risking injustice to particular cohorts.

Generational Justice and the Baby Boom In the argument advanced so far, policies that are sometimes considered to be unjust age discrimination, like mandatory retirement, may in fact be justified if one considers the Lifespan Neutral Discrimination Principle (LNDP). But, in order for particular policies to be justified under the LNDP, they must not only aim to equalize life prospects over the course of one’s lifespan, but also be relatively equal in their effects on existing and projected birth cohorts. As will be demonstrated, contemporary Canadian policy aimed at different age groups, while attempting to solve the lifespan problem by means of transfers between age groups, has not adequately adjusted itself for the effects of different birth cohorts on those policies. While it has not yet aroused as much public concern in Canada as in the United States, it is a dormant issue that may cause a serious loss of faith in Canada’s social institutions in the longer term if not dealt with in the next few years. Canada experienced the post-war baby boom and baby bust cycle in an even more dramatic fashion than the United States. Canada’s fertility rate peaked at 3.85 births per woman in 1959, compared to the American high of 3.71 in 1957. Among industrialized nations, only New Zealand and Ireland had higher post-war fertility peaks, while other industrialized countries experienced little or no increase in the fertility rate in the 1950s and 1960s. But Canada also experienced an even more dramatic drop in fertility rates during the late 1960s than the United States and most other countries, falling to a fertility rate of 2.26 in Canada in 1970 compared to only 2.4631 in the United States. This difference between the American and Canadian baby boom phenomenon is probably the result of higher initial fertility rates in Quebec and the sharp and rapid decline in that province after the Quiet Revolution. Regardless of cause, Canada is obviously faced with all of the socioeconomic problems caused by a large population bulge in an even more stark fashion than the United States. In addition, Canada has a much more generous system of social benefits than the United States, including the fully indexed Canada/ Quebec Pension Plan and Old Age Security Pensions and a universal Medicare system which primarily benefits the elderly. Even based on optimistic fertility projections, however, the proportion of people over sixty-five in Canada can be expected to nearly double over the next forty years. While there are almost six working age Canadians between twenty and sixty-four today for every retired person, this will drop to a three to one ratio by 2031.32 Those three workers will have to find the resources to support their own children as well. While a vigorous debate has raged in the United States over the solvency of its Social Security pension fund and the appropriate limits to public support for

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health care, in Canada, debate has too often been limited to platitudinous assurances from right and left that pensions and Medicare are “sacred trusts.” While there were some efforts toward pension reform in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there remains an apparent assumption in Canada that generous pension and medical benefits for the elderly will continue to be paid for by increased taxation on those in the workforce for the foreseeable future. But a blanket assumption of this sort imposes a huge potential tax burden on cohorts just entering the workforce and those still to come. For example, under the U.S. Social Security system, “Under a strict pay-as-you-go system, the children and grandchildren of the baby-boom generation would therefore face tax rates more than half again above those faced by the baby-boom generation itself.”33 The Canada/Quebec Pension Plan is a parallel case. While many Canadians think of the C/QPP as the public equivalent of a privately funded pension or insurance scheme, it is in fact very different as it is partially operated on a pay- as-you-go basis. Rather than pooling contributions into an investment fund to pay for future benefits, the government pays for current benefits primarily from current payroll deductions. Some surpluses were accumulated in the early years of the program, but the surplus fund is projected to disappear at current contribution and benefit levels, requiring increases in C/QPP payments if the system is to remain solvent. Payments were initially 3.6% of covered earnings in 1969. That has risen to 4.85% today, and is expected to rise to 6.85% by 2001 and 10.1% by 2016.34 This means that, as the population ages, those still in the workforce will be expected to pay proportionately far more in pension contributions than their elders did, although they will not receive more benefits. When the baby boom aged cohorts retire, the ability to pay may become so stretched that benefits may actually have to be cut if the government is to remain solvent.35 Here we see a prime example of how programs meant to solve the problem of equalizing income over a lifespan can lead to massive inequities between specific cohorts. Actuarial analyst William Hamilton observes that “Social Security benefits rely on massive intergenerational transfers. Our claim to social security rests first and foremost on our ability to tax our children.”36 This is only acceptable under the LNDP if each birth cohort can expect similar treatment at various stages of life. To the Baby Boomers who face an uncertain retirement, and Generation Xers who face a rising taxation burden to pay for benefits for the aging population, the current Canada/Quebec Pension Plan constitutes unjust age discrimination. In overall terms, Canada has seen its social expenditures massively skewed in the direction of older Canadians. While medicare and pensions are “sacred trusts” not to be tampered with, programs designed for the benefit of younger Canadians are among the most vulnerable to government cutbacks. The budget restraint of the 1980s hit hardest at universities, education, home ownership plans and job training programs—programs designed to benefit youth and younger workers—while programs aimed at the elderly went largely untouched. The attempt to deindex OAS Pensions in 1985 was met with a wall of resistance from older Canadians, while the Family Allowance Act was quietly buried in 1992 with little fanfare. The results of these policies have been dramatic. Over the past ten years, while the proportion of seniors living in poverty has dropped from 28% to 15%, the proportion of children living in poverty has climbed 15% to 17%.37 While there are still a great many poor seniors, their numbers are roughly in line with the national average. The rate of poverty among children, however, is climbing, with government taking little action to prevent it.

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The effects of the severe recessions of the early 1980s and early 1990s were also borne primarily by younger workers. For example, a Statistics Canada study showed that while workers aged twenty- to twenty-four saw their real wages decline by 17.59% between 1981 and 1986, workers between the ages of 45 and 64 saw real increases of 2.96%.38 These results, along with other figures demonstrating higher rates of youth unemployment and part-time work, led the authors to conclude that the much discussed “decline of the middle class” in Canada is especially acute in younger age groups. It seems that Canada’s `declining middle’ (or lower middle) is not a pervasive phenomenon affecting all groups equally. Rather, for this period at least, it was largely created by dramatic shifts in the distribution of wages paid to workers in different age groups— downward movement in the relative wages of youth and some upward movement in the relative wages of older workers.39 Today, families with a head of household under 25 years old are 7.5% poorer in real dollar terms than their counterparts were in 1971. That cohort which was under 25 in 1971, by contrast, now earns 21.3% more in real terms than their opposites in the 35- to 44- year old bracket did in 1971. Of course, from the perspective of the LNDP such effects could well be tolerable if they were compensated by higher wages as the cohorts entering the job market in the 1980s caught up later. But as we have seen, they will face higher taxation throughout their working lives, with most of that revenue going to fund programs for the retired. The economic trend of the Baby Boomers (a sociological group which only includes the late 1940s and 1950s cohorts of the post-war baby boom, which demographers count from 1946 to 1964 in the United States, and 1947 to 1966 in Canada40) enjoying unprecedented wealth, while the Generation Xers (roughly those born between 1960 and 1970) are becoming the first generation in North American history to do worse materially than their parents, partly as a result of government policy, stands in sharp contrast to the Rawlsian principle of fair equality of opportunity. One solution to these inequities would be to increase taxes on capital gains, which mainly accrue to wealthy older workers and retirees. The trend, however, is the opposite: from progressive taxes on capital to regressive taxes on consumption. European countries, which did not experience a baby boom and thus have had older populations historically, have led the way in this regard. Finlayson comments on this phenomenon: Aging populations do demand more public spending on social support services. At the same time their growing numbers at the ballot box make it difficult for governments to raise extra money by taxing capital income to pay for these services. As many European countries have discovered in recent years, older voters are perfectly capable of exercising their political power to ensure that capital taxes are minimized. This in turn has forced governments to introduce consumption taxes, in the form of retail sales taxes, value added taxes or expenditure taxes, to raise the extra money they need.41 Canada has repeated this history with the introduction of a $150,000 lifetime exemption from capital gains taxation in 1985, a revenue shortfall that was partly compensated by the introduction of the regressive Goods and Services Tax in 1989.

126 Justice and the New Generation Gap

Despite these inequities, it is hard to generate political concern for generational justice. The root of the problem is built into the political system itself. Older persons vote in higher numbers than any other citizens, while younger people vote the least, and children not at all. According to American sociologist Samuel Preston, “Enlightened self-interest has simply become self interest—looking out for number one—with particularly devastating effects for children... Americans have never had any strong sense of collective responsibility for other people’s children, only private responsibility for their own.”42 Support for the elderly, on the other hand, has a universal appeal. “The elderly are a very peculiar type of interest group, quite unlike the Teamsters or Southerners or the National Rifle Association. They are a group that almost all of us can confidently expect to belong to one day.”43 Even commentators concerned with social justice in public policy are reluctant to address the issue of justice in stark generational terms, however. Finlayson, having documented the demographic, economic, and political trends caused by the baby boom and bust phenomenon on Canada’s pension system still calls for governments to dramatically increase government support for pensions and to mandate improvements in corporate pension plans. According to Finlayson, the argument that an aging population requires increased contribution rates and limited benefits is “Partly bunk.”44 She argued that the demographic trends have been exaggerated by “harbingers of doom and gloom,” and suggests that increased pension benefits for the elderly will reduce their demands on the health care system, which seems unlikely as long as human beings remain subject to eventual illness and death. Daniels, faced with the argument that expensive pension programs have taken resources from other groups, like poor children, argues that they are separate, distributive justice claims that should be viewed apart from the issue of pension programs. The issue is miscast if it is portrayed as competition between children and the elderly. Rather, programs aimed at distributive justice in general—redistributive transfers from the rich to the poor—have all taken a back seat... Our concern about increased poverty among children and our legitimate worries about the stability of transfer systems that will soon encounter the baby boom cohort should not tempt us to undermine what is valuable in our collective solution to the age group problem.45 The problems with Daniels’ and Finlayson’s arguments is that they imply maintaining (and improving) the obvious social asset of a generous scheme of retirement pensions as an important part of the solution for the universal problem of age groups, and transfers within lifespans remain the top social priority, even when the resources used for this utilitarian purpose distort justice. Yet, as Rawls argues, “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions.”46 Programs such as U.S. Social Security and the Canada/Quebec Pension Plan, while having some redistributive effect, do not tax as progressively as regular income tax, and do not distribute benefit according to need as effectively as welfare or guaranteed income programs. The political popularity of such programs should not be allowed to obscure their limited progressivity. If such programs are to be maintained on the grounds that they better distribute resources within lives, and provide a modest redistribution within cohorts, the massive and unjust redistribution of benefits between cohorts must be eliminated. Practically speaking, this would require larger increases in C/QPP contributions immediately, rather than phased increases

127 IJCS / RIÉC that hurt younger cohorts more, with the increases to be used to more fully fund future benefits through investment, rather than simply paying for current deficits or government expenditure. Another alternative might be to examine, within the context of the LNDP, increasing the age at which C/QPP benefits may be collected. To redress the inequities already done without reducing the income of the elderly poor, higher capital gains or succession duties might be contemplated. But simply maintaining the current system on a pay-as-you-go basis will perpetuate a massive injustice to younger cohorts, and will risk the future stability of social security and medicare.

Conclusions If what I have argued above is correct, then age discrimination is not simply the result of policies that differentiate by age that have a negative impact over one’s entire lifespan. Under this definition, which I have rendered explicitly in the Lifetime Neutral Discrimination Principle, mandatory retirement may be an acceptable policy if considered as part of a system of institutions designed to improve one’s overall life prospects. The current Canada/Quebec Pension Plan, and other public policies which sacrifice distributive justice for younger cohorts to provide utilitarian benefits which benefit older cohorts, would appear to constitute unjustified age discrimination under the LNDP. This contradicts popular perception, which sees the obvious discrimination of forcing somebody to retire or refusing somebody a heart transplant simply because they have turned sixty-five as unjust, while the more subtle, genuinely unjust forms of discrimination built into tax systems and demographic trends escape public notice. The courts and academic commentators on discrimination must radically alter their perspective on age discrimination to account for the twin facts that differential treatment of persons according to age group may be justified because all persons age, while systemic discrimination against particular cohorts is a grave injustice because people remain part of the same cohort at whatever stage of life they are at. As the next decades progress, with increased life expectancies, rising health care costs, and the aging of the baby boom population, these forms of discrimination will come to far outweigh possible explicit acts of legislative age differentiation in their potential social impact. These trends will give rise to new claims from the left that the collective rights of younger and future generations should override the rights of (older) individuals, while those on the right will call for a libertarian slashing of social programs to prevent generational inequity. Given a court system and political culture that is based on the principles of liberal equality, and the threat such collectivist or libertarian claims would pose to it, demonstrating and rectifying systemic discrimination against birth cohorts that violate fair equality of opportunity will be crucial to preserving the stability of our social system.

Notes 1. Douglas Coupland, Generation X (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), p. 21. 2. Gary Wedeking, “Is Mandatory Retirement Unfair Age Discrimination?” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 20:3 (September, 1990), p. 323. 3. Ibid., p. 323. 4. Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Children’s Rights: A Legal Perspective,” in Patricia A. Vardin and Ilene N. Brody, eds., Children’s Rights: Contemporary Perspectives (New York: Teachers College Press, 1979), p. 104. 5. Wedeking, p. 424. 6. Brennan J. Frontiero v. Richardson 411 U.S. 677 (1973) at 686.

128 Justice and the New Generation Gap

7. Samuel La Selva, “Mandatory Retirement: Intergenerational Justice and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 20:1 (March, 1987), p. 153. 8. Ibid., p. 153. 9. Robert J. Drummond, “Commentary on `Mandatory Retirement: Intergenerational Justice and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms’ by Samuel LaSelva,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 21:3 (September, 1988), p. 587. 10. Ibid., p. 587. 11. Norman Daniels, Am I My Parents’ Keeper? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 12. 12. Ibid., p. 13. 13. Ibid., p. 13. 14. Drummond, p. 595. 15. Ibid., p. 588. 16. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 408. 17. Ibid., p. 293. 18. Ibid., p. 66. 19. Leslie A. Jacobs, “Employment Equity, Pay Equity, and Equality of Opportunity,” in François-Pierre Gingras, ed., Gender and Politics in Contemporary Canada (forthcoming), p. 7. 20. Rawls, p. 73. 21. Ibid., 137. 22. B.M. Barry, “Justice Between Generations,” in P.M.S. Hacker, ed., Law, Morality, and Society: Essays in Honour of H.L.A. Hart (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), p. 278. 23. Daniels, p. 41. 24. Ibid., p. 63. 25. David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, II, iii, 3. 26. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Person, Pt. III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). 27. Daniels, pp. 174-176. 28. Ibid., p. 130. 29. Rawls, p. 178. 30. Rita Campbell, “The Problems of Fairness,” in Michael J. Boskin, ed., The Crisis of Social Security: Problems and Prospects (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1978), p. 131. 31. A. Romaniuc, Current Demographic Analysis: Fertility in Canada From Baby Boom to Baby Bust (Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada, 1984), p. 124. 32. Ann Finlayson, Whose Money Is It Anyway? The Showdown on Pensions (Toronto: Viking, 1988), pp. 59-60. 33. Henry J. Aaron, Barry P. Bosworth, and Gary Burtless, Can America Afford to Grow Old? (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1989), p. 48. 34. “Income Shifts Pose New Problems,” Financial Post, August 10, 1992, p. 7. 35. This presents something of a dilemma for mandatory retirement, however. Earlier, it was argued that mandatory retirement could be justified under the LNDP as protecting one’s interest as a young person. The prospect of a large cohort retiring too rapidly presents the opposite problem — not that younger workers will not have access to jobs, but that they will face too high a tax burden to pay for the retired. Thus, it will be seen that the LNDP only allows for what Drummond calls the “weaker” argument that liberal justice may allow mandatory retirement, not that mandatory retirement is necessarily required for liberal justice. Again, we see the importance of periodic reviews of policies (such as retirement age and its voluntary or mandatory nature) for cohort relative effects. 36. “Income Shifts Pose New Problems,” p. 7. 37. Ibid., p. 7. 38. J. Myles, G. Picot, and T. Warnell, “Wages and Jobs in the 1980s: Changing Youth Wages and the Declining Middle,” Statistics Canada Analytical Studies Branch Research Paper Series (Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada, 1988), p. 144. 39. Ibid., p. 89. 40. David K. Foot, Canada’s Population Outlook (Toronto: Lorimer, 1982), p. 45-56. 41. Finlayson, p. 200.

129 IJCS / RIÉC

42. Samuel H. Preston, “Children and the Elderly: Divergent paths for America’s Dependents,” Demography 21:4 (November, 1984), pp. 447-448. 43. Ibid., p. 446. 44. Finlayson, p. 200. 45. Daniels, pp. 137-138. 46. Rawls, p. 3.

Bibliography Aaron, Henry J. Economic Effects of Social Security. Washington: Brookings Institution, 1982. ————, Bosworth, Barry P., and Burtless, Gary. Can America Afford to Grow Old? Washington: Brookings Institution, 1989. Barry, B.M. “Justice Between Generations,” in P.M.S. Hacker, ed. Law, Morality, and Society: Essays in Honour of H.L.A. Hart. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. Boskin, Michael J., ed. The Crisis in Social Security: Problems and Prospects. San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1978. Clinton, Hillary Rodham. “Children’s Rights: A Legal Perspective,” in Patricia A. Vardin and Ilene N. Brody, eds. Children’s Rights: Contemporary Perspectives. New York: Teacher’s College Press, 1979. Coupland, Douglas. Generation X. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Daniels, Norman. Am I My Parents’ Keeper? New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Drummond, Robert J. “Comment on `Mandatory Retirement: Intergenerational Justice and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms’ by Samuel LaSelva.” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 21:3 (1988), pp. 585-595. Economic Council of Canada. One In Three: Pensions for Canadians to 2030. Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada, 1979. Finlayson, Ann. Whose Money Is It Anyway? The Showdown on Pensions. Markham: Viking, 1988. Foot, David K. Canada’s Population Outlook. Toronto: Lorimer, 1982. Government of Canada. Better Pensions for Canadians. Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada, 1982. Howe, Neil and Strauss, William. “The New Generation Gap.” The Atlantic Monthly, 270:6 (1992), pp. 67-89. “Income Shifts Pose New Problems.” The Financial Post, August 10, 1992, p. 7. LaSelva, Samuel. “Mandatory Retirement: Intergenerational Justice and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 20:1 (1987), pp. 149-162. ————. “Reply: Rethinking Equal Opportunity.” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 21:3 (1988), pp. 597-598. Longman, P. “Justice Between Generations.” The Atlantic Monthly, 255:6 (1985), pp. 73-81. Myles, J., Picot, G., and Wannell, T. “Wages and Jobs in the 1980s: Changing Youth Wages and the Declining Middle.” Statistics Canada Analytical Studies Branch Research Paper Series, No. 17. Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada, 1988. Pesando, J.E., and Rea, S.A. Public and Private Pensions in Canada: An Economic Analysis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977. Preston, Samuel H. “Children and the Elderly: Divergent Paths for America’s Dependents,” Demography, 21:4 (1984), pp. 435-456. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Romaniuc, A. Current Demographic Analysis – Fertility in Canada: From Baby-boom to Baby- bust. Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada, 1984. Russell, Louise B. The Baby Boom Generation and the Economy. Washington: Brookings Institution, 1982. Wedeking, Gary. “Is Mandatory Retirement Unfair Age Discrimination?” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 20:3 (1990), pp. 321-334.

130 Robert Drummond

Rejoinder to “Justice and the New Generation Gap” by Mark T. Cameron

The author makes a valuable and interesting contribution to the debate over intergenerational justice, expanding consideration of the concept beyond the question of mandatory retirement (where he/she rightly observes much of the debate has up to now taken place). The most important contribution the article makes however is to argue the desirability of employing what the author calls a “life span neutral discrimination principle” to assess the justifiability of apparently discriminatory policies. By such a principle, a policy that discriminated on the basis of age would be justified if the person whose preference is defeated (the person discriminated against) would rationally prefer such a policy “in a neutral bargaining situation as likely to improve his/her past and future life prospects if considered over the course of his/her life span.” Such a rational preference necessarily relies on a calculation about the likelihood of a policy’s improving one’s life prospects, and while that calculation is easy if one is being asked in a particular moment to choose employment or unemployment, it is more difficult when one is being asked over one’s life span to accept a policy of mandatory retirement as likely to make employment in earlier life stages more certain. What if the empirical premise on which the calculation rests is flawed? What if the number of jobs available for young workers is largely unrelated to the number of jobs currently held by older workers? Intuitively of course, such a finding seems absurd, but since the volume and quality of available work fluctuates widely in response to a number of factors, it is not difficult to envision an economic scenario in which jobs for persons entering the labour force increase without anyone retiring at the upper end of the age scale, or (perhaps more easily envisioned in the present economic climate) a scenario in which jobs for young workers contract despite substantial retirements at later ages. One could even construct a scenario in which the quality of work and contribution to the economy of older workers might be such that the very act of removing them from the workforce could actually reduce the number of jobs available overall. What are the rights of younger and older workers then: “What policy is just in that event!” Would it be rational to prefer, in a neutral bargaining situation, a policy of mandatory retirement if it did not seem likely to improve one’s life prospects, given all the other factors that will have effect? If not, would it be just to introduce such a policy? The author correctly observes that age is not like race or sex as a ground of distinction/discrimination, since “each person usually passes through each age group and stage of life,” and thus “[p]eople may agree to be treated unequally at different stages of life in order to achieve more equal treatment over their entire life span.” Of course, one’s entire life span must be viewed either prospectively or retrospectively, and the aim of just policy should be to provide conditions that would rationally be chosen if one could look at ones whole life, in all directions as it were. When we address policies affecting the

International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue international d’études canadiennes Special issue / Numéro hors série, Winter/hiver 1993 IJCS / RIÉC later life stages of course, we have the opportunity of hindsight and could conceivably tailor policies for different cohorts (or individuals) to take account of their life experiences. Such variation could be seen as just by some accounts but would undoubtedly raise questions of fairness in the minds of those at earlier life stages who would be uncertain what policies would eventually be applied to them. Is it just, however, to impose the same requirements to retire on two groups of people, one of whom may have experienced involuntarily delayed entry to the labour force (either by systemic sex discrimination of an earlier era, or economic circumstance like the great Depression) and the other of whom may have benefited from a post-war economic boom and largely uninterrupted employment? We would be assisted in answering this question if there were empirical evidence to show whether different age cohorts could expect to experience roughly the same number of years of employment availability, but I suspect such evidence is not easy to come by. Finally, the author addresses pension plans and the baby boom and rightly observes that the contributory part of the Canadian pension system—the Canada Pension Plan—operates not as a funded pension but on a pay-as-you- go basis. It therefore results in an intergenerational transfer that is hard indeed to justify. Few would object, I believe, if the money raised by government pension plan contributions were actuarially set, so as to be sufficient when invested to fund completely the pension obligations thereby created—as would be the case with a private pension scheme. However, again we would be helped in assessing the desirability of this policy (and maybe its justice) if we had the answer to an empirical question. In order fully to fund Canada Pensions, the government would have to raise from currently employed persons (including the bulk of the post-war baby boom) enormous sums of money which it would then have to invest. Since the agency involved is government, it is prudent to recognize this as a large to increase, the proceeds of which would either be invested in private securities, or in public capital works. In the latter cast, the pension contributions would in a sense turn from a tax into a kind of government debenture, since the pension fund obligations could be met only if the money realized a return that allowed the fund to grow. Indeed this is the way Canada Pension funds were employed (usually as loans to provincial governments) in the period before the plan’s obligations began to match, and then outstrip, its income. Now suppose it were determined that the growth of the economy, and thus the income of the society,could be increased more rapidly if contributions to Government pensions were not increased (to be invested by government), but instead were left in private hands for a variety of private investment and consumption decisions, with taxes to be collected later as needed from a larger, wealthier economy? (Of course, the taxes would still be needed; it is a question of when. Moreover the opposite proposition about the effects of government investment pools could also be argued.) In any case, the decision whether a pay-as-you-go pension plan is the cause of an unjust intergenerational transfer of wealth relies, I believe, on the answer to an empirical research question—is a generation better off if it is taxed to fund the pensions of those who have retired, or taxed to fund its own pensions, when the latter option might adversely affect economic performance? This is a difficult and thorny problem to be sure, but in principle one capable of having evidence brought to bear on its solution. Of course the problem is in part related to the different sizes of age cohorts—and the changing old-age dependency ratio. However there is nothing an individual can do to affect the size of his own birth cohort, so it is a complicated matter to serve justice while taking account of

134 Rejoinder those size differences. Again however it is a matter well-served, I think, by the application of empirical data. In short, a major part of my argument in response to Samuel LaSelva on intergenerational justice was the contention that our answers to these normative questions would be much assisted by some empirical research. I feel that this argument retains validity, even in the face of the present author’s improved analysis of the intergenerational justice issue.

135 Mark T. Cameron

Reply to Rejoinder

Professor Drummond questions the Lifespan Neutral Discrimination Principle as it would apply in two situations: mandatory retirement, and full funding of public pensions. In both cases, he questions the empirical premises on which mandatory retirement and full funding might be made acceptable under the LNDP. First, he questions whether a policy of mandatory retirement would in fact increase job opportunities for younger workers, suggesting that there may be no relationship between jobs held by older workers and the availability of work to the young. If this were in fact the case, mandatory retirement would not be an acceptable public policy, as it would not be likely to enhance anyone’s overall life prospects. Based on anecdotal evidence and personal experience, however, I suspect that the larger scale empirical research which Drummond calls for (and which is fully consistent with the approach to public policy which I have advocated) would confirm that there is a relationship between jobs held by older workers and the availability of employment to the young. On the question of pensions, Drummond does raise a troubling problem: the full funding of pensions would lead to the creation of a massive capital pool in government hands which would undoubtedly distort the market economy and could, if poorly managed, lead to worsened economic performance which may result in reduced pension benefits for all recipients. For that reason, a fully funded pension plan may not be prudent, but some thought should be given to creating a pension fund surplus large enough to keep the fund solvent despite demographic shifts. Given the already low rates of savings and public investment in North America, I suspect that such a fund could be put to effective use, although I share Drummond’s fear that government may not be the best manager of such large amounts of money. I would suggest that perhaps a number of competitive, privately managed investment funds analogous to union pension funds be established with the revenues collected, rather than the money simply going into government coffers along with general revenues. The fact that the debate over mandatory retirement and pension funding levels has been narrowed to questions of economic utility, however, suggests that on grounds of justice, there are no principled objections to something like the LNDP being used to assess public policy decisions or to the concept of differential treatment by age group if the net result will improve the life prospects of all birth cohorts.

International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue internationale d’études canadiennes Special issue / Numéro hors série, Winter/hiver 1993 Caterina Pizanias

Re-viewing Modernist Painting and Criticism in the Canadian Prairies: A Case Study from Edmonton*

Abstract The basic theoretical assumption of this paper is that art is socially constructed; the methodological schema upon which its diachronic and synchronic discussion of modernism in the prairies is based relates to Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of “fields.” The first part of the paper provides a historical overview of the various generations of painters and critics—those born and trained abroad as well as those born and trained on the prairies. The second half focuses on the intertwined careers of Douglas Haynes (a painter) and Karen Wilkin (a critic). The modernism discussed is that of Clement Greenberg and “generation” is understood as the distillation of mainstream values at any given time. The final part provides support to the thesis that the prairie, as physical and social environment, has affected and is affecting both the art produced and its reception.

Résumé L’auteure se base sur l’hypothèse que l’art est une construction sociale. Le schéma méthodologique sur lequel repose son examen diachronique et synchronique du modernisme dans les provinces de la Prairie se rattache à la notion de « champs » élaborée par Pierre Bourdieu. La première partie du texte fait l’historique des diverses générations de peintres et critiques, tant celles nées et formées à l’extérieur que celles nées et formées dans la Prairie. La deuxième partie se penche sur l’entrelacement des carrières de Douglas Haynes (peintre) et Karen Wilkin (critique). Le modernisme à l’examen est celui de Clement Greenberg, et on entend par le terme « génération » la distillation des valeurs prépondérantes à n’importe quel moment donné. La dernière partie vient soutenir la thèse que la Prairie, en tant que lieu physique et social, a influencé et influence l’art et la réception de celui-ci.

Painting was not always a commodity. In earlier times, it was closely associated with the functional needs of the community. Increasing industrialization brought about changes in the production and consumption of art that made painting not only a means of expression or enjoyment, but also an instrument of power for the church and the nobility. The turning point came with the privatization of this power. When painters began using easels, they produced small, portable objects that lent themselves to ownership by, and transference between, individuals. Paintings thus became commodities not unlike others traded in open markets. From medieval times to the present, the production and distribution of paintings was controlled first by the guilds, then by the academies, and finally—inextricably implicating aesthetic value and

International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue internationale d’études canadiennes Special issue / Numéro hors série, Winter/hiver 1993 IJCS / RIÉC commercial success—by the art market. Increasingly identifying paintings with their monetary counterpart, this market has become ever more speculative and monopolistic in its practices. One notable by-product is its concomitantly increasing vulnerability to the “boom and bust” cycles of the broader, capitalist economy. The most common way to explain this phenomenon has been in economic terms. But does this suffice? Was it only economy that determined the boom and bust of Edmonton modernism? To understand fully, I think we have to give more consideration to the specific context. Art, removed from its everyday praxis, came to Canada via French and English settlers;1 art as a separate and autonomous institution was established after Confederation as the result of efforts by a number of Canada’s viceroys to create a “national culture,”2 in which they were assisted by the Canadian Pacific Railway.3 Modernist art in the form of abstract expressionism came to the prairies because a number of artists in Saskatchewan felt totally left out of the central Canadian art discourse. As John O’Brian has documented, it was “anti-eastern” rather than “pro-American” sentiments that brought the New Yorkers to Saskatchewan at the by now famous Emma Lake workshops,4 which began in 1955, took place annually, and managed to not invite any central Canadians until the early 1970s. Clement Greenberg came to Canada also by invitation, of the editors of Canadian Art in 1963 to provide a critical review of the artistic scene on the prairies, presumably because the artistic establishment needed the validation of a critic from south of the border; the habit of going south for validation has continued unabated to this date. Arthur McKay, a painter from Saskatchewan, wrote in 1964 in Canadian Art regarding some opposition that arose as a result of American dominance at the Emma Lake workshops: “Curiously enough, we accept political coercion, economic domination, Coca-Cola, and pre-digested mass communication, while we resist exposure to the more human and civilized arts from the U.S.A.”5 Greenbergian modernism came to the prairies via Regina and Saskatoon, but has found a welcome home in Edmonton’s art world. The first part of this paper provides a historical overview of the various generations of painters and critics who have left their mark on the prairies, beginning with the foreign-born and -trained who came to Canada looking for adventure, and those who stayed as teachers; the next generation is then examined, those who were born and trained in Canada and became professional painters, teachers and gatekeepers. The second half of the paper focuses on Edmonton and the career of Douglas Haynes, an abstract painter who was born and raised in Regina, educated at the Alberta College of Art in Calgary, and is now established as a senior painter (third generation) in Edmonton’s art world of painting, a world seen by most as a historical anomaly for remaining a stronghold of modernist artistic practices well into the 1990s. The discussion will offer some re-visionist explanation of the “route” of modernism on the prairies, its successes and failures. My basic theoretical assumption is that art is socially constructed,6 and the methodological schema on which my diachronic and synchronic discussion of the art world is based relates to Pierre Bourdieu’s “intellectual field.”7 I use the term “generation” as do Randy Rosen and Catherine Brawer, in Making Their Mark, to refer to “the distillation of the values of the mainstream” at any given time, when the mainstream is understood as “a filtering mechanism—identifying, legitimizing, and propagating certain styles, world views, and interests.”8 The modernism discussed is that of Clement Greenberg and his many epigoni who

140 Re-viewing Modernist Painting and Criticism in the Canadian Prairies

have found a permanent or temporary home in the art world of Edmonton; the fundamental tenets of Greenbergian modernism are (a) that criticism can and ought to be value-free, removed from the urgencies of everyday life and (b) that it is based solely on the inherent qualities of the medium, such as colour, flatness, scale, edge—anything else is totally irrelevant. I have chosen to focus on Douglas Haynes—a third-generation artist—and his career for a number of reasons. First, because of his thorough prairie provenance: born in Regina, trained in Calgary, making Edmonton his artistic home (as opposed to Jock MacDonald, foreign-born and -trained settler, first generation; Illingworth Kerr, prairie-born, domestically trained by foreign teachers, second generation). Secondly, because of his lengthy exhibition and critical interpretation record within local, national and international settings; and thirdly, and most importantly, because of the early and less than enthusiastic reception of his work by both Clement Greenberg and Karen Wilkin and their subsequent change of mind regarding Haynes’ work, a change of mind which best exemplifies and unmasks the purported a-political position of Greenbergian criticism, a rather politically committed position to suppress the personal and social in art. The manifest position of orthodox modernist criticism—that great art is but a succesion of great stylistic ideas exhibited by a roster of great masters—masks “the unexplored meanings, silent contradictions, unseen conflicts, and inarticulate ironies....the truly fascinating questions surrounding the social ground of art, the psychological text of artistic subjectivity, and the ideological manufacturing of an aesthetic school’s attributes get totally lost in the rhetorical fog.”9 In other words, the prairie as physical and social environment is left out for the benefit of the tenets of modernist criticism that should remain uncontaminated by the exigencies of everyday life. In writing about modernism’s route through the prairies and its effects on Edmonton’s art in particular, one cannot escape the critical influence and itinerant presence of Clement Greenberg and Karen Wilkin. It is Karen Wilkin, the critic/author whose professional provenance (U.S. Ivy League trained and close associate of Greenberg) allowed her the “authority” to consecrate/ valorize local artists/art objects for a national and international audience, who has become more closely associated with prairie modernism in general and Douglas Haynes in particular. And it is the same provenance that kept Wilkin from accepting the role of “place” in the work of Haynes in her writing (although instinctively she must have recognized it since her valorization of his work became greater the more he allowed his sense of “place” in his work); her itinerant life as a writer/critic/curator forced her to adapt her views, according to her new audiences/readers in U.S. , Central Canada and England thus precluding her from becoming a mentor to other local artists/writers/ curators. Taking my theoretical cues from Pierre Bourdieu, and art critical temperament from writers such as Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Timothy Luke, Brian O’Doherty and David Carrier,10 I will attempt in the pages that follow to re-tell the passage of modernism through Edmonton, focusing on the peculiarities of experience among some of the members of its art world of painting. It is my intent to show that art worlds are ripe with contradictions enforced upon their members through the uneasy alliance of aesthetic idealism and commercial success. In telling this story, I will be introducing many voices and points of view in a polyvocal narrative, a narrative that will not be appropriating these voices through “summaries,” since these same voices have not had the

141 IJCS / RIÉC opportunity to critically contextualize their discourse bases: they are voices from personal interviews, excerpts from art reviews, published conversations, personal correspondence and other such anecdotal, un-theorized sources. This essay may be seen both as a document and an analysis of an ethnographic case study contributing to the development of this genre within contemporary artistic discourses. I have made frequent use of long quotes in order to write the ethnography as conversation and social practice between the subjects as opposed to the traditional descriptions of the subjects’ reality and opinions written compendiously through the privileged “I/eye” of the objective ethnographer. There are no final truths to this story, or any other story; but its “telling” might reveal something new about art, the Canadian prairie and its creative temperament.

A Historical Overview Alberta had its own economic boom years in the period from 1978 to 1983. Especially in Edmonton, the art community benefited from this boom as much as the oil barons. Many new galleries opened their doors, and many new artists emerged, albeit momentarily, from obscurity. The mode of preference was New York-style abstract art. Sales were brisk, with collectors coming from across Canada and the United States to buy paintings from local artists. This process of embourgeoisification was not unlike many rags-to-riches stories: the railroad brought progress, oil brought capitalism, capitalism brought optimism and prosperity, prosperity brought Americanization, Americanization brought peddlers, mercenaries, and promoters of all things American, including ways to make and sell art. And like many rags-to-riches stories, what went up came down: when the Arab states lowered oil prices, Alberta’s oil became unprofitable, and so all the specialists and mercenaries left the province. Things went bust in Alberta, and Edmonton’s art world was no exception. Abstract painters moved from gallery to gallery in futile pursuit of dwindling sales, and by the mid 1980s, many of the new galleries had gone out of business. With the change of climate, the once almost monolithic New York influence began to wane, being replaced by more personal modes of painting. Alberta has a short history—it became a province only in 1905; before that it was part of the Northwest Territories. It was first “discovered” by white explorers in quest of a “Northwest Passage” during the second half of the eighteenth century. The Hudson Bay Company quickly followed, and by 1754 had established a flourishing trade with the Plains Indians. Things continued in much the same vein for two hundred years: the white presence in Alberta consisted of adventurers, explorers, fur traders, wolf hunters, prospectors, fugitives, surveyors and missionaries. In time, they were joined by the North- West Mounted Police and, after 1873, government functionaries and railroad engineers. The one thing all these groups had in common was that they were “short-timers,” there for specific, limited purposes, rather than permanent settlers.11 “Real” settlers—Anglo- and French-Canadians, with a leavening of Americans—began to filter into the region once the railroad was established. They found an empty, inhospitable land, full of tangled bush, unyielding muskeg, treacherous rivers and wild, wind-swept, open spaces. Their reactions ranged from disappointment to trepidation. Rebuffed if not openly threatened by the land and its inhabitants, these early pioneers responded by withdrawing into self. Practical exigencies aside, they developed a surprising facility for

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“seeing” only the view from the fort, a garrison mentality they kept long after the land was cleared and the fences put up.12 Towards the end of the century, a different breed of immigrant began to settle in Alberta. The newcomers were not of English, American or French descent, but from the rural areas of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe. Having fled from regimes that were politically, religiously and economically oppressive, they bypassed the urban centres of Toronto and Montreal and headed directly for the West.13 These second-wave settlers were not sustained by the same notions of individual liberty that had motivated their predecessors, especially American. They left old worlds not out of a burning need to create new ones, but in order to salvage old ways in a new environment. This orientation to the past, of course, made the encounter trauma all the more severe. The environment on the prairie was nothing like home in either its climate or its scale. They reacted to the vast, flat, empty landscape, the long and harsh winters, and the sterilizing light the same way as those who came before them, travellers and settlers, artists and laymen alike: they were repelled.14 The propensity of the prairie “to enter into almost everything”15 has been well documented in the literature, as have the effects of its visual tyranny on its beholders. Geographer Ronald Rees has been particularly astute in analyzing the psychology of western settlement. Canadians, he writes, moved west not to escape from civilization but to (re)establish one.16 The prairie was nothing like what they had experienced before; it engulfed them in total isolation and forced them, out of fear, to recoil into what they knew best: the ways of the old world. “They were physically in one world and spiritually in another.”17 In response to this disquieting situation, they immediately busied themselves clearing the land and surrounding themselves with shelter belts of tall trees. These trees not only protected them from the harshness of the weather, but— almost more important—defined “their” space in the barren land. Inside the shelter belts, houses were built and decorated, gardens planted, and rituals enacted to remind them of the life and place they had left behind. This pattern of first responses was reinforced by ongoing demographic trends. The prairie, because of its unforgiving nature, and its distance from the industrial and political/cultural centre of Canada, created small outcroppings of population, communities without much contact with each other, and inhabitants who felt inferior to the land. The precariousness of their position ensured that each new group of arrivals would inherit a defensive stance toward the landscape, uniquely Canadian.18 According to available data,19 the first person to paint professionally in Edmonton was Paul Kane, an Englishman who lived in Toronto. Kane’s artistic education was very limited aside from an extended trip to Europe, where he spent most of his time viewing continental art and copying the Italian masters. What was ultimately more important, during a visit to England he had the opportunity to view George Catlin’s famous exhibition of Indian paintings. Inspired by the American, Kane determined to make it his life’s goal to record the folkways of the Natives of North America. Kane did not, however, emulate Catlin’s relatively spontaneous style of working.20 He preferred to make only quick sketches on the spot during his travels and then return to Toronto, where he turned them into polished studio paintings. Not surprisingly, the overall impression given by this oeuvre is not of the Canadian West, but of nineteenth-century Europe. Kane painted the landscape according to the standards not of nature but of culture: that is, as wild

143 IJCS / RIÉC but picturesque. In this, Kane was typical of painters who came through Alberta during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If conventions changed, the tendency to be conventional did not. In 1880, when the Royal Academy was established, its annual exhibition was dominated by renditions of the Rocky Mountains in the fashionable, sublime style. Part of the reason for this homogeneity—again—was economic. With the railway completed, an increasing number of artists were commissioned to paint pictures of the terrain it traversed. Because the primary purpose of these productions was propaganda (the CPR wanted to encourage tourists; the government and its developers wanted to settle the area as quickly as possible), it was imperative that they show the landscape as enticing, and that meant repackaging it according to current aesthetic norms. Considering its continuity with earlier and later trends, however, the preference for distancing through technique— the preference, even more, for “full” rather than “empty” scenery—was probably inspired as much by the overwhelming impact of the land itself as by the interests of patrons. Like the first settlers, then, the first painters arrived in the West with their values pre-formed. Like the settlers, the only way they could assimilate the unassimilable prairies was to clutter it with “things,” or focus on the near-to- hand. Almost without exception they used imported idioms; the duplication of the old cultural standards made them feel less alien in their new and strange land. (Even the later, putatively revolutionary Group of Seven were strongly predisposed by European influences like Art Nouveau and the Scandinavian school.) It was easier to ignore nature than to face it; by transforming the strange into the familiar, they were not simply taking artistic shortcuts but practising a kind of “mental self-protection.”21 Alberta began to change around the turn of the century. With the establishment of cities, the permanent population expanded rapidly. The first farming and ranching communities developed close to the American border. With the railroads, new ideas began to arrive from central Canada. The easterners brought with them notions of “mechanization” and “agribusiness” ways of subdividing the landscape into rural and urban. This was only the beginning. In 1947—before even the first generation of settlers had died—the discovery of oil in Leduc was to change the prairie look and prairie life beyond recognition. To this point, the economy had been largely agricultural. Within a mere handful of years, a massive influx of speculators, engineers and foreign capital would lay the ground for an oil and gas industry that rapidly became Alberta’s economic mainstay. Oil brought capitalism; capitalism ushered in an economic boom. The general euphoria swept Edmonton into a new role as the gateway to a North rich in resources and wealth. Beguiled by the apparently limitless generosity of a suddenly beneficent nature, Albertans embraced not only an American style of industry and management, but also a uniquely American vision of unlimited economic expansion. In the 1970s, an increasingly urban middle class of educated professionals—corporate lawyers, geologists, engineers, landsmen, consultants, accountants and the like—gave Peter Lougheed’s Progressive Conservative party a mandate to transform the province from an economic satellite into a centre of power, wealth and cosmopolitan culture.22 Caught up in the excitement, Edmonton’s art world began to identify with New York’s post-war rags-to-riches success story. “Edmonton does not have to look to Toronto or Montreal for inspiration and/or legitimation,” was the cry. “Edmonton can go directly to New York—and vice-versa.”

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The Arab oil embargo of 1973 put the final touches to this inflation. In the wake of unprecedented prosperity, Edmonton’s population increased, monies were poured into its cultural institutions, and many young art professionals came to settle from places as close as Calgary and as far away as New York and London. The newcomers were quickly absorbed by the university, the museum and the commercial galleries, creating an even more inviting environment for both working and would-be artists. The results were not long in appearing: the city’s thriving art community began to attract attention from such internationally known artists and critics as Anthony Caro, Michael Steiner, Kenworth Moffett, not to mention, of course, the ever-present Clement Greenberg. The best and most visible of the galleries were those that showed and supported abstract works; the news got around quickly that Edmonton was the place to “buy good and cheap modern art.”23 It is perhaps useful here to backtrack a little. If modernism came to Edmonton with Americanization and prosperity, it came to America in the first place with capitalism. In Europe, modernism as ideology and practice in art became firmly entrenched during the latter part of the nineteenth century, when the bourgeoisie became the keepers of knowledge and bearers of standards. In its historical progression, this class gained control, first, of the academies, then of the secondary institutions: the salons, art schools, galleries, journals. Dealers and critics became increasingly influential throughout the twentieth century by setting the standards of excellence and by controlling the entrance and progress (success or failure) of both artists and artistic styles. During the 1940s and 1950s, an expanded (i.e. more aggressively commercial) version of modernism appeared in New York, the new centre of late capitalism. It was this version that was adopted by Edmonton, an art community whose majority of artists still clung to the canons of the late nineteenth century.24 One of the most important of these was the belief that art was “created” rather than “produced”—that it arose, as it were, as an unfettered, unmeditated emanation of the individual imagination. The one person most directly responsible for introducing abstract expressionism to western Canada was Jock Macdonald, a Scottish-born abstractionist (and disciple of Kandinsky) who had worked with New Yorker Hans Hoffman. In 1946, Macdonald taught at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art in Calgary; among those who fell under his influence were Marion Nicoll, Roy Kiyooka, Arthur McKay, Ronald Bloore and Illingworth Kerr. The following year, the latter was appointed director of the Art Institute in Calgary, making 1947 notable in the history of painting in Alberta for more than the discovery of oil. Kerr’s open enthusiasm for the current New-York style of abstraction was to critically influence the post-war generation of students. Maturing artistically during the very height of the oil boom, these young modernists were well placed—by virtue of both age and idiom—to “get in on” the market expansion, thus ensuring that the Edmonton art scene was dominated during this critical period by artists whose major interests departed radically from the erstwhile dominance of landscape and naturalism.25 In 1956, at the annual American Abstract Painters Exhibition in New York, the art critic Clement Greenberg saw and expressed an interest in the work of William Ronald and Jock Macdonald; within a year he made his first visit to Canada. He was invited to lead the 1962 Emma Lake Workshop in Saskatchewan, as a result of a recommendation and proding by Barnett Newman, Herman Cherry and other New York artists, a meeting which was attended by many prairie artists. Regina had been the first of the western cities

145 IJCS / RIÉC to develop an active and creative art community. The “Regina Five”—Arthur McKay, Ronald Bloore, Roy Kiyooka, Douglas Morton and Ted Godwin—led the way in breaking the grip of the region’s geographic and artistic isolation. A product of their commitment, the Emma Lake workshops changed not only the preferred style of participating artists, but also their outlook. The 1959 session was to prove critical for Alberta. That year McKay, Kiyooka and Bloore invited Barnett Newman for a visit, thus ushering in the real advent of western Canadian abstract expressionism. One of the participants in the 1965 workshop was a young art student from Regina by the name of Terry Fenton who was later, by a circuitous route, to become the catalyst for abstract painting in Edmonton. From 1965 to 1971, Fenton worked at the Norman Mackenzie Gallery in Regina. During this period he met and struck up a strong and lasting friendship with Greenberg.26 When he was appointed director of the Edmonton Art Gallery in 1972 (Karen Wilkin, an American, had already opened the door to abstract expressionism as the gallery’s chief curator), he brought to bear not only his own influence, but that of one of the most widely proclaimed prophets of modernism. Greenberg began visiting the Edmonton art community on a regular basis, which visits have continued ever since. At first, Greenberg was not really impressed with what he saw in Edmonton. His response was far from unequivocally negative, however. He attributed the lack of coherence in the art community to the fact that Edmonton was rapidly expanding. And he was struck by the fact that if Edmonton painting was “manneristic,” it was also aggressive. Aggressiveness and control were qualities much appreciated by Greenberg. During the 1940s he had touted “the greater vitality, virility and brutality of the American artist” as a means of breaking the hold of Europe. This new visual ideology, he said, according to Serge Guilbaut would: transform the provincialism of American art into inter- nationalism by replacing Parisian standards that had until then defined the notion of quality in art (grace, craft, finish) with American ones (violence, spontaneity, incompleteness). Brutality and vulgarity were signs of the direct, uncorrupted communication that contemporary life demands.27 These and similar theoretical claims provided much of the force behind the merchandising of modernism in post-war New York: on the analogue of commodity capitalism (the paradigm for institutionalized aggressiveness), commercial success equalled—indeed, proved—aesthetic success. Small wonder that western Canadian painters fell under the spell of Greenberg’s rhetoric. For once, an idiom came their way that seemed equal to the job at hand. Empowering them with a larger-than-life confidence commensurate with a larger-than-life landscape, it not only gave them at least symbolic control and mastery over their feared environment, it could make them rich in the process! Girded with American optimism, Edmonton very quickly developed the largest per capita community of abstract painters in the country. More to the point, those within this community developed the conviction that they were sitting on a gold mine. In the heady decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Edmonton’s artists received constant encouragement from the city’s gatekeepers that they were on the right track; that art was international, and that if they persevered long enough they would triumph—critically and financially—like their New York cousins. Just as economic realities put a

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quick end to Lougheed’s grandiose dreams of an independent Alberta, however, they also did in the notion of a bottomless market for art. In some ways at least, the fall was a “fortunate” one. Relieved of the pressures of keeping up with (emulating) New York, the reluctantly dispossessed Edmonton abstractionists began experimenting with less derivative styles. Some of them began to modify their practice by introducing delimiting devices such as drawing, to play with surface, texture and light, that would have incurred the wrath of the New York deities. These new paintings looked quite different from what was being produced elsewhere on the continent. They were individualized; they told a story of being-in-the-world, especially in the world of the Alberta prairie, with its unending horizon, geometrical flatness and sterilizing light. Judging by both the quality and the particulars of these renditions, it seems plausible to speculate that the loosening of the grip of the American paradigm allowed/encouraged some of Edmonton’s abstract painters to develop, for the first time, a vernacular that expressed their sense of groundedness, their sense (not unlike the existential anxiety evinced by their predecessors) of being surrounded and diminished by an illimitable space. One of the most successful of these new prairie storytellers is Douglas Haynes.

The Making of an Artistic Career Douglas Haynes was born in 1936 in Regina, Saskatchewan. He recalls that he made a conscious decision to study drawing in third grade; a friend’s brother taught him how to draw cartoons, and he was totally fascinated with the process and his ability. He decided that when he grew up he wanted to study drawing, or maybe architecture. When the time came, he enrolled at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art in Calgary (now the Alberta College of Art), graduating in 1958 with a commercial art diploma. He says, “Once I got to art school and got into painting classes, I realized, as bad as I was, I really liked it.”28 He worked briefly as a commercial artist but very quickly realized that he “couldn’t stand the people I had to work with, and so I got a job in an architect’s office, thinking that’s an option—and it took about a week to realize that was not an option either!” Eventually, when it was discovered that he was a graduate of an art school, he was promoted to architectural renderer (as opposed to draftsman); all the while he continued painting on his own time. In 1960, someone showed Haynes a newspaper clipping advertising scholarships for Canadians to study in Holland. He applied, won the scholarship, and spent 1960-61 studying part-time at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague. Besides the obvious opportunity to study the Dutch masters, Haynes was exposed to a different social organization of artistic occupations: in Holland, professional artists were getting a monthly allowance to paint, whereas Haynes, in Edmonton, had to keep a day job to feed his family. With or without public allowance, Haynes kept painting because he really wanted to: “You can find the way by trying to be on the dole, get grants, starve, or—I was never the romantic—I found a way by making sure I got a job that would feed me and my family, that would allow me to do what I want. Some people think that was safety, I don’t. It was just a choice that I made. I want to paint and I don’t want to starve my wife and kids.” He became involved in a cooperative gallery where the artists and their families mounted exhibits and sold art. He sold quite a few small pieces “for fifteen bucks a piece, and that was nice extra money.”

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In 1962, Russell Harper from the National Gallery of Canada was travelling across the country choosing works for the Fifth Biennial Exhibit. John McGillvray, director of the EAG, asked local artists, including Doug Haynes, to bring some work to the Edmonton Art Gallery. One of Haynes’ works was sent to the Biennial: “Getting into that Biennial was a real big thing because it made me realize that I was part of the national scene. It didn’t so much go to my head as to my heart, I guess.” Haynes also went to the Sixth Biennial in 1964 and was appointed to an associate membership in the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1968. In 1962, something happened that would ultimately mean a lot to Doug Haynes—and to the rest of the Edmonton art community. In that year the editors of Canadian Art asked Clement Greenberg to visit the prairies and report on the state of the visual arts there; he published his findings in the Spring 1963 issue of the magazine: Abstract art in Edmonton, which was the first place I visited in Alberta, was more provincial than in Saskatchewan. Art in Edmonton has the benefit of a municipal supported art centre whose collection is not to be sniffed at, and whose director, John McGillvray, is active as well as informed. And Edmonton has an artists’ co-operative, the Focus Gallery. But the art being produced there seemed to me to lack the élan of art in Saskatchewan, nor did I get as vivid a sense of a coherent artists’ community. Maybe this was because Edmonton is in such a rapid state of expansion. It reminded me that the abstract art showed the highest influence of New York that I had seen in prairie Canada. The pictures of Ethel Christensen and Les Graff were not only soaked in Tenth Street mannerisms, they were also brash and expressive in a Tenth Street way. This is no verdict on the potentialities of these two artists; but it does reflect very much on their taste. In Douglas Haynes’ touched-up prints, I was even more surprised to see the lay-out of Adolph Gottlieb’s “Burst” paintings unabashedly present (though Gottlieb’s is the antipodes of Tenth Street). This lay-out was handled, all the same, with a certain felicity, that I had to conclude that Haynes had added something of his own to the idea by reducing it in size.29 Elsewhere in the same essay, Clement Greenberg, in discussing representational painters, spoke of their treatment of the prairie: In Saskatoon, however, the prairie seemed into almost everything (and for an easterner like me the prairie was a far stranger sight than the “bush,” which you can see in Maine and Quebec, too). The problem was how to master the prairie’s lack of feature, and the most usual solution was to find a town on it, or a clump of trees, or a conspicuous slope.30 Regardless of how strange the prairie might have looked to an easterner like Greenberg, within a few years of that first visit, Edmonton was to become a destination site (permanent, semi-permanent or transitory) to many persons from Regina, New York and London, with training stops at Calgary and the ACA or Saskatoon and the Emma Lake workshops. Haynes, as mentioned, was born and raised in Regina, which in the 1960s was a hotbed of avant-garde visual arts. Although he is younger than the Regina Five, he was in contact with some of them and was aware of their artistic and political stands. In 1967, Karen Wilkin, a New Yorker, came to Edmonton and got a job teaching art

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history at the University of Alberta, where she remained until 1971 when she moved to the Edmonton Art Gallery as its chief curator until 1978. In 1972, another Regina native who had there met and befriended Clement Greenberg became the new director at the EAG: Terry Fenton. How the art of the prairies —painting and sculpture—was made known to the outside world, how it was rated and received, is intertwined with the careers, positions and positionings of these three persons: Clement Greenberg, Terry Fenton and Karen Wilkin; and the work of Douglas Haynes is no exception. Haynes had continued working to support his family, selling small pieces for extra cash and exhibiting not only at the biennials, but at the Focus Gallery (1962), the Edmonton Art Gallery (1964) and the Allied Arts Centre in Calgary (1969), among other places. Virgil Hammock, who organized Haynes’ 1970 solo exhibit at the EAG, wrote of his work: “Doug Haynes’ only subject is the Canadian Prairie…. He has surrendered to his environment but has lost nothing in the battle. I don’t want to give the idea that Doug is a backwoods regionalist or an artistic isolationist…. Doug is not an artist who is fashionable or avant garde, but he is an artist whose work will grow on you if you give it a chance. In an age where `mind blowing’ is the norm, the quiet contemplative art of Doug Haynes is a pleasure.”31 Elsewhere Hammock wrote, “[Haynes’] paintings should, if there is any justice in this world, outlive the fads that come and go in the art world and survive to take their place in Canadian art history.”32 In 1972, Karen Wilkin sent a report on the Canadian West to Art in America. She began her essay by referring to an episode in Brendan Behan’s play The Quare Fellow, where an Irishman is boasting for doing his time in an English prison, a fact that carried high political currency among Irish dissidents but only bemuses the warden, causing him to reflect on his prisoner’s “national inferiority complex.” Wilkin, I presume placing herself in the warden’s position, wrote: “Western Canadian artists suffer from a similar complaint; already defensive about being Canadian, not American, they are doubly so about being Western. Ironically, much art produced in the prairie provinces and British Columbia is heavily influenced by New York and West Coast trends, but the current emphasis here is on Canadian content in the arts.”33 She was actually reporting on an exhibit mounted in 1971 by the Edmonton Art Gallery and subsequently toured to Calgary, Saskatoon and Victoria. Before I report on what she had to say about Haynes’ work in the exhibit, it is important that we read more about Wilkin’s understanding of Canada’s art world in the early 1970s: C.A.R., or Canadian Artists Representation, is a new and, at the moment, loosely organized artists’ union. It urges galleries and museums to pay exhibition fees and to encourage local talent. Unofficially C.A.R. insists that member artists be aware of their identity as Canadians, but it admits members who are merely Canadian residents. The fact that the U.S., particularly New York, has dominated that art world for the past twenty years is resented, and has somehow been confused with economic and political considerations. One suspects that if Paris were still the centre of the art world, C.A.R. would be less nervous about outside influence…. The recent government statements urging both Canadian national awareness and multi-culturalism have done nothing to lessen the confusion, but Canadian content in the arts is the catch phrase, and a sense of identity is emerging.34

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And the sort of identity that was emerging, at least in the Canadian West, according to Karen Wilkin, was the artists’ coming to terms with the environment—physical and social—of the prairie: The northern prairies are a unique landscape: enormous space, a brilliant sky with spectacular cloud formations, clear and slanting light. In winter, it is still more dramatic, with sparse calligraphic rows of trees against the unrelenting whiteness…. Some western artists are making use of their experiences with this environment, and their work stands quite apart from the local interpretation of the current New York idiom.35 She singles out Haynes and Ihor Dmytruk as successfully responding to their environment through their paintings: Doug Haynes’ equally austere canvases seem chilled by the northern winter, thawing occasionally to suggest the bare brown landscape of early spring. Thick impasto, applied string and plaster form rich texture. The paintings are tonal: luminous white, cool gray, browns and beiges like dead grasses. Rough surfaces and bleached colours suggest things weathered and aged; the canvas is often physically split or grooved…. Texture gives way to tone, complexity to essential shape. One can only guess at what is coming.36 Compare Clyde McConnell, reviewing the same exhibit: It is notable that few of the artists represented in “West ’71” are concerned with developing an interpretation of their environment. Without trying to project a particular value, I think this fact relates to something in the character of life in the prairies, and to a lack of intensity of communication between artists which operates independently of style—concepts. 37 While the two eastern reviewers were finding the work done on the prairies “exotic”-nice Wilkin and “exotic”-sombre McConnell art continued to be produced there, more particularly by Haynes, who in the meantime was hired by Ron Davey, then chair of the Fine Arts Department, first in a sessional and later in a tenure-track position at the University of Alberta. In 1970, he joined the faculty, and by mid-1971 he has abandoned the relief methods used in his painting for the better part of the previous decade. He wanted to adopt “a more direct painting process, one which would allow me a more organic and freer way of working. This was unavoidable if I wished to stretch the boundaries of personal imagery and expression established to that point.”38 J. A. Forbes, who wrote the catalogue of Haynes’ exhibit at the Glenbow, described the changes in his work: The first works in this series reveal a new concern for the totality of the painted surface. There are no longer the mounds and channels of earlier paintings. The relief, so far as it exists, is entirely the result of impasto and the symbolic circles and lines are now almost casually suggested with paint rather than built up or grouted out…. Haynes has introduced a U-shaped form near the bottom of the painting but gives it a completely different quality from the canals of earlier year which were dug into the surface…. It would be interesting to speculate on the sign itself and its possible significance, for it appears with greater or lesser prominence in the first eight paintings in the show…. 39

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A year after the above exhibit, Karen Wilkin wrote another essay on the prairies and the art produced there for Canadian Forum. Again, she began with a reference to a writer, André Malraux this time, quoting from his The Voices of Silence: “What makes an artist is that in his youth he was more deeply moved by his visual experience of works of art than by that of the things they represent—and perhaps of Nature as a whole.”40 Regardless of whether Malraux is correct or not in his assertions, Wilkin continues with the following claim about the prairie artist (always, for Wilkin, male): He must be able to withstand isolation and lack of encouragement from his community to a greater degree than his peers in a large urban centres; he must tolerate the indifference or at best condescension of the rest of Canada. If Malraux is right, he faces another grave problem: the small number of serious galleries in the Prairies not only makes it hard for him to exhibit his work, but makes it hard for him to see the works of art of high quality.41 Douglas Haynes miraculously survived intact in this rather bleak environment; his work, like that of Otto Rogers of Saskatoon and D. T. Chester of Regina, exhibited a slyness with colour, “sombre or close-valued colour, often stressing surface or texture.”42 Haynes’ work continued to be received positively through its many evolutions, but Karen Wilkin’s beliefs concerning the effects of the prairie as social and physical environment in art changed abruptly and without explanation: Statements relating the open spaces and big skies of the Prairies to the openness and scale of Prairie artists’ work are probably meaningless. Any artist is in some way affected by the time and place in which he lives, which is why French art is different from Italian art, and 17th century art different from 16th century. It seems fashionable lately to accuse Canadian abstract artists of catering to New York taste, ignoring the fact that an increasing degree of abstraction is a characteristic of the development of 20th century art. (Why abstraction should be labelled as New York and suspect, while work deriving patently from California funk should be acclaimed as grassroots regionalism, remains a mystery to me, but that is a subject for another discussion.) The only common factors shared by the Prairie artists I have discussed are a desire to make major art and a willingness to take risks in their work in order to come closer to fulfilling that desire. For artists working in an environment which provides only minimal encouragement, those are impressive ambitions.43 A month after this statement was published, Haynes had a solo exhibit at the Latitude 53 Gallery; the above claims appeared in the catalogue accompanying “The Canadian Canvas,” an exhibit initiated and sponsored by Time Canada Limited and curated regionally. Karen Wilkin curated the prairies; the Alberta painters included were Harold Feist, Haynes and Ann Clarke Darrah. From J.A. Forbes’s review of the Latitude exhibit for ArtsCanada, we read: The present exhibition finds Haynes continuing with the large format, richer colour and seductive surfaces, but he has brought back a convention from his earlier paintings—the frame within a frame. In the light of this it is interesting to see his title for the show (From the Interior) and to read his own notes where he says, “The title has

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multiple meanings.… as well as describing the process by which the paintings are constructed, in formal terms it describes the compositional device used, the frame within a frame, or the window concept.” Later he (Haynes) points out that he will accept a reading of From the Interior as relating to a geographical or regional concern. He makes no secret of the fact that the prairie environment, i.e., the interior, “plays an important role in terms of my response to the images created through the medium of paint….” Although Haynes acknowledges his debts to Gottlieb, Reinhart and Olitski, there is much that is regional in his work. He has never rejected the environment as a factor in his development and, although he is not a referential as is, for example, Otto Rogers of Saskatoon, at times he seems to be a prairie landscapist.44 Forbes went on to discuss some classical European influences on the work of Douglas Haynes, painters like Rubens and Vermeer, a fact that he thought might surprise some viewers. He reconciled these two seemingly disparate influences: prairie geography and classical European painters really represented two aspects of “Haynes’ artistic personality—on the one hand the classical ordering of space and, on the other, the lush and sensuous surface.”45 Haynes by his own admission was influenced also by Poussin, Goya, El Greco, Rembrandt and many others to whom he was introduced during his transatlantic visits. But if one listens to Terry Fenton—“Painters don’t necessarily observe historical processes—they usually just paint. Living amidst the art of the present and unguided by their experience of it, they try to make art of their own”46—Haynes appears as deviant. One might come to believe that painters go through their present, oblivious to their art-historical past, but somehow critics, at least those like Fenton, are able to discern that “in Western civilization, quality has accompanied formal innovation and that ... in our century, it has belonged to abstract painting.”47 Paintings are mere products of images; it takes critics like Fenton to discover quality and innovation. In 1978, the Commonwealth Games were held in Edmonton and a special exhibition was organized by the Edmonton Art Gallery and the British Council. The idea for the exhibition, suggested by Karen Wilkin, was one that Fenton, then director of the EAG, found provocative because, as he stated in the catalogue: For centuries, Great Britain exerted a strong influence on Canadian art. Although that influence hasn’t entirely ceased, today Canadian artists have begun to influence some artists in Great Britain. At the moment, and perhaps for the first time, parallel, interrelated traditions exist in the two countries…. The exhibition doesn’t purport to be regional or democratic. It doesn’t speak for Canada or for Great Britain. It speaks for certain traditions which exist today in these two countries.48 The art that was shown was produced in the Canadian West, Toronto and London. Muriel Wilson, exhibition officer, Fine Arts Department of the British Council, organized and wrote about the British half of the show; Karen Wilkin did the same for the Canadian half. The introduction to her “Canadian Point of View” seemed hopeful once again: more Canadians travel, more cities are becoming increasingly urban, new funding conditions and decentralization make it easier for artists to survive and thrive in isolation, “the division between English and French culture plays its part in maintaining Canada’s

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multiplicity, as do variables of economic development and climate and geography.”49 It appears that the more civilized Canada became, the more “oddly pictorial” or “curiously animate, [with] suggestive images” became the paintings of Canadians: This new pictorialism is conditioned by modern assumptions about the painting as an object with a continuous surface. These assumptions, in fact, prevented artists from producing self-indulgent notations or unresolved representations. At the same time as they are concerned with creating a personal vocabulary of images or shapes which become protagonists in obscure dramas, they are absorbed with making different kinds of marks, with producing a variety of surfaces, and with spreading elements across the canvas. No matter how complex or associative the imagery, the pictures remain disembodied and abstract.50 Once again Haynes was invited to participate in this exhibit (as well as a number of others in Montreal, Hamilton and Ottawa). Of his participation Wilkin said: “Haynes has given himself up to colour, spread across eccentrically divided canvasses. His suggestive diamonds are sliced and knocked out, while vigorously worked paint and smaller quirky shapes enliven the pictures.”51 After this show, Karen Wilkin left the EAG and became a freelance curator/critic/art historian, working for a while in Toronto and later moving back to New York, where she continues to live and freelance. Many of her assignments bring her back to Edmonton, and she always returns to write the catalogues for Haynes’ exhibits. In 1979, she wrote an essay on the Canadian prairies for ARTnews in which she again discusses the first-rate art produced by prairie artists, their efforts to keep together and in touch: “Populist-isolationists claim their art is uniquely western Canadian, owing nothing to anyone. Internationalists insist on being reckoned with as artists, not as Prairie artists…. Abstract artists are frequently denounced as dominated by New York (American imperialist) taste, more particularly by Clement Greenberg.”52 Alberta, characterized by Wilkin as an oil-rich province that boomed in 1947 and continues to attract “immigrants” to a “middle-class Kuwait,” and especially Edmonton where young painters like Ann Clarke, Robert Scott and Douglas Haynes are all committed to abstraction; we learn of Haynes that he: surprised everyone a few years ago by becoming one of the boldest and most inventive colourists in Canada. A split diamond image allows him to apply large areas of colour with a variety of surfaces, and to oppose them with centralized colours of “drawing.” Haynes’ admiration for Bush, Motherwell and Gottlieb comes through, usually in quotations in the stacked drawing, but Haynes’ own personality comes through more powerfully. He is even beginning to eliminate the quotations.53 In the same month, February 1979, another article appeared on Haynes by Ken Carpenter for artsmagazine; Carpenter quotes Haynes talking about his art of the mid-1970s, the same art that Wilkin spoke about in the previous excerpt. Said Haynes: While influences can be traced (Motherwell, Gottlieb, Miro, Bush, etc.) the prime sources are my previous work. The layout and its emphatic and emblematic quality comes from the circa 1967/68 series of split ovals; the centre forms from previous use of circles,

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verticals, etc.—most obviously seen perhaps in the drawing elements of some of the 1975/76 black pictures; the use of the over painting and luminosity from the series titled “From the Interior,” which came directly from my studying of the painting methods of Rubens, etc.54 Carpenter found antecedents to Haynes’ glazing in Rembrandt, an insight that Haynes agreed with; also, Carpenter found the recent paintings (those produced during the second half of the 1970s) to have benefited from Haynes’ past career as an architectural renderer—with respect to his range of colour, “since in the renderings it was appropriate for him to work with changes of value as well as line and chroma.”55 Carpenter again quotes Haynes on his preoccupations as an artist: “Painting always seems to be a series of transcending, or working through. Working from chaos to order, darkness to light, influences to assimilation, liking to understanding and—perhaps the most difficult—intellect to feeling.”56 In 1978, Haynes had a solo exhibit at Gallery One, one of the most successful galleries in Toronto. That first show was a success, and Gallery One continues to represent Haynes’ work. The show was reviewed by Ken Carpenter for Art in America, where he wrote: “This is an art always in the service of feeling, never subordinate to considerations of technique or to formal problem- solving, and Haynes has—at the age of 42—a new maturity that is all his own.”57 Kay Woods, writing about the same show for artscanada, said: “Doug Haynes already has a considerable reputation in the Prairie Province. It is surprising considering the high calibre of his work, that no Toronto gallery has exhibited it until now.”58 Haynes continues to have shows/exhibits in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ontario as well as teaching at the university. An exhibit mounted by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge in 1980 brought Karen Wilkin back from Toronto to write the catalogue. By then, two years away from Edmonton, Wilkin reminisced: When I first arrived in western Canada in the late 60s I was introduced to the work of a young Edmonton painter named Doug Haynes. He was something of a local celebrity: a prairie boy with talent and the opportunity to develop it…. Haynes’ pictures from the 60s were encrustations of thick paint, plaster, burlap, string or anything else which could add yet another texture…. Doug Haynes seemed to hit his stride about 1977. The split diamonds and the cross pictures establish his reputation as a painter to be reckoned with, not simply as a regional phenomenon. The pattern of his evolution proves his willingness to reevaluate even his most successful work, in order to challenge himself further, and this attitude, together with his evident creative gifts, make almost certain that the promise of the “prairie boy with talent” will be richly fulfilled by the career of the mature artist.59 A month later, the work of Doug Haynes received an underhandedly positive review by Art Perry, the art critic for Vancouver’s Province. The exhibit was at the Kenneth G. Heffel Gallery. That review was really a historical and critical review of abstraction’s “generational” route through the prairies and its reception outside Edmonton/Regina/Saskatoon as well as a review of Haynes’ work—it is well worth looking it up.60 In 1983, “the prairie boy with talent” went back to his hometown, Regina, with a solo exhibit at the Norman MacKenzie Art Gallery, a retrospective of his work produced in the 1980s. Curators Norman Zepp and Michael Parke- Taylor wrote about the continuity and change that have always characterized

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Haynes’ work: “[His] entire career is the presence of an image which gives a sense of purpose, and reason for the act of painting, which keeps his work, unlike that of many of his contemporaries, from becoming a mere colourist exercise in the manipulation and application of paint.”61 During the 1980s, Haynes took his split diamond images and made them one with his canvases’ edges. He would crop the canvas to fit the image—irregular “cropping” was in at that time in Edmonton. But Haynes did not stay long with the pack. He again took control of the process: he brought forward from the 1960s the oval and diamond and returned to a rectangular canvas/frame—Little Keeper is an example of this resolution. The oval shape acted as a container and a ground that allowed “passage” for Haynes into a reinvented cubism. But before the passage was complete, Haynes’s work was due for another detour via London, and an exhibit, “Abstraction X 4,” proposed, organized and written about by Karen Wilkin. Three other artists were included: Harold Feist, Joseph Drapell and Leopold Plotek. Six years after Wilkin left Edmonton we learn in the foreword to the catalogue that she “had lived for a while in Edmonton,” was curator at the Edmonton Art Gallery, and has had a “long standing interest in [abstraction].” And Karen Wilkin in her own text makes no further reference to the prairie and its talented boys, the wildness of nature and the ruggedness of character; now she talks to a different audience, away from the prairie, away from Toronto; now she is trying to make a place for herself back in New York. She opens the essay not by quoting Brendan Behan or André Malraux, but with an oblique reference to the new artists and critics of post-modernity that have by now totally dominated the art world of New York and of all other major, art-producing centres: These days it is fashionable to speak of the demise of abstract painting, to see abstraction as the exhausted offshoot of an outmoded tradition. We have come very nearly full circle from the days when painters purged their art of anything recognizable as an act of faith, a declaration of modernism. It now happens that even the most ham- fisted bit of representation is taken as a work of seriousness and up- to-date thinking, and recent interest in figuration among young painters is offered as evidence that abstraction has lost its strength. This is nonsense, of course. No single kind of art has a monopoly on excellence. The overwhelming question is not whether the work is figurative or abstract or anything else, but whether it is any good.62 The artists are written about in this essay in alphabetical order—first Drapell, then Feist of Toronto, then Haynes of Edmonton and finally Plotek of Montreal. Their polyglot histories are, I suppose, some sort of testimony to Canada’s much vaunted multiculturalism. Born in four different countries on two continents, trained in Canada, the U.S.A., England and the Netherlands, Drapell, Feist, Haynes and Plotek now live in widely divergent regions: French Canada, urban English-speaking Ontario (is there any other Ontario?) and the Prairies. It would be surprising if their work failed to reflect their internationalism and peripatetic lives: what is more surprising is that it also reflects some regional characteristics.63 [italics mine] Of the four, Haynes has been the least peripatetic—with the exception of forays abroad to look at art or take part in workshops—and so, one might

155 IJCS / RIÉC assume, in his work we would find a bit more of the “surprising regional characteristics.” Here is Wilkin on Haynes’ work: Haynes’ most recent pictures are haunted by the memory of the Cubist studio: guitars, tables, still life objects. More importantly, however, they are informed by the flux of cubist space, the pulsating, shifting planes of 1911, translated into 1980 terms. Scale is crucial to these pictures. Each of Haynes’ “planes” comes out of a large gesture, a single manipulation of his materials. Unlike their Cubist antecedents, which are meticulous facsimiles of non-existent things, Haynes’ planes are momentary accumulations of paints. They represent nothing but themselves, and they seem to happen as we look. Their subtle shifts in colour and the transparency are not illusions achieved by shading, as in Cubist pictures, but instead are the result of changes in the density of paint. This simultaneous likeness and unlikeness to their Cubist inheritance is part of the pleasure and strength of Haynes’ recent paintings.64 In discussing Haynes’ cubist paintings, Wilkin painstakingly ignores their titles, all making references to actual locations in Alberta or real persons’ names: Mercoal Swing, Carlisle Lady, Geoffrey’s Oval or Beast, a painting so aggressive and animate that it was aptly named. In 1985, Haynes had another solo exhibit at the Edmonton Art Gallery, “Cubism Revisited: The Paintings of Douglas Haynes,” with curation and the text of the catalogue by Russell Bingham, another modernist practitioner who sees good art as art that is “emphatically post-cubist.”65 Bingham seems amazed at the “emphatic cubism” of Haynes’ work and almost apologetically writes: “Haynes’ emphasis on drawing and adjustments of value in his new works seem to run at cross-currents with modern attitudes and methods and this is what at first makes them look so remarkable…. It becomes apparent after a time that these Cubist pictures aren’t aberrant—or mannered either. Ultimately, they look modern—and this says something important about their originality.”66 Liz Wylie, reviewing the same exhibit, wrote for Canadian Art: “But it would be misleading to suggest Haynes is doing pastiches of cubist paintings: these recent abstracts only echo some cubists’ concerns, they don’t replicate the works. Haynes’ new pictures are quirky but startlingly successful…. The unique qualities of these new paintings set Haynes apart from his Edmonton peers, as does his profound understanding of the artistic process.”67 And Haynes, interviewed by Phylis Matousek for the Edmonton Journal said, “I don’t think of myself as a cubist—but cubism has been an influence.”68 In an article published in the Update subsequent to his cubist exhibit, Haynes wrote of influences and inspirations from art and artists of the past: The artists that become favourites are the ones that inspire me to get into the studio and start painting—to compete. Other artists, such as Titian, I hold in awe, but not as personal favourites because they do not give me that sense of urgency and excitement to get to work— yet. I say yet, because I never know who will speak to me next. I have found over the years that whenever the opportunity is presented to visit some of the great museums and see works in any sort of depth, there will always be someone new waiting for me. The masters of the past just seem to wait until I am ready for them; then they reach out and shake me by the collar. Most often artists that do this are unexpected; artists that I never thought I particularly even liked, let alone admired. This past spring, while visiting some of the famous

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museums, I found what may well be my biggest surprise of all— Poussin. [When] I visited the Prado Museum in Madrid, I was particularly drawn to a painting by Velásquez, The Cardinal Infante Do Fernando as a Hunter, and the way in which it was painted…. I understood so clearly as a painter what Velásquez was thinking when he laid in those whites, that for a short while the three-hundred-year time span simply vanished, and I was in the company of a colleague.69 After the “cubist experiment,” Haynes continued to change as a painter and to be shown in solo or group exhibits in Alberta, throughout Canada, and abroad …in London, at the Alberta House in the spring of 1988, the exhibit, “Douglas Haynes: Recent Paintings” was mounted and later toured to Edmonton and Calgary. The catalogue was written by Peggy McDougall, organizer of the exhibit, who wrote: Haynes’ paintings are a skilful blend of his knowledge of art history, his desire to find his own solutions and his ability to break new ground. Haynes often borrows from art history in terms of colour or themes or action, yet produces work different from anything painted then or now. He alludes to dances and battles, candies and stories, honky tonks and jives; but whatever the matrix, his paintings savour of his experience.70 In another of Haynes’ visits to Europe, and specifically to the Toledo Cathedral, Spain, he became attached to and fascinated by El Greco’s El Espolio (the disrobing of Christ) and Los Apostolados (the portraits of Christ’s apostles). He says about that encounter: The reaction to El Greco was certainly not for a reason of looking for an idea, nor for the use of a style, nor was it appropriation. It was the recognition that concerns I had for a long time, combined with all the explorations, technical and formal, found a forebear in El Greco. He had patiently been waiting for me to catch up…. My gravitation toward Poussin and El Greco is a reflection of my needs. They point the way along a path that I am already on. I didn’t go looking for them. They found me and hollered to me from across the room, and time for that matter. It is not a case of a programmed plan of development, but rather a response to a feeling of what I seem to be searching for, both in form and content.71 He improvised around El Espolio during an Emma Lake workshop, and upon his return from Saskatoon realized the enormity of his project, the time that it would take to visit at length with El Greco. He decided to apply for a McCalla Professorship at the University of Alberta—recipients get a year’s leave from teaching duties with pay in order to pursue a research project of their choice. The competition is university- wide and the proposals are juried by an interdisciplinary Committee. Douglas Haynes became a recipient in 1988 and retired to his studio to work on The Toledo Series, which was exhibited at the Edmonton Art Gallery three years later, 6 April - 16 June 1991. Karen Wilkin once again wrote the essay for the catalogue, and although she found Haynes’ inspiration/discovery in El Greco “quite improbable,” she reminds the viewer that in the past Haynes was usually inspired by “less overt expressionism than that of El Greco. Adolph Gottlieb has been one of his heroes.”72 In an effort to legitimate this improbable fascination, she tells an anecdote about Jack Bush: “Bush, after his first European trip, spoke of how

157 IJCS / RIÉC impressed he was by Matisse’s work, especially by the late, monumental papiers coupés. `What he really wanted to do in his own work, he said, was hit Matisse’s ball out of the park.’ (The friend to whom he confided this told him, `Go ahead, Matisse won’t mind at all.’)”73 Having secured Haynes’ “correct” genealogy within modernism, Wilkin continued to place him in the “correct” art-critical category: These days, many artists lean increasingly on their predecessors, but their relation to their chosen archetype is quite different than Van Gogh’s—say—to Delacroix. In 1991, a description of a project like Haynes’ Toledo Series could lead us to expect that El Greco’s imagery had been used as a springboard for ironic improvisation or that it had been fragmented and forced into new, improbable contexts. Some artists of the 1970s or 1980s might have quoted Los Apostolados verbatim, analyzed them for political, sociological, or sexual subtexts, or reduced El Espolio to a schematic quantification. But Haynes has neither swallowed whole the works he found so fascinating in the sacristy of the Toledo Cathedral, nor has he subjected them to a modish deconstruction, parody, or simulation. Neither has he rendered a traditional act of homage to a chosen exemplar. Peculiar as the notion may sound, he seems instead to have striven to acknowledge some sort of kinship with El Greco. I described Haynes’ prolonged involvement with his Toledo Series as a commentary on El Greco’s paintings; it would be truer to have called it an extended, albeit imagined, dialogue with the Spanish Mannerist.74 In the rest of the essay we get more discussion aimed at the readers of Wilkin’s The New Criterion; she feels compelled to expunge any emotional/existential aspects from Haynes’ paintings, his past or present. The main text is really an apology for writing about a painter who might have aspirations that are not purely modernist: Rather, they [The Toledo Series paintings] are new inventions that aspire to achieve the emotional impact of earlier art within the formal and technical language of the late twentieth century. These pictures bear eloquent witness to the history of their making. They are, after all, not depictions of imagined persons or events, but material objects whose meaning resides in inflections of surface, clashes and accords of color, tensions between parts. The physical character of each block—its transparency or opacity, its color and relative size, its four- squareness or deformation—helps to create the sense of personality and animation that dominates each canvas, not any presumed echo of one of El Greco’s images of high drama.75 In the same essay, Wilkin quotes an excerpt from a letter Haynes wrote to a friend, Harold Feist, where he describes his encounter with El Greco’s works at the Prado Museum in Madrid: There is very little reference to the real world, no buildings or vista- like landscape stretching out behind and across. Hence you don’t feel you are looking at a cropped event from the real world, but rather at a dream-like abstracted world complete unto itself. The pictures really are remarkable. Most of the space described is the negative space, such as that described between the outstretched hands of one of the figures, as though he was holding an invisible balloon, or the space

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captured between the wings of the angels. At times, the clouds are like rocks and the figures like wraiths, a curious turning of things inside out that keeps the whole space forever turning back on itself.76 And, in case this statement of Haynes’ reminds one of Wilkin’s earlier description of The Toledo Series as “after all, not depictions of imagined persons or events, but material objects whose meaning resides in inflections of surface,” she states right after Haynes’ quoted statement: “Substitute ‘color blocks’ or ‘planes’ for ‘figures’ or ‘clouds’ and you have a useful description of how Haynes’ apostle pictures function.”77 Later on in the same essay she writes, “It is as if Haynes had found a way of making visible the excitement he felt when making his pictures, substituting the exhilaration, doubt, puzzlement, and pleasure of the act of making art for the religious dogma of El Greco’s day. Haynes’ Toledo Series can be read as a modern day pantheon, an apostolados of the act of painting.”78 Following on this statement, the final paragraph goes to Haynes, who presumably describes this modern-day pantheon: “I find myself reaching to pictures like Titian’s and El Greco’s as if they are angels revisiting, messengers bearing truth, virtue, and equality— what painting can be.”79 A summary of this most contradictory essay, or the moral of this story, would be: you can take the prairie boy out of the prairie, but you cannot take the prairie out of the boy. Later, in the same catalogue, there is a commentary by Harold Feist, a long-time friend of Douglas Haynes, a successful painter in his own right who lives in Toronto and whose exhibition catalogues Karen Wilkin is also summoned back to Canada to write. Here is an excerpt of his writing on The Toledo Series: Is it arrogance to follow after a master, trying to do something of the kind? Any work of art requires something akin to arrogance on the part of the artist since it is made within a tradition and, therefore, has to fly in the face of the best that has been produced…. All artists must come to terms with this and most must be pitied for it. The wise thing to do would be not to try… But some see, then want to do,orare compelled to do—and to do it as well as they have seen it done…. Doug’s paintings are in homage to an old master but are, as well, a reiteration of pictorial devices and concerns—narrative, figuration, angels—that have not, so far as I know, been dealt with in such a head-on manner and to such a great extent as in The Toledo Series. This kind of intent is new to abstraction. It is a hybrid of non- objective painting and the kind of painting that makes use of subject matter. Shapes flutter and dance as if they are putty or angels or ascending and floating figures in a shallow, dished-in space—within a stage set or niche in the wall. There is a richness and intensity of colour, and a deeper, more sonorous surface than there was before in Doug’s work. The same hand is there, but has more of a Midas touch now—opulent, sensuous. Doug has managed to tap into a new resonance by following the lead of this experience of looking at El Greco, his El Greco. That is, finally, what we are looking at—his vision.80

Discussion I have traced Douglas Haynes’ career as a painter by framing it within Pierre Bourdieu’s account of the artistic field of painting, paying particular attention to Haynes’ strategies for producing works for artistic legitimation within the field of painting in Edmonton—a historically generated field—and the

159 IJCS / RIÉC gatekeeping obstacles he had to negotiate, obstacles that the field itself has created in order to facilitate the reception and legitimation of paintings. Haynes’ artistic habitus can be characterized as a restless exploration of the received art of the past, tempered by the improvisational (polythetic) practices of a “prairie boy.” The painting style of Douglas Haynes has undergone quite a few transformations, but regardless of these transformations it has been received favourably by various legitimators of the art world of Edmonton and abroad. Haynes has been exhibited, recognized and written about more than any other painter from Edmonton’s art world, from Clement Greenberg’s underhanded support (“felicitous appropriation of Gottlieb”) to Karen Wilkin’s initial disappointing reaction: The first artist whose work I was introduced to was Doug Haynes and at that time, I thought he was a very competent craftsman-like painter. I was convinced he was never going to go anywhere. Those works were reliefs—he was collaging onto the canvas—they were plaster, symmetrical, very competent, very, very boring. But I had enormous respect for him as a person, as a thinker and was convinced he was never going to be an earthshaking artist, and then about 1974, those split diamonds happened and there has been no looking back,81 to Virgil Hammock’s 1970 prophetic remark, “[Haynes’] paintings should, if there is any justice in this world, outlive the fads that come and go in the art world and survive to take their place in Canadian art history.”82 Even though Haynes has received a lot of favourable notice, there has been variation in the degree of favour: Norman Yates, J. A. Forbes, Ken Carpenter, Virgil Hammock, Harold Feist and Peggy McDougall have written about Haynes differently from Karen Wilkin, Terry Fenton, Russell Bingham and, say, Lelde Muehlenbachs, who opened her review of The Toledo Series this way: “Although some may claim that as a series, Absolut Vodka ads display more invention and contemporary meaning, Douglas Haynes’ The Toledo Series has elicited its fair share of enthusiasm and pride.”83 The first group of writers/reviewers were regional painters, art historians and occasional art reviewers for the local dailies and have centred Haynes’ uniqueness and success on his being a westerner, a prairie boy, whereas the second, a group that sees itself primarily as critics/curators with various degrees of abstraction, wrote about his works as if they were illustrations of their modernist aesthetic stand—devoid of any personal history. If the reader was to go back to the beginning of this essay and reread Wilkin’s telling of the story of Haynes’ career, he or she would clearly see reflections of the telling changes within the changing career of Karen Wilkin—modernism at all costs—which in turn changed with the fortunes of modernism within North America (including New York) and Europe. In the 1960s, when it was in vogue for New Yorkers to be enthralled with the eccentric artists of Canada’s West, the prairie, the isolation and the toughness of characters, both Greenberg and Wilkin recognized the prairie—as a physical and social environment—as a factor in the art produced here. Wilkin did so more than Greenberg, successfully “converting” the Edmonton of her experience into an art-critical capital of “distinction.” When she first arrived in Edmonton, she was just beginning—first, sessional work at the university, later, curating at the EAG. The late 1960s and early 1970s were good years, financially, for someone to forge ahead with an aesthetic that was thought of as

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international, that is, modernism. But as soon as Wilkin left the EAG and Edmonton, art talk about the prairie became “ludicrous,” her associative memories of Edmonton only “fleeting”; the only thing of value for her was the work of Douglas Haynes, Harold Feist and Ann Clarke—and her discussion of their work from then on was always concerned with style, the surface. She consistently marginalized—as is the case with all orthodox modernists—aspects of artistic motivation, implicitly denying that art works as well as critiques of them are bound up with the personal and social networks that make up the art exhibition system. Yet it is the same system with its colonized habits that allows her the role of “validator,” brought back time and time again to create the cultural record of a modernism that never really was. If Douglas Haynes occasionally spoke of his experience, Karen Wilkin was always there to expunge any residue of everyday life, any residue of a painter who has a habit of thinking of El Greco, Goya or Poussin as visiting with him in his studio. Increasingly, Wilkin used Haynes’ work to make a case against the new art that had taken over New York, an art that spoke of life and questioned the modernist structures and ideologies of the art world, which Wilkin, Fenton, Bingham and company were trying against all odds to defend. But if Karen Wilkin is the person that translates Haynes’ art to the rest of the art world agents, and if she is involved in what appears to be a losing battle, then how come Doug Haynes’ work keeps being shown, enjoyed and bought? If references to specific locations and particular persons have lost their currency in the artistic capital exchanges of abstract expressionism, post-modern re- evaluations have made the personal and the specific central to all explanation and evaluation. Douglas Haynes’ inherited artistic disposition does not begin with Matisse and end with Jack Bush; it goes further back and is always tempered by his prairie roots. The prairie has been the clearing house, the unconscious and subversive source of his success. Haynes does make use of the grammar of modernism, but in order to tell his own story, by-passing the limits set by Greenbergian modernism. If Haynes were inclined to spew theory he could have made a pretty good case for himself as a post-modern artist: witness his selective “dips” into the inherited aesthetic tradition, his personal “quotes” extracted from his intimate and reflective talks with Rubens, Poussin, El Greco, or his exhuberant expressionistic use of color, his “localism,” and so on. But theory-bound he is not, and so his work is being bound up in (or out of) the current theoretical straight-jackets of an artistic critical discourse that knows only the sites of other texts and almost never their intersection with specific historical and social institutional contexts. If we were to “do a Bourdieu” on Karen Wilkin, following Bourdieu’s discussion of honour (substitute “prairie”) in the society of Kabyle in his Outline of a Theory of Practice, Wilkin would be the foreign observer who can see the prairie only in abstract/rhetorical terms and (as Bourdieu would claim) not as “a disposition inculcated in the earliest years of life and constantly reinforced by calls to order from the group.”84 He later describes those inherited dispositions as embedded in the agents’ very bodies in the form of mental dispositions, schemes of perception and thought, extremely general in their application, such as those which divide up the world in accordance with the appositions between the male and female, east and west, future and past, top and bottom, right and left, etc., and also, at a deeper level, in the form of bodily postures and stances, ways of standing, sitting, looking, speaking, or walking.85

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One might object that my application of Bourdieu’s notion of inherited disposition to Douglas Haynes’ work imposes an explanation that is tenuous at best; but there is enough Canadian literature to substantiate the prairie’s playing an important subversive role in the psyche of Canadians.86 Looking back, Haynes claims that “when abstraction hit western Canada it made complete sense” because it allowed one to paint the “straightforward clarity of the prairie light.”87 His own early paintings, as we have seen, were mixed-media works, almost sculptural in mood, and compositionally preoccupied with the centre of the canvas. In the 1970s, however, Haynes abandoned overt physicality; his work became less “tangled,” favouring geometrical shapes such as circles, rectangles, ovals and diamonds split into subzones by columns of colour or bare canvas. Of that time the artist says, “My mentors [were] finished with me, remaining … as only dear and close friends.”88 In the shadow of Edmonton’s economic bust, he moved progressively towards bolder drawing and more exuberant colours, as if telling everyone, “I have finally come home!” Translated, this meant that he had succeeded in cutting up the vastness of his particular given—called the prairie —into smaller, more manageable, human-sized parts. It meant that he had learned to catch the light in portions and angles that would be not blinding, but illuminating. It meant, in short, that he had begun constructing metaphorical shelter belts, claiming his place, exorcising and delimiting the illimitable space. In the early 1980s, having worked through his particular obstacles, Haynes succeeded in coming to terms with the existential aspects of a particular situation. He developed an abstraction that speaks not only of art history, but of the life and history of the western prairie, with its vastness, its unnerving light, the lack of “thingness” it exhibits to the insensitive eye, the eye not trained or capable of seeing the rich surface that becomes even richer when the light strikes it a certain way, the way that Haynes has learned to catch it. His archetypal diamonds, crosses, ovals, circles and rectangles are imaginative and metaphorical ways of coming to terms with—indeed, celebrating—this reality. Like the shelter-belts used to frame the “real” prairie homestead, they serve not merely as protective devices, escape routes, but as routes to redefining the relations between self and other—easy paths for visiting back and forth. Even the names of many of his paintings attest to his preoccupation with “his” landscape: Coal Spur, Cadomin, Mercoal Swing, all names of locations in Alberta. Conventional affiliations aside, there are unmistakable tokens of place in this artist’s attention to surface, the openness of the works, the light contrasts in the foreground, the construction of metaphorical shelter- belts through drawing or framing. Much of this oeuvre, in fact, can be seen as providing homologues for the “box” in which, according to McGregor, “Canadians reside a structure of consciousness that is paradoxically, both existential and arbitrary, natural and self-created, container and frame.”89 Modernism has found a home on the prairies, and it is not of the theoretically “correct” kind. Douglas Haynes and the generation of artists before him, such as Illingworth Kerr, Ronald Spikett and the “Regina Five,” accepted modernism not only as a style of art making but as a way of making sense of the place where they were born and lived. They saw in abstraction not only a matrix of aesthetic devices that could possibly connect them with the larger art scene south of the border but also as a movement that might give them a negotiable position vis-à-vis the eastern Canadian art establishment. But because of the propensity of

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Canadians to look elsewhere for legitimation, and through their decision to bring on board so many modernist New Yorkers, they inadvertently precluded the formation of any future generations of art writer/critics. As Brian O’Doherty so aptly stated about the contemporary art scene in New York: “Visual art does not progress by having a good memory. And New York is the locus of some radical forgetting. You can reinvent the past, suitably disguised, if no one remembers it. Thus is originality, that patented fetish of the self, defined.”90 New York became the locus of so much forgetting because there was no other way for it to claim the radical re-writing of the book of artistic Genesis: “In the begining was the Word (Greenberg’s) and the Word became painting (abstract expressionism)...” But this story has already been told by Tom Wolfe.91 What needs to be told more widely is the role that art writing has played in the establishment and marketing of the “mainstream” art styles and/or artists at any given time in North America and Europe. What needs to become more clear is the role that art criticism has been playing since the 1960s, when the writers of “distinction” began treating their writing as an art form, a form serving only the display of self or theory.92 This selectivity of memory and the display of self or theory we saw demonstrated in Karen Wilkin’s recorded passage through the prairies. From its earliest years, Alberta attracted painters who brought with them European artistic sensibilities, some of which they retained and others learned here; they were attracted to the possibilities that the Canadian West had to offer, they called Alberta home, they worked and taught the next generation of artists who were to populate the universities and art schools to be established after the discovery of oil in Leduc in 1947. Depending on their age, education and training at immigration time, place of employment and choice of residence, they have reacted to the prairie as a physical and/or social environment in varied degrees. It is not only the limitless horizon and the reflection of light that enters their work, it is also how that work is received by Central Canada. Canada’s historical regionalism—geographic, economic, social and political—directly or indirectly has played an interesting role in the development of generations of modernist painters, whose prairie temperment has been at times a welcome and refreshing change to the established art scenes in eastern centers which managed to have become “necropolis[es] of styles and artists, a columbarium visited and studied by critics, historians, collectors.”93 Critics, writers and collectors (who mostly “look”) descend upon Edmonton on a regular basis from New York and London for refreshing short stops and then return to the great necropolises where they came from: and herein lies the paradox of these great art centres, although they are dead, they can generate employment for modernist art historians and critics. Because contemporary art worlds during the last century or so in Europe and North America have been product-driven and dependent on art writing for their products’ ultimate destination, the museum and art history: “[these products are], filtered through galleries, offered to Collectors and public institutions written about in magazines partially supported by the galleries and drifting towards the academic apparatus that stabilizes History—certifying, much as banks do, the holding of its major repository, the museum. History in art is, ultimately, worth money. Thus do we get not the art we deserve but the art we pay for.”94 One may conceivably say that since Edmonton never developed the class that needed to pay for art to legitimate itself, then Edmonton got the art it aesthetically deserved: modernism’s aesthetic success in Edmonton might appear to be a historical abberation within Canadian painting history if it is seen through the eyes of an orthodox a-historical modernism. But it does make

163 IJCS / RIÉC sense (and history) though, if seen from a regional, grounded sociohistorical perspective.

Postscript During the fall of 1993, abstraction seemed to be the order of the day in Alberta especially Calgary: at the Glenbow, one would see the National Gallery’s “The Crisis of Abstraction in Canada: the Fifties; at the ACA’s Illingworth Kerr Gallery, one could see “Dark Decor” another abstract show; at the Canada Trust building, a third abstract retrospective curated by the University of Lethbridge’s Jeff Spalding; finally two commercial galleries, the Canadian Art Gallery and the Newzones Gallery of Contemporary Art, also showed abstract work. As for Edmonton, things were quieter: at the Edmonton Art Gallery, one could see an exhibit of Montreal’s renowned abstractionist Charles Gagnon, and across the city square in the CityCentre building, The Edmonton Contemporary Artists Society had its inaugural exhibit, curated by Russell Bingham. The society was established according to Mitch Smith, one of its founding members, because “we felt that there was a lot of good art that was not shown, especially in a group context.... For my own part I think that it is important for me to see my paintings in exhibition against the work of artists who I respect.”95 Almost all abstract painters those who follow orthodox modernism joined the Society, with the notable exception of Douglas Haynes. Among those who joined are Robert Scott, Terrance Keller, Philip Darrah, Graham Peacock, Gerald Faulder, Guiseppe Albi, Mitchel Smith and, from Saskatoon, Robert Christie. They see themselves as the “forgotten” generation, the one that has fallen through the artistic cracks of Edmonton’s art world ever since Terry Fenton’s departure in 1987. Lelde Muehlenbacks, in her review of the Society’s inaugural exhibit, summed it up best: “Edmonton’s first art love-in took place Friday night. The Edmonton Contemporary Artists Society premiered in a cavernous retail space in City Centre with the best opening in years. In part a walk down Memory Lane, in part brothers and sisters doing it for themselves, the community rallied for a big, laid-back, self- congratulatory evening. And the schmooching between young and old art upstarts and aficionados never stopped.”96 There was no catalogue and no-one was brought from New York to consecrate the event—these are hard economic times. But the aesthetic fascination of prairie artists and their viewers continues with modernism—of the orthodox or revisionist type—despite the economic downturn and the art world intelligentsia’s fascination with postmodern and interventionist art. Having a tenured position in the various post-secondary institutions does a lot to foster eccentric painterly choices; the same cannot be said for itinerant critics.

Notes * I would like to thank The Calgary Institute for the Humanities for its continuing support. 1. Books on Canadian painting are a scarce commodity. The most comprehensive work is R. Harper’s Painting in Canada (1966), which most other publications refer to as a source; it contains very few references to prairie painting as, at the time of its publication, not much had happened in the western provinces. Western Canadian painting is discussed more extensively in B. Lord’s Painting in Alberta: An Historical Survey (1974), a highly partisan examination of Canadian painting as colonial painting, first under French, then English and now American influence. Finally, there is K. Wilkin’s Painting in Alberta: An Historical Survey (Edmonton: EAG, 1980), published in celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Province of Alberta.

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2. M. Tippett, Making Culture: English-Canadian Institutions and the Arts before the Massey Commission (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990). 3. E.J. Hart, The Selling of Canada: The CPR and the Beginnings of Canadian Tourism (Banff: Altitude Publishing, 1983), pp. 31-40. 4. J. O’Brian, “Where the Hell is Saskatchewan and Who is Emma Lake?” in The Flat Side of the Landscape: The Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops, exhibit catalogue, (Saskatoon: Mendel Art Gallery, 1989), pp. 29-38. 5. Arthur McKay, quoted in O’Brian, ibid. p. 33. 6. J. Wolff, The Social Production of Art (London: Macmillan, 1982), chapter 2. 7. P. Bourdieu, “The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46, 1987-88, pp. 201-10; “The Field of Cultural Production, or The Economic World Reversed,” Poetics 12, 1983, pp. 311-56; “The Market of Symbolic Goods,” Poetics 14, 1985, pp. 13-44; “Flaubert’s Point of View,” Critical Inquiry 14, 1988, pp. 539-62. The gist of Bourdieu’s treatment of fields: “The artistic field is populated by agents (artists, actors, authors, writers, dealers, critics, directors, publishers, etc.) and institutions (galleries, museums, academies, etc.): it is a site of artistic prise de position (position takings or stances) that are possible at any given period in any given art world/artistic field (genres, schools, styles, subjects, manners, etc.); the position takings or stances arise from the encounter between particular agents’ dispositions, i.e., their habitus which refers to a system of acquired schemes that become practically effective as categories of perception and evaluation: as principles of classification, and also as principles of organizing social action. The artistic field is a field of forces, but also a field of struggles, between the two principles of hierarchization: the heteronomous principle favourable to those who dominate the field, and the autonomous favourable to those least endowed with specific capital (symbolic, economic, cultural or social). The artistic field is then a space of contestation for distinction, i.e., there are constant efforts to (a) define position, (b) to defend against it and (c) to distinguish it from those below. In order to understand the practices of artists and their products, one needs to understand that they are the result of the meeting of two histories: the history of the positions they occupy and the history of their dispositions. In order for that to be accomplished one must understand the strategies employed by the agents of the artistic field; strategies are understood as the orientation of practice which is neither conscious, nor calculative, nor mechanically determined, but rather the product of a “sense” for this particular game (the production and consumption of art). Finally, the art object is both merchandise and meaning, the latter being necessarily collective and existing solely by virtue of the collective belief which knows and acknowledges it as a work of art.” Note #4, from C. Pizanias, “Making Art in the Global Village,” Canadian Themes, Vol. 14 1992, p. 125. 8. R. Rosen and C.C. Brawer, Making Their Mark: Women Artists Move into the Mainstream, 1970-85 (New York: Abbeville, 1989), p. 7. 9. T.W. Luke, Shows of Force: Power, Politics and Ideology in Art Exhibits, Durham: Duke University Press, 1992, p. 228-232. 10. See “Re-viewing Modernist Criticism” in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. by Brian Wallis, New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art in association with D.R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. Boston, 1984, pp. 87-103; in same volume see Martha Rosler, “Lookers, Buyers, Dealers, and Makers: Thoughts on Audience”, pp. 311-340; Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of Gallery Space, Santa Monica: Lapis Press, 1986; and David Carrier, “Art and its Market” in R. Hertz Theories of Contemporary Art, Englewood Cliff: Prentice Hall, 1985. 11. H. Fryer, The Pioneer Years (Langley: State Coach Publishing, 1907), pp. 8-45; J.W. Hogan, West, Nor’West: A History of Alberta (Edmonton: Northgate, 1945), pp. 1-34. 12. For a discussion of this phenomenon see N. Frye, “Conclusion” in C.F. Klinck, ed., Literary History of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), pp. 821-49; see also G. McGregor, The Wacousta Syndrome: Explorations in the Canadian Langscape (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), pp. 3-25. For a different interpretation see R. Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1991), chapter 4.

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13. R. Rees, “Nostalgic Reaction and the Canadian Prairie Landscape,” Great Plains Quarterly, 1982, pp. 157-67. 14. R. Rees, “In a Strange Land … Homesick Pioneers in the Canadian Prairie,” Landscape 26, 1982, pp. 1-9. 15. C. Greenberg, “Painting and Sculpture in Prairie Canada Today,” Canadian Art, 1963, p. 103. 16. Rees, “In a Strange Land,” pp. 26-32. 17. Rees, “Nostalgic Reaction,” pp. 162-65. 18. See McGregor, The Wacousta Syndrome, chap. 3. 19. K. Wilkin, Painting in Alberta, p. 1. (See note 1 above). 20. There is a good discussion of this comparison in A. Davis, A Distant Harmony: Comparisons in the Painting of Canada and the United States of America, exhibition catalogue, Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1982, chap. 2. 21. G. Woodcock, “Nationalism and the Canadian Genius,” artscanada 5, 1978, p. 5. 22. J. Richards and L. Pratt, Prairie Capitalism: Power and Influence in the West (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979), pp. 148-849. 23. T. Fenton, interview with author, March 4, 1984. 24. See M. Baldwin, “Art History, Art Criticism and Exploration,” pp. 202-6, and S. Guilbault, “The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America,” pp. 153-66, both in F. Fransin, ed., Pollock and After: The Theoretical Debate, (London: Harper and Row, 1985). See also M. Byrstyn, “Art Galleries as Gatekeepers: The case of Abstract Expressionism,” Social Forces 45, 1978, pp. 391-408. 25. Historical and anecdotal information about the earlier years of painting in Alberta draws on material I collected while developing a series of portraits of older painters in Alberta for the ACCESS Educational Television Network in 1980-81. The participating artists were Ron Spickett, Luke Lindoe, Stan Perrot, Janet Mitchell, Illingworth Kerr, Stan Blodgett, and Marion and Jim Nicoll. 26. T. Fenton, with author, March 4, 1984. 27. S. Guilbaut, “New Adventures,” pp. 202-206. 28. D. Haynes interview with author at his studio, 28 September, 1990; all subsequent quotations from Haynes, unless otherwise indicated, are from the same interview. 29. Greenberg, “Painting and Sculpture,” pp. 94-95. 30. Ibid., p. 103. 31. V. Hammock, Doug Haynes, exhibit catalogue, EAG, 1970, unpaginated. 32. V. Hammock, quoted in Update 6, no. 4, 1985, p. 9. 33. K. Wilkin, “A Report from the West: Canada,” Art in America, May-June 1972, p. 102. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., p. 103. 37. C. McConnell, “West ’71, The Edmonton Art Gallery,” artscanada, December 1971/January 1972, p. 143. 38. D. Haynes, statement for his solo exhibit at the Glenbow Museum, Calgary, unpaginated. 39. J. A. Forbes, foreword to the catalogue for the Haynes exhibit at the Glenbow Museum, ibid. 40. K. Wilkin, “The Prairies: A Limited View,” Canadian Forum, summary, p. 37. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., p. 39. 43. K. Wilkin, The Canadian Canvas, exhibit catalogue, travelling exhibition initiated and sponsored by Time Canada Ltd., p. 32. 44. J. A. Forbes, “Edmonton — Doug Haynes,” artscanada, June 1975, pp. 101-2. 45. Ibid., p. 102. 46. T. Fenton, from a catalogue of an EAG exhibit on recent abstract painting and sculpture in Canada and eastern U.S., June 1977, unpaginated. 47. Ibid. 48. T. Fenton, “Certain Traditions: Recent British and Canadian Art,” exhibit catalogue, EAG 1978, unpaginated. 49. K. Wilkin, “Rugged Individualists with No Urge to Draw,” ARTnews, February 1979, p. 84. 50. Ibid., p. 87. 51. Ibid.

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52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. D. Haynes, quoted in K. Carpenter, “Douglas Haynes: Recent Paintings,” artsmagazine 10, 1979, p. 31. 55. Ibid., p. 31. 56. Ibid., p. 31. 57. K. Carpenter, “Douglas Haynes at Gallery One,” Art in America, March/April, 1979, p. 157- 61. 58. K. Woods, “The September Openings,” artscanada, December 1978/January 1979, p. 68. 59. K. Wilkin, “Douglas Haynes: Paintings,” exhibition catalogue, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge 1980, unpaginated. 60. A. Perry, “Lost in an Artistic Time Warp,” The Province, November 18, 1980, p. B8. 61. N. Zepp and M. Parke-Taylor, catalogue for “Doug Haynes: Painting in the Eighties,” Norman Mackenzie Gallery, Regina, unpaginated. 62. K. Wilkin, catalogue for “Abstraction X 4,” Canada House Cultural Centre Gallery, London, England, unpaginated. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. R. Bingham, catalogue for Cubism Revisited: The Paintings of Douglas Haynes, Edmonton Art Gallery, unpaginated. 66. Ibid. 67. L. Wylie, Cubism Revisited: The Paintings of Douglas Haynes, Edmonton Art Gallery, Edmonton, unpaginated. 68. D. Haynes, quoted in Phylis Matousek, “Experiment in Cubism,” Edmonton Journal, January 26, 1985, p. H2. 69. D. Haynes, “Inspiration from Unexpected Sources,” Update 7, no. 2, 1986, p. 19. 70. P. McDougall, catalogue for Douglas Haynes: Recent Paintings, Alberta House, London, England, 1988, unpaginated. 71. Haynes, quoted in McDougall, Ibid. 72. K. Wilkin, for exhibit catalogue The Toledo Series, EAG, 1991, p. 6. 73. Ibid., p. 3. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid., p. 5. 76. Ibid., p. 6. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid., p. 7. 79. Ibid. 80. H. Feist, “Commentary by Harold Feist,” published in the catalogue for the Toledo Series, op. cit. p. 21. 81. K. Wilkin interview with the author, 25 March, 1987. 82. V. Hammock, quoted in Update 6, no. 4, 1985, p. 9. 83. L. Muehlenbachs, “On the Walls: Did Christ Pick the First 12, and Other Interesting Observations,” The Edmonton Bullet, June 19, 1991, p. 11. 84. P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 14. 85. Ibid., p. 15. 86. For discussion of this phenomenon see McGregor, The Wacousta Syndrome, esp. pp. 3-25; Frye, “Conclusion,” pp. 821-49; and R. Rees, Land of Earth and Sky: Landscape Painting of Western Canada (Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1984). 87. D. Haynes, interview with the author at his studio, 28 March, 1987. 88. D. Haynes, quoted in Carpenter, “Douglas Haynes: Recent Paintings,” p. 32. 89. McGregor, The Wacousta Syndrome, p. 124. 90. D. O’Doherty, “Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Santa Monica and San Francisco: The Lapis Press, 1986), p. 87. 91. T. Wolfe, The Painted Word, (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1975). 92. T. Lawson, “Last Exit: Painting,” Artforum, October 1981, p. 45. 93. O’Doherty, op. cit. 87. 94. Ibid., p. 91.

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95. Press release, The Edmonton Contemporary Artists Society, Summer, 1993. 96. L. Muehlenbachs, “Two must-see art shows,” Pique, October 7, 1993, p. 13. See also the following: A. Kellogg, “Abstract artists uniting to help construct a better future: New group organizing its own show,” The Edmonton Journal, September 24, 1993, C3; C. Mandel, “Contemporary artists offer a sexual exercise,” The Edmonton Journal, October 2, 1993, F5.

168 Michel Tousignant, Emmanuel Habimana, Mathilde Brault, Naïma Bendris et Esther Sidoli-Leblanc

Les rapports entre générations dans les familles de réfugiés au Québec1

Résumé Les rapports entre générations au sein des familles de réfugiés sont déterminés par une dynamique différente de celle qui existe dans les familles québécoises ou canadiennes de souche. C’est le constat qui ressort d’une série de 210 entrevues réalisées auprès d’adolescents issus de familles de réfugiés de diverses communautés culturelles du Québec. Les entrevues font ressortir trois caractéristiques : la grande part de responsabilités de ces jeunes et le renversement des rôles avec les parents; la grande discrétion des parents à l’égard de leur passé avant l’exil et les stratégies de contrôle exercées par les parents. De telles situations produisent davantage de rébellion et de conduites déviantes que de crises suicidaires, et l’adolescent recherche plus son indépendance que son autonomie. Du côté positif, l’esprit de débrouillardise exigé pourra donner lieu à un esprit d’entrepreneur ou d’innovateur.

Abstract Relationships between generations among refugee families differ from those existing in Quebec- or Canadian-born families. This conclusion follows an analysis of 210 interviews with adolescents from refugee families belonging to various cultural groups in Quebec. The data show three main characterictics: the role inversion with parents and the large responsibilities of children, the parents’ secrecy about their pre-exile life, and the parents’ controlling behaviour. These situations produce more rebellion and deviant behaviour than suicidal tendencies, and adolescents strive more for independence than for autonomy. On the positive side, the coping required to face adversity may produce a spirit of enterprise and innovation.

Le présent article analyse les relations entre les adolescents et leurs parents au sein des familles de réfugiés. Cette recherche s’inscrit à l’origine dans le cadre d’une étude plus large en épidémiologie psychiatrique dont l’objectif est de prédire la présence de diagnostics psychopathologiques à partir de l’histoire familiale. Nous n’aborderons cependant dans cet article que des éléments plus descriptifs des rapports entre les générations. La reproduction sociale des générations nécessite des ajustements profonds en situation de migration. La socialisation des enfants, en plus de tenir compte des

International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue internationale d’études canadiennes Special issue / Numéro hors série, Winter/hiver 1993 IJCS / RIÉC changements culturels d’un monde en mutation rapide, s’inscrit dans un processus de polarisation entre la culture d’origine et celle du pays d’accueil. Il y a malheureusement une pénurie de recherches empiriques dans ce domaine (Groupe d’étude sur la santé mentale des immigrants et des régufiés, 1988; Aronowitz, 1984; et Ben-Porath, 1987). La probabilité que les problèmes ressortent plus en situation d’exil, à cause de décision rapide de sortir de son pays, nous a amenés à arrêter notre choix sur cette population particulière. Nous supposons cependant que l’écart entre les réfugiés et les groupes immigrants pauvres d’arrivée récente n’est pas considérable. Les facteurs qui caractérisent davantage les vagues récentes de réfugiés sont les suivantes : provenance du Tiers-Monde et des régions peu industrialisées; dislocation temporaire ou même définitive de la cellule familiale; absence d’une masse démographique critique de plusieurs nationalités de réfugiés dans la société canadienne (Murphy, 1977). Il existe peu d’observations systématiques des rapports entre les parents immigrants et réfugiés et leurs enfants à la période de l’adolescence. Elles sont davantage centrées sur la petite enfance (Sabatier, 1991). L’ensemble de ces recherches porte principalement sur les modes d’interaction mère-enfant, sur la stimulation sociale et cognitive, ainsi que sur la perception du tempérament. Les travaux sur les adolescents se concentrent davantage sur la construction de l’identité culturelle et fait peu de place aux rapports avec les parents.

Cadre de la recherche Échantillon L’échantillon couvre une grande partie du territoire québécois, soit une école de l’ouest de Montréal, deux écoles de la région nord-est ainsi que les écoles de la Commission Scolaire Ste-Croix (Outremont, Ville-Mont-Royal et Ville St- Laurent). Les autres territoires couverts comprennent les régions de Longueil, Trois-Rivières, Bois-Francs, Québec et Sherbrooke. L’échantillon est construit essentiellement à partir des listes des écoles. Quelques noms ont été rajoutés grâce à l’intermédiaire des associations culturelles. Les listes scolaires indiquent le pays d’origine du père et nous retenions les pays d’où la majorité des migrants sont venus au Canada à titre de réfugiés au cours des dernières années. Cette sélection excluait, par exemple Haïti, le Liban et le Maroc. Une lettre décrivant les grandes lignes du projet est envoyé au domicile et une brève entrevue téléphonique permet ensuite de vérifier si des motifs politiques ou de sécurité sont à la source de la décision de la famille de migrer. L’échantillon total comprend 210 jeunes issus de 38 pays différents. Les pays les plus représentés dans cet échantillon sont par ordre d’importance le Salvador (33), le Cambodge (24), le Laos (19), l’Iran (17), la Pologne (17) et le Vietnam (16). À l’autre extrême, ilya10nations avec seulement un sujet parmi lesquels Cuba, les Seychelles, la Palestine, l’Érithrée et l’Irak. L’âge varie entre 12 et 19 ans, et l’âge médian est de 16 ans. La répartition entre les sexes est relativement équilibrée avec un léger surplus de filles, soit 109 pour 101 garçons. Le taux d’acceptation pour la grande région de Montréal se situe à 66,7 p. 100 (161/255), ce qui est légèrement supérieur à des recherches antérieures utilisant une procédure similaire auprès d’une population étudiante francophone de la population générale. Les principaux motifs de refus sont le manque d’intérêt (54), le manque de temps (19) et l’absence de permission des parents (11). À de rares exceptions, tous les sujets ont séjourné au moins trois

172 Les rapports entre générations dans les familles de réfugiés au Québec ans au Canada et devaient très bien s’exprimer en français. Néanmoins, plus des trois quarts sont nés à l’extérieur du Canada. La plupart des sujets de la région de Montréal ont été rencontrés dans les laboratoires de l’université suite à la difficulté d’obtenir un endroit discret dans le domicile familial. En région, ces entrevues se déroulaient principalement dans des locaux empruntés à des organismes communautaires. Les entretiens duraient en moyenne trois heures. Plusieurs instruments, dont il ne sera pas fait mention dans cet article, ont été utilisés lors des entrevues. Une somme de 15 $ était offerte au sujet pour le dédommager de son temps et de ses frais de transport. Instrument L’essentiel des données provient d’une entrevue semi-structurée dont l’objectif à l’origine est d’identifier les facteurs familiaux qui augmentent la vulnérabilité à un état psychopathologique. Ces facteurs comprennent la privation de soins parentaux, la supervision et la discipline, l’antipathie des parents, le renversement des rôles ainsi que les tensions et discordes dans la famille (Bifulco, Brown et Harris, 1986). L’administration de cet instrument dure en moyenne une demi-heure et se déroule en français. Les répondants doivent décrire, à partir d’exemples concrets, leur relation avec leurs parents, ou substituts, au cours de toute leur vie et préciser le degré de chronicité et la période des comportements problématiques rapportés. Les questions sont posées séparément pour le père et la mère ou pour tout substitut.

Bref portrait économique et social La plupart des réfugiés proviennent de pays peu industrialisés. La culture, dans des modes différents et à divers degrés, sanctionne l’intégrité de la famille et son insertion dans un réseau étendu où le statut est lié à l’appartenance à un lignage. Ces loyautés sont mises à rude épreuve dès l’arrivée au Canada, et parfois même durant la période qui précède l’exil, lorsque la famille se confronte aux conditions de vie d’une société industrielle avancée. De fait, la famille exilée passe par les mêmes épreuves que la famille québécoise et sa cohésion en subit des effets similaires. Les données tirées d’un sous-échantillon de 41 sujets démontrent que 12 d’entre eux, soit 29 p. 100, ne vivent pas actuellement avec leurs deux parents biologiques2. Ces données correspondent de près au même pourcentage que celui des familles québécoises. Cependant, les raisons diffèrent puisque le décès du père est plus fréquent chez les réfugiés et que la séparation des parents résulte parfois de l’exil. Il est difficile dans ce cas de faire la part entre le désir des parents de ne plus vivre ensemble et les circonstances externes. La séparation entre les parents lors de la période de l’exil rend la vie de couple plus difficile par la suite. Des 13 couples séparés lors de l’exil, seulement 7 vivent encore ensemble à la période de l’entrevue3. Par contre, seulement 3 des 24 couples non séparés lors de l’exil ne vivent plus ensemble maintenant (X2= 3,91, p 0,05). Les enfants sont aussi souvent séparés de leur parents lors de l’exil. Des 35 adolescents de ce sous-groupe nés en dehors du Canada, 14 ou 40 p. 100 ont été séparés d’au moins un de leurs parents durant cette période. Quatre l’ont été de leur mère pendant plus d’un an, soit 12 p. 100. La période de séparation dure

173 IJCS / RIÉC rarement moins d’une année et peut s’étendre jusqu’à six ans. On se représente aisément la difficulté de l’enfant à reprendre alors son lien de filiation. La famille exilée accorde une grande importance à la famille étendue, particulièrement aux grands-parents ainsi qu’aux frères et soeurs des parents. Malgré tout, l’unité résidentielle de la famille nucléaire demeure très solide. Seulement 8 des 41 familles logent un membre de la famille étendue. L’oncle est aussi représenté que le grand-parent, de telle sorte que les familles de trois générations sont exceptionnelles. Le nombre moyen de personnes par ménage s’élève à 4,78, c’est-à-dire près de trois enfants en plus des parents. Ce chiffre dépasse celui des familles québécoises de souche dont la progéniture n’atteint pas le taux de reproduction. Les familles analysées oeuvrent dans des conditions financières difficiles, et ce plusieurs années après leur arrivée au Canada. Elles ont généralement le minimum vital au niveau de la nourriture, du logement et du vêtement. Les revenus supplémentaires de la mère ou des enfants permettent de boucler le budget, et l’endettement est rarement élevé ou prolongé. Mais la stabilité d’emploi du père est généralement précaire. Onze sur 38 sont sans travail au moment de l’entrevue, dont trois suite à une invalidité. Le taux de chômage s’élève donc à 21 p. 100. En comparaison, nos recherches précédentes révèlent un taux de chômage de5à8 p.100auprès des pères d’adolescents québécois. La venue dans un pays industrialisé ne chambarde pas autant que par le passé la position de la femme en regard du marché de l’emploi. Ilyaenfait plus de mères (24) qui comptaient sur un emploi rémunéré dans leur pays d’origine que ce n’est le cas maintenant au Canada (19). La décision de se consacrer entièrement à l’éducation des enfants pourrait expliquer cette différence. Ces femmes sont aussi relativement isolées, qu’elles soient employées ou non. Plus de la moitié (21/41) reçoivent en moyenne de la visite à la maison seulement une fois ou moins par semaine.

Rapports entre générations Nous avons choisi de diviser en fonction de trois domaines l’analyse de la relation entre l’adolescent et ses parents : le renversement des rôles, le silence sur les secrets de famille et la difficulté des parents d’assumer le contrôle dans un milieu éducatif ouvert. Ces domaines ont particulièrement attiré notre attention lors de la lecture des notes d’entrevue. Dans la mesure du possible, nous tenterons d’établir une comparaison avec la population québécoise en général. Renversement des rôles L’enfant de parents réfugiés entre très vite, trop parfois, dans l’univers adulte. Dans les cas extrêmes, la guerre civile le plonge dans des responsabilités rarement affrontées par des enfants ou même des adultes occidentaux. Heureusement, la plupart des enfants sont épargnés du contact direct avec les hostilités. Une fois au Canada, d’autres situations feront appel cependant à leurs ressources psychologiques. Les parents sont en effet souvent incapables, à cause principalement du manque de maîtrise de la langue française ou anglaise, de mener de façon autonome leurs affaires, et les enfants les aideront non seulement à traduire, mais encore à prendre des décisions importantes. Dans d’autres cas, c’est un parent, plus souvent la mère, qui se sent esseulée et coupée de communications significatives avec son mari, ou simplement en situation monoparentale. Elle aura alors besoin de prendre l’un de ses enfants

174 Les rapports entre générations dans les familles de réfugiés au Québec comme confident ou comme appui pour traverser son épreuve. Ces situations surviennent probablement moins fréquemment dans les familles canadiennes de souche où l’étendue des contacts de la mère lui permet de prendre un autre adulte comme cible de ses confidences. Le cas d’Amina sert d’exemple de fardeau fort lourd à porter. Il est certainement exceptionnel, mais il illustre comment certains enfants sont brutalement projetés du stade de l’enfance à celui d’adulte : À huit ans, Amina habitait son pays d’origine au Moyen-Orient quand son père a dû soudainement s’exiler suite à sa participation à une opération de propagande antigouvernementale. Elle partageait alors sa chambre avec ses grands-parents. Le grand-père fut interpellé par la police secrète deux jours après la désertion du père. Après une torture en règle, il est ramené chez lui presque sans vie, ne pouvant ni parler, ni manger, ni marcher. Il meurt deux semaines plus tard des séquelles des mauvais traitements. La famille décide alors de partir rejoindre le père et demeurera deux années dans un camp de réfugiés avant de parvenir au Canada en 1989. Elle est encore en attente d’un statut de réfugié puisque celui-ci leur a été refusé en juillet 1991. La famille n’a aucun contact personnel au Québec. Il incombe donc à Amina de préparer la défense de ses parents pour en appeler de la décision. Cette responsabilité l’affecte beaucoup. Même si elle fait preuve d’intelligence et qu’elle a su rapidement apprendre le français, Amina est angoissée parce que la décision du juge, dont peut dépendre la vie de la famille, repose en grande partie sur la dextérité avec laquelle elle pourra présenter le cas avec le concours du nouvel avocat. Ces démarches la touchent également dans sa vie scolaire parce qu’elle doit s’absenter de l’école de quatre à cinq fois par mois. Heureusement, son professeur, compréhensif, l’aide à reprendre le temps perdu durant la période du midi. La grande inquiétude des parents face à leur sort est difficile à supporter, car il retombe sur elle de les réconforter. De plus, comme elle a quatre petits frères âgés entre 1 et 11 ans et que la mère travaille très tôt le matin, Amina est constamment occupée par les travaux domestiques, préparant le petit déjeuner, faisant le ménage et donnant le bain aux enfants en soirée. C’est également elle qui aide les petits avec leurs travaux scolaires. Les enfants des familles exilées ressentent un poids très lourd lorsque les parents n’arrivent pas à s’exprimer dans l’une des deux langues du pays. L’exemple suivant donne une idée de la façon dont l’adolescent se substitue à ses parents autant pour les tractations courantes que pour des situations plus délicates. Omar est un adolescent de 14 ans du Moyen-Orient. À 12 ans, soit seulement un an et demi après son arrivée au pays, il a dû se faire l’interprète de son père auprès du médecin de celui-ci avant une opération délicate. Cette situation nécessitait qu’un enfant, encore jeune, aide un parent à prendre une décision pénible et angoissante. Par ailleurs, Omar achète, avec les sous économisés d’un travail à temps partiel, une voiture d’occasion à ses parents. C’est lui aussi qui s’occupe de la négociation du bail du logement, qui accompagne son père pour chercher du travail auprès des employeurs et, lorsque sa mère doit à son tour être hospitalisée, qui prend l’initiative des démarches. Un autre incident, survenu un soir du Ramadan, illustre

175 IJCS / RIÉC

bien de telles substitutions. Comme la famille faisait un peu de bruit, un voisin est venu leur faire des menaces d’agression physique et a ensuite appelé les gendarmes. Omar ne craignait pas les menaces car il suivait des cours d’arts martiaux et il a tranquillement expliqué aux policiers la nature des festivités. Le voisin a finalement entendu raison et s’est excusé de sa saute d’humeur. Des jeunes comme Amina et Omar sont en même temps très fiers d’exercer leur débrouillardise et savent que ces responsabilités leur confèrent un statut et une autonomie qu’ils n’auraient jamais pu acquérir dans des circonstances ordinaires. Il faut dire que leurs parents, face à leurs limites linguistiques, expriment leur soutien et leur témoigne une grande estime. La situation s’avère plus difficile dans les familles monoparentales. La mère, isolée, se confie parfois à l’adolescent quant à ses malheurs et ses problèmes antérieurs avec le père, ou quant à la nostalgie chronique de son pays natal. L’adolescent est alors mal en point pour consoler sa mère. D’autres fois, il s’inquiète du fait que sa mère ne puisse maîtriser le français ou l’anglais. Qu’arrivera-t-il si elle se perd ou si elle est victime d’un accident? Un sujet rapporte qu’il écrivait d’avance des billets pour chaque éventualité d’une urgence et qu’il informait sa mère de tous les lieux où il pouvait se trouver au long de la journée. Un tel adolescent ne peut évidemment compter que sur lui- même pour se débrouiller s’il tombe malade ou s’il est victime d’accident. Ces prises de responsabilité ont généralement des conséquences positives sur la consolidation de l’estime de soi. Cette entraide contribue aussi à resserrer les liens familiaux. La participation très active aux tâches domestiques augmente le sens d’appartenance, et cela même chez les garçons. Le secret de famille Les migrants opèrent souvent une coupure avec leur passé et n’y réfèrent parfois qu’avec réticence. Si le passé peut être fortement idéalisé, il est rarement raconté dans sa version plus prosaïque. La tendance semble encore plus accentuée chez les exilés. Les enfants connaissent en général peu de choses sur la situation de leurs parents avant l’exil. Ils identifient difficilement à l’occasion le métier de leurs parents dans le pays d’origine et ne savent souvent pas par quels moyens ceux-ci ont fui. Des adolescents vietnamiens n’ont pu confirmer si leurs parents avaient quitté leur pays par avion ou par bateau de fortune. Pourtant, ils pouvaient décrire des scènes très troublantes de leur vie familiale, ce qui témoigne qu’ils ne pêchaient pas par discrétion. L’observation la plus dramatique de cette dynamique est survenue lorsque le deuxième auteur s’est rendu au domicile d’une famille et s’est entretenu dans un premier temps avec la mère en présence des enfants. Il s’agit d’une veuve originaire du sud-est asiatique. Elle s’est alors mise à raconter spontanément les misères vécues durant la guerre civile et son exil, les habitants du village assassinés et les scènes de pillage. Elle a récupéré ses enfants qui étaient encore vivants sous un tas de cadavres et elle a traversé le pays miné de toutes parts jusqu’en Thaïlande. Les enfants, stupéfiés, apprenaient, dix années plus tard et en même temps que notre collègue, l’effroyable odyssée de leur mère. Nous pouvons présumer qu’un certain nombre d’enfants continuent d’ignorer à peu près tout du passé de leurs parents qui, n’ayant pu faire le deuil de leurs pertes ou désirant reconstruire une vie entièrement nouvelle pour leurs enfants, font tout pour occulter leurs expériences. Les enfants doivent quand même se

176 Les rapports entre générations dans les familles de réfugiés au Québec

douter à travers les bribes d’information provenant des médias ou des films de ce qui s’est passé. Par exemple, beaucoup de femmes et de jeunes filles sont violées et agressées sexuellement soit pendant la guerre, soit dans une moindre mesure dans les camps de réfugiés. Ces expériences continuent de jeter un voile de honte entre le mari et la femme sans que rien ne soit su des enfants. Ce repli des parents engendre occasionnellement des tensions aiguës. Une jeune Cambodgienne, dont le père a été enlevé par les Khmers rouges et qui est disparu lorsqu’elle avait cinq ans, harcèle sa mère pour obtenir des renseignements sur son histoire. La mère évite les questions ou n’y répond qu’après une forte insistance. Les rapport sont d’ailleurs très négatifs entre les deux, et la fille rend sa mère responsable de son problème de filiation avec le père en le projetant sur elle et lui disant : « Je ne veux plus être ta fille ». Le contrôle parental L’ensemble des parents, peu importe la région d’origine (Amérique latine, Asie ou Europe de l’est) exercent un contrôle assez strict sur leurs enfants quoique avec des variantes prononcées dans les modalités. L’instrument utilisé dans cette recherche permet d’assigner une cote « élevé » dans les cas de contrôle très prononcés qui, d’après les cliniciens, augmenteraient la vulnérabilité à certaines formes de psychopathologie. Les jugements sont basés sur les exemples rapportés et leur persistance et non sur la perception des sujets. Le contrôle des parents s’étend donc généralement sur plusieurs années et prend des formes variées dont les plus sévères sont l’utilisation de punitions physiques répétées; l’interdiction de sorties à l’extérieur de la maison après 18 heures même durant la fin de semaine et l’été; l’interdiction de recevoir des téléphones ou des visites personnelles; fouiller l’espace personnel de l’enfant sans son consentement pour obtenir des preuves de désobéissance; et critiquer quotidiennement et avec véhémence, sans raison sérieuse, les moindres écarts de comportement. Un calcul opéré sur la première moitié de notre échantillon (N = 102) indique que 17 sujets, soit 16,7 p. 100, décrivent une situation de contrôle élevé. Les filles sont nettement surreprésentées puisqu’elles comptent 13 des 17 cas. Une autre étude menée en milieu montréalais par notre équipe relève, pour la tranche d’âge entre 14 et 24 ans, des taux de contrôle élevé qui se situent autour de 8 p. 100 pour toute la période entre 0 et 17 ans4. Le contrôle exagéré des parents de familles de réfugiés ne s’exerce donc pas universellement, mais cible davantage les filles que les garçons. Par ailleurs, ce rapport du simple au double serait plus grand si nous tenions compte des situations où une surveillance forte est exercée par les parents sans pour autant être déviante et pouvoir nuire à la socialisation de l’enfant. Ce contrôle peut prendre la forme de mesures disciplinaires sévères dont les punitions physiques jusqu’au seuil de l’adolescence, voire jusqu’à la période de jeune adulte chez les filles, ou de règles rigides concernant les sorties. Ces comportements parentaux continuent généralement ceux transmis par la culture d’origine. Ils provoquent bien sûr des conflits parfois aigus auprès des adolescents dans un contexte canadien. Les filles sont plus sujettes à ces mesures et l’étau peut même se resserrer quand la menace des sorties avec les garçons commence à poindre. Pour certains parents, la crainte de la promiscuité cache mal l’angoisse de perdre du pouvoir; pour d’autres, c’est le refus de voir leur fille s’engager avec un garçon d’un autre groupe culturel ou d’une autre religion. Il est arrivé de voir un père

177 IJCS / RIÉC accompagner sa fille en entrevue ou une adolescente être obligée de téléphoner à la maison aux demi-heures pendant l’entrevue pour assurer qu’elle se trouvait toujours dans nos locaux. Le plan original de mener les entrevues à la maison a été très tôt abandonné en raison du manque de discrétion de la part des parents. Certains sujets du sud-est asiatique ont révélé que même si leurs parents se tenaient dans une pièce attenante, et que la porte était fermée, il y avait danger qu’ils écoutent tout. Les exemples de punition physique sont monnaie courante dans presque tous les groupes suffisamment représentatifs. Le degré d’accord de l’enfant avec le comportement des parents varie grandement, allant de la légitimation à des actes de rébellion. Ainsi, un garçon raconte avec une certaine fierté comment sa mère, lorsqu’il eut dit des mots sales dans son pays d’origine vers l’âge de huit ans, prit une allumette et lui brûla légèrement les lèvres. À côté des exemples de contrôle culturellement sanctionnés, il existe des conduites de contrôle sévère perçues très négativement, du moins en rétrospective, par l’adolescent. Une adolescente latino-américaine rappelle avoir été élevée de façon très stricte par sa mère. Dans son pays d’origine, et cela jusqu’à l’âge de 13 ans, elle ne pouvait se rendre que chez la voisine et ne pouvait pas rentrer plus tard que 19 heures 30 au risque d’être battue. Sa mère allait la conduire et la chercher tous les jours à l’école. Une fois, la mère ne se présenta pas à l’heure habituelle et la fille, alors âgée de 7-8 ans, rentra avec sa gardienne. La mère, enragée par cette inconduite, lui mit la tête dans la cuvette des toilettes. Cette jeune fille a maintenant 16 ans et habite Montréal avec sa tante, également très stricte. Elle a pu arracher la permission de voir son ami de coeur une fois par semaine. Une autre adolescente du sud-est asiatique rapporte ne pas avoir eu le droit de sortir de la maison après souper jusqu’à l’âge de 15 ans. Ce contrôle des filles est aussi extrêmement serré dans les familles musulmanes. Cette démarche des parents souffre souvent d’un manque de légitimité sociale dans une société postindustrielle avancée. Les enfants devenus adolescents et désormais bien conscients des valeurs d’égalitarisme et d’autonomie véhiculées à la fois à l’école et dans les média n’intériorisent pas toujours ces attitudes de contrainte et, à moins que les parents aient pu valider leur mode d’agir, ils se rebellent contre ce qu’ils perçoivent comme une atteinte à leurs libertés fondamentales et un frein à leur intégration dans la société libérale. À ce point, les parents vacilleront entre des bouffées d’autoritarisme et un abandon de leurs responsabilités. Ils se sentent de plus en plus dépassés et ils abdiquent graduellement. Les garçons sont particulièrement victimes de ces situations d’ambivalence parentale. Notre recherche a relevé un nombre assez élevé de comportements antisociaux tels que les vols, les batailles de rue et, occasionnellement, la promiscuité sexuelle. Ce syndrome est souvent généré en partie par des dynamiques familiales où les parents manifestent une incompétence à gérer le devenir de leurs enfants après avoir tenté par tous les moyens de les contenir. Chez les 30 premiers sujets masculins, nous avons relevé cinq cas avec au moins quatre symptômes de conduite antisociale. Trois des adolescents rapportent avoir été battus par leur père. Un quatrième, sans être battu, est la cible de scènes de colère disgracieuses connues de tout l’étage de l’immeuble. Ces enfants disent tous avoir eu très peur de leur père au cours de leur enfance. Maintenant, il existe une dynamique de défi à l’égard de cette répression paternelle au moment où la peur s’amenuise.

178 Les rapports entre générations dans les familles de réfugiés au Québec

Dans d’autres circonstances, et cela est plus remarquable chez les filles en provenance du Moyen-Orient, il existe une soumission consentie au contrôle des parents. Le milieu très protégé interdit une socialisation avec l’ensemble des adolescents, sans que ce soit pour elles source de malheur. Cet équilibre ne pourra durer qu’en autant que la vie future de ces adolescentes reproduise la situation vécue au foyer. Comme plusieurs de ces groupes ne possèdent pas une densité démographique très élevée au Québec, la transition risque d’être difficile. Encore est-il qu’il ne faille pas sous-estimer la capacité de la famille à gérer entièrement la vie intime de leurs enfants. Ainsi, une jeune fille musulmane qui approche de la majorité attend avec soumission d’aller vivre l’an prochain dans son pays d’origine avec un mari encore inconnu que son père ira lui procurer.

Conclusion Il va sans dire que, sans être meilleure ou pire, la dynamique qui préside aux relations intergénérationnelles diffère considérablement dans cet échantillon de familles d’exilés vivant au Québec que dans les familles francophones de souche (Tousignant, Hamel et Bastien, 1988). Rappelons brièvement les observations faites antérieurement au sujet de ce dernier groupe. Les familles québécoises accordent évidemment beaucoup plus de liberté à leurs enfants, conscientes que ceux-ci doivent prendre graduellement en main leur destinée. Ces adolescents se préoccupent alors moins de leur indépendance que de leur capacité d’autonomie qui s’exerce non seulement envers les parents, mais aussi envers leurs amis, leurs camarades et même leurs amis de coeur. Les écarts de la norme, quand ils surviennent dans ces familles, prennent alors la coloration d’un laisser-aller ou d’un désistement de la part des parents. Les jeunes se plaignent aussi du manque de contribution émotive de la part du père, et cela même dans les familles sans problèmes graves. Les parents sont parfois eux aussi obsédés par leur désir d’autonomie et se distancient des enfants pour investir dans leur carrière ou leurs loisirs. Quand il y a détresse psychologique chez les adolescents, elle emprunte alors la voie de la crise suicidaire, quand ce n’est pas de la tentative elle-même dont la fréquence est de 6 p. 100 entre 14 et 17 ans. Dans les cas plus heureux, les adolescents sont en mesure de prendre rapidement des décisions importantes, de s’exprimer ouvertement sur leurs états psychologiques et de faire confiance aux autres. Ils auront de la reconnaissance envers leurs parents, mais leur générosité s’orientera également vers l’extérieur de la famille au sein de leur groupe de pairs ou dans des engagements sociaux. Les familles de réfugiés semblent revivre sous une autre forme le choc des valeurs vécu au Québec durant la période de la Révolution tranquille. C’est le passage d’une société traditionnelle à une société libérale. La civilisation nord- américaine exerçe un attrait certain sur les parents qui sont moins assurés dans leurs valeurs, et on observe souvent une cassure du contrôle avec les années. La communauté culturelle d’appartenance n’est pas suffisamment nombreuse dans la plupart des cas au Québec pour assurer un support aux parents dans leur démarche éducative. On assiste donc davantage à une espèce de guerre de tranchée où le jeune tente d’accaparer de plus en plus de terrain. Cependant, il ne sait plus trop comment utiliser le pouvoir nouvellement acquis qui se traduira gauchement en rébellion et en conduites déviantes. Chez les filles, cela se traduira davantage par des sentiments d’anxiété et des conduites phobiques parce qu’elles sentiront que les parents ne peuvent plus leur

179 IJCS / RIÉC apporter la protection promise. Les conduites suicidaires, bien que présentes, sont aussi moins prononcées que chez les jeunes Québécoises. L’aspect positif est l’empreinte plus forte laissée par la famille chez les exilés. Les parents investissent beaucoup dans leurs enfants, probablement parce qu’ils ont perdu tellement de liens d’attachement en s’exilant. De plus, le racisme vécu par les deux générations — en provenance aussi bien de Québécois de souche que d’autres groupes migrants — à l’école et sur le marché du travail resserre nécessairement les liens d’appartenance. Mais le point le plus saillant s’avère la participation prononcée de ces jeunes dans le monde adulte et dans l’espace domestique. Ils ont de nombreuses occasions de surmonter des défis, de se battre et de se sentir importants. Cela contraste sûrement avec la situation des Québécois de souche qui affrontent aussi des défis, mais davantage sur le mode du jeu, soit dans les sports ou les associations de jeunes. Il y a aussi chez le groupe de réfugiés ce sentiment que l’on part de rien et qu’il faut foncer dans la vie, cette contrainte de ne pouvoir regarder en arrière, cette conviction qu’il y va de l’honneur de sa culture. Il faudra attendre encore quelques années pour savoir si les grands entrepreneurs et innovateurs de demain proviendront davantage de ces familles d’exilés. La nature de notre échantillon nous force à limiter nos conclusions à la population des réfugiés. La tentation est forte cependant de les étendre aux autres groupes d’immigrants. Lors de la présentation de ces résultats préliminaires en conférence, nous avons entendu quelques témoignages de représentants d’autres groupes culturels qui voyaient dans nos données un reflet de leur expérience familiale d’immigrants. Nous ne pouvons qu’espérer que d’autres recherches viennent enrichir ce protrait initial.

Notes 1. Cette recherche a été rendue possible grâce à des subventions du CRSH, du FCAR et du Fonds FODAR de l’Université du Québec. Nous tenons à remercier les personnes suivantes qui ont contribué à ce texte : Claire Malo etx Francine Perrault. 2. Les données de cette recherche ne sont pas encore informatisées et ne pourront l’être avant plusieurs mois. Les statistiques présentées reposent donc sur une fraction de l’échantillon. 3. Il ne s’agit pas dans ces cas de familles en attente de réunification. 4. Ces résultats n’ont pas encore été publiés. Pour d’autres détails sur cette étude voir Tousignant, M., Hamel, S., Bastien, M.F. (1988). Structure familiale, relations parents- enfants et conduites suicidaires à l’école secondaire. Santé Mentale au Québec, 13, 79-93.

Bibliographie Aronowitz, M. (1984). The social and emotional adjustment of immigrant children: A review of the literature. International Migration Review, 18, 237-257. Ben-Porath, Y. S. (1987). Issues in the psycho-social adjustment of refugees. Texte préparé pour le National Institute of Mental Health’s Refugee Assistance Program. Mental Health/Technical Assistance Center of the University of Minnesota (Contract No. 278-85- 0024 CH). Bifulco, A.T., Brown, G.W. et Harris, T.O. (1986). Childhood loss of parent, lack of adequate parental care and adult depression: a replication. Journal of Affective Disorders, 12, 115- 128. Groupe d’étude sur la santé mentale des immigrants et des réfugiés (1988). Review of Literature on Migrant Mental Health/Revue de littérature sur la santé mentale des migrants. Santé, Culture, Health, 5(1), 5-74. Murphy, H.B.M. (1977). Migration, culture and mental health. Psychological Medicine, 7(4), 677-684. Sabatier, C. (1991). Les relations parents-enfants dans un contexte d’immigration. Ce que nous savons et ce que nous devrions savoir. Santé Mentale au Québec, 16, 165-190.

180 Les rapports entre générations dans les familles de réfugiés au Québec

Tousignant, M., Hamel, S., Bastien, M.F. (1988). Structure familiale, relations parents-enfants et conduites suicidaires à l’école secondaire. Santé Mentale au Québec, 13, 79-93.

181 Claire Harris

A Grammar of the Heart

As earth lives the bodies of the dead1 she lived language at first she examined each word skin peeled back green flesh squeezed between thumb and forefinger till she tasted sentences rolled them in her curious mouth swirled them around the sides and back of her tongue waited for the aftertaste thin sound grew in her as if she hummed as if humming she sang in here i hereiamin herein i am in and am indifference i differ in here am different her and in indifference am within difference am difference no defence with out herein iamin in this monotony and as if she had absorbed the word into her blood thus it began to flower in silence

International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue internationale d’études canadiennes Special issue / Numéro hors série, Winter/hiver 1993 IJCS / RIÉC

Consider her my mother in her awful moment my father’s hand cupped in her brown one his fingers blue at nails and tips begun their slow fading while she sits staring at that face so suddenly frozen into its final dignity without a word she lays down that hand and as if she can and slice through thick air to trap the core of things she closes his window on the dense music of bees of cicadas of nameless life she draws his blinds straightens his riotous blue brown sheets pulls the heavy counterpane up over his shoulders then leaves him in half open contemplation of what ever lay seized in his dark eyes and shuts the door

184 A Grammar of the Heart

How here to say the unsayable when she was eight death wheeling over her house a great flight of corbeaux of darkness snatched sisters a brother now deathbeds have become her womb from her first husband’s at twenty she birthed grief in black veils and in honey then her father died she drew from the hollow of that death the modern bread winner & so fashionable she laughed often was young her mother died she shed the daughter became wife once more and finally

If death knocked again she wouldn’t answer

* And yet believing in her own immortality

In something that is no more than nothing

Ravelling and ravelling her silences

Against death against offspring against darkness with the soft crumpling of days laying goodmornings and goodnights one on one on one a haven a fastness

185 IJCS / RIÉC

Thus she turned away from us all retired to her own womb its slow gestations she lay curled drank only when her body newly parched cried out and there under the stigmata of her woman’s life she paced the deliberate the walled moment its love affair once tended as one tends a garden... naming and with a certain ruthlessness a certain awe... now shattered as by earthquake

For days she wandered among beaten branches among amputations and boulders gouging herself among the thorns of hope and strewn petals till as if driven from or by a spade flaming into sword she rose a stranger the thing splintered in her mended to a new shape out of her clear eyes something distant surprised looked on us

186 A Grammar of the Heart

Now through my writing window the late summer sun flares briefly before his going down (death here his wail still somewhat in poor taste a turning away as from shabby defeat) now not silence but the city’s quiet settles over the Bow

187 IJCS / RIÉC

To sketch one who discarded words with words she was a woman born in the dawn her girlhood startled by the first world war she loved she married she buried she loved again married in rose lace and promise then calm eye of the storm she mothered she cooked she taught she baked she nursed she danced and played and fussed over bruises and laughed and prayed and loved and read and baked cared made wonderful punch and yet she was a woman who thought herself unwatched her heart secret around the first grief she moved through her life as if she wasn’t there

188 A Grammar of the Heart

Through the plate glass windows a lone plane floats soundlessly Calgary’s midnight wash of sky no stars never stars a moon like a parenthesis

and still i remember how she filled the house with such quiet gaiety gathering us all around her in the huge bed in the hot afternoons after the day’s teaching to laugh at our stories and yet she wrapped herself around him my father like a second skin and she fit in the suppressed laughter in the chatter those sudden teasing silences from her room there was no space for any child and yet she was so gentle we rose each morning at five to be almost alone with her climbing the hill to mass in the deep hibiscus dawn and still fired ebony at the core or bronze i remember rosary beads clicking like an abacus in tapered fingers and how cool she could be how adamant in the face of certain griefs and yet

189 IJCS / RIÉC

She was a spell a plot i could not be like her it was something i could not learn the way i learnt to make buljol stuff cucumbers match patterns the way i learnt a woman must have a profession that way you aren’t dependent on any man and yet now sometimes i come upon her suddenly and in shadow now perhaps my grave’s clarity resolving itself i understand what passion forged the cool smile

190 A Grammar of the Heart

Caught in the light of her infinite surprise in that silence growing longer than days we panicked doctors/nurses/sea air will do her good forced to Mayaro she gestured away the days our frantic whisperings distanced even the clash of currents at her ankles we argued ways means how to live out a life refused taking the matter from her gently and as if it were ours but she rocked the sandy verandahs prepared bits of meals as if these things mattered and each day at high noon she stood in the spent sibilance of sea at wind wave’s edge and day after day

191 IJCS / RIÉC

I remembered my father his sudden rising from driftwood a shout in trunks he strode into raw sea without a word steadily without distraction until the waves break over his shoulders he now begins to swim further and still further into brilliant sunstricken ocean beyond swell and far breakers his head a black dot dances where that heavy pool of light becomes Atlantic his head grows smaller while our thin cries scratch and the gulls’ cries strain above the waves small crabs scuttle flocks of chip-chip work in aeons of sand as if the world unspoken were still there

How she stands never takes her eyes from his head the curve of his arm rising never calling him back how he turns finally and many years later how the world comes back and he pounds towards shore and she how before he can touch ground turns away as if the coconut palms thrashing about her were the whips of scorpions

192 A Grammar of the Heart

And wind flares from that ocean strips from those palms from these river-green poplars the world’s wild fiery breath now lean and dark he whistles beneath my balcony

Where i have seen her a wet snow falling arms wrapped around her shoulders rocking as she may once have rocked away noonday sun

And i have seen her make from the space between a new world of snow and difficult daughters

Once she said a woman’s choice limited must be quick and sure her silences grew baroque

Still she wrote letters to the lawyers: I decide not these children in the windows dark waters of the Bow drown a city

193 IJCS / RIÉC

I phone my brother the air waves taut with loss he says she was so gracious did i ever tell you he hesitates suddenly gruff are you writing this down of course

194 A Grammar of the Heart

In the end twice married rich with experience of dark men she turned to her third seduction death seeing himself invited begins a slow flirtatious dance and she with him now like a young bride soft with hope and mystery

And the present deserts her as if the burden of grief had shunted her into past tense she began to blur i arched found claws spat at death at fear

Eventually cottonwoods stripped of their leaves the Bow wearing thin frills of ice she returned to that room where everything was out of proportion

And there where even memory was too highly polished the curtains too heavy she lay

195 IJCS / RIÉC

And she was gone from us slowly so slowly like a sequence of gaunt ferryman loved face growing smaller and smaller till only the hulk drifting over the horizon tip of a sail For years

She wandered in a bright haunted wood the dead leaving victorian graves to call her name small sisters father husbands she answered them all her voice its words are a herd of douen clinging to her skirts their dead backward footprints

The adult gone from her in messy details woman poured out as water through a basket

She ceased to be the wall between me and the grave yet a cool gravity an inquiring eyebrow

As transparent as an embryo

I would abort but lack the courage of saline or solutions

And years

As if or whether stabat mater were intrinsic to the mother

Dolorosa and already infinite

Impossible to say her pain or whether for us a wracking a slow burning at the stake i wanted her to answer once

196 A Grammar of the Heart

She lay my mother without speech before a headboard too tall too tightly carved my visits brought no softening of that resistance i joined you i lay in silence only your eyes moved refusing recognition and the shedding of your flesh was speech when you had poured out all you could i lay fat unwrinkled your skin hooked tight over bone i lay full looselimbed puppet on your string eyes stretched on some inner play you were marble an effigy before your own tomb i gave up i gave in

Now in the mango wind drifting from island backyards in the purpling of lilacs on Memorial at bridge hands in country lamplight i remember you your earlier times young and laughing i remember how silence rewarded you my father storming around your stillness then giving in

197 IJCS / RIÉC

EPILOGUE

Rushing home from Calgary my mother dying the forest roads lined with lilies I see them mad fluent orange and stop to capture this for her later in a mud green hospital room though gathered in huge bunches dumped raw in great stone jars in the awesome victorious silence suddenly wildly obscene and stricken like this verse extinguishing what is left of her that is wild and full of grace

Note

1. Luis Rosales “The Root”, Roots & Wings, Hardie St. Martin, Harper & Row

198 Review Essays Essais critiques Simon Langlois

Trois regards sur les générations

François Ricard, La génération lyrique, Montréal, Boréal, 1993. Douglas Coupland, Generation X. Tales for an Accelerated Culture, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Reginald Bibby et Donald Posterski, Teen Trends. A Nation in Motion, Toronto, Stoddart, 1992.

La génération à laquelle on appartient est à la fois le point d’ancrage d’une définition du monde, mais aussi un critère de positionnement objectif par rapport aux autres dans une société donnée. La première perspective renvoie aux façons différentes dont les générations définissent le monde, les valeurs, les façons de vivre, l’exercice de l’autorité, le respect de la tradition ou l’ouverture au changement. Les générations peuvent s’affronter violemment ou se succéder dans une certaine harmonie, selon les époques et les cultures, tout comme elles peuvent aussi coexister dans l’indifférence ainsi que le donnent à penser les analyses de E. Shorter (Naissance de la famille moderne, Paris, 1977). Mais l’appartenance à une génération peut aussi être considérée, dans une seconde perspective, comme un critère d’allocation des ressources disponibles dans une société, au même titre que la classe sociale, la langue, le sexe ou l’ethnie. On parlera d’effet de genération — et non plus seulement d’effet d’âge — lorsque l’équilibre relatif des rapports entre groupes d’âge est rompu d’une cohorte à l’autre. Dans ses Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse, Renan écrit : « J’aime le passé, mais je porte envie à l’avenir. Il y aura eu de l’avantage à passer sur cette planète le plus tard possible ». Les jeunes d’aujourd’hui auront peut-être quelques hésitations à se reconnaître spontanément dans ce discours qui leur paraîtra pécher par excès d’optimisme. Il est vrai que la situation socio- économique de la majorité s’est améliorée au fil des ans, dans la foulée du développement économique considérable qu’ont connu les sociétés industrielles. Mais il est également vrai que cette tendance s’est en quelque sorte arrêtée depuis plus de quinze ans. Ce temps d’arrêt a affecté les jeunes plus durement que tout autre groupe. Ainsi, la situation relative des jeunes familles et des personnes âgées s’est-elle considérablement modifiée en Amérique du Nord durant les années 1980 : globalement, les jeunes ont perdu du terrain par rapport aux jeunes des générations précédentes, et les personnes plus âgées ont réussi quant à elles à améliorer leurs acquis par rapport aux cohortes passées. Les deux aspects de l’analyse des générations que nous venons d’identifier sont présents, à des degrés divers, dans les trois ouvrages analysés ici. Lus l’un après l’autre, ces livres sont autant de regards différents sur l’un des phénomènes sociaux les plus importants de la fin du siècle : la remise en cause et la redéfinition des rapports entre les genérations dans les societés développées.

International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue internationale d’études canadiennes Special issue / Numéro hors série, Winter/hiver 1993 IJCS / RIÉC

La génération lyrique L’ouvrage de François Ricard, La génération lyrique, est à la fois un essai — un essai d’abord littéraire, se plaît à rappeler l’auteur — et un portrait qui s’attarde à dégager la mentalité des premiers-nés de la génération du baby- boom au Québec. Voilà aussi une sorte de biographie collective et de confession critique qui s’attache à suivre le déroulement de l’existence de cette génération que Ricard divise en trois périodes : l’enfance et l’adolescence (les années 1960), la jeunesse et l’entrée dans le monde (les années 1970) et l’âge du réel ou l’âge de la prise en main de la société (qui va jusqu’à la fin des années 1980). Portrait particulièrement bien réussi qui intéressera d’abord les lecteurs par ses qualités littéraires. La langue est alerte et vive et le style, incisif. L’auteur a le don de la formule qui sait ramasser en peu de mots une idée, un diagnostic, une interprétation. L’ouvrage est à lire, d’abord pour le plaisir que sait donner tout livre bien écrit. Ricard a trouvé chez un littéraire — Milan Kundera qui est non seulement un écrivain remarquable mais aussi un fin observateur du monde contemporain — le fil conducteur de son essai qui l’a amené à qualifier de génération lyrique, les premiers-nés du baby-boom, cette crète d’une vague démographique qui a déferlé en Amérique du Nord après la Seconde Guerre mondiale. « Dans le vocabulaire de Milan Kundera, l’une des composantes essentielles du lyrisme est justement cette attitude qui consiste à voir le monde comme un immense champ ouvert, comme une matière vierge où l’être ne rencontre aucun obstacle et qu’il peut donc défaire et refaire à sa guise pour s’y projeter et s’y accomplir sans réserve ni confusion » (p. 25-26). La première partie de l’essai dresse un portrait quelque peu idéalisé de l’enfance de cette génération. Conçue avec amour par des parents ayant confiance en l’avenir, la génération lyrique n’a pas connu les drames des générations précédentes. Ses membres ont été insoumis bien plus que révoltés. « L’insoumission, en un mot, n’était pas d’abord une revendication de liberté mais bien le signe de cette liberté même » (p. 147). La contestation des années 1960 n’a pas été seulement un moyen collectif de promotion des intérêts d’un groupement, elle a été d’abord une fête, une agitation lyrique; elle a été moins une révolte que l’expression d’une assurance. L’auteur tranche ici avec quelques interprétations acceptées sur les idéologies étudiantes de l’époque. Habitée par le sentiment de la légèreté du monde propre à son époque — toujours Kundera — la jeune génération lyrique n’a pas eu à lutter contre la contrainte. Celle-ci s’était en quelque sorte évanouie d’elle-même dans une société mobile se modernisant et s’enrichissant rapidement. L’auteur montre bien ici la place unique de cette génération. Celles qui l’ont précédé ont fait face à des contraintes lourdes que n’ont pas connues les jeunes appartenant à la génération lyrique. Celle-ci n’a pas eu seulement devant elle un monde marqué par la légèreté; elle a affirmé avec force sa présence par le nombre, telle une grosse vague qui s’avance lourdement, bousculant tout. D’où trois traits que lui attribue Ricard : « foi en sa propre puissance, habitude de se reconnaître dans le groupe, affirmation narcissique de sa différence » (p. 161). La troisième partie de l’ouvrage — l’âge du réel — analyse la prise de contrôle de la société par la génération lyrique parvenue à l’âge adulte. Ici, l’auteur se fait plus cynique, plus mordant même, montrant comment cette génération s’est comportée en maître du monde, se donnant un État pour soutenir ses intérêts et le contestant, quelques années plus tard, toujours dans le même but. Le chapitre le plus important de l’ouvrage est peut-être celui sur les idéologies

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lyriques. Idéologies de la société, du moi, de la culture, sans oublier le féminisme, les discours élaborés par la génération lyrique sur elle-même et sur la société globale ont été marqués par l’absence d’originalité, le ton péremptoire, une espèce de terrorisme idéologique. Emportées dans une grande agitation, ces constructions du monde n’ont guère inventé mais elles ont beaucoup détruit. Seul point positif que l’auteur concède : le désir d’innover, surtout présent en littérature. Nous voyons bien aujourd’hui que tout cela n’était que des mots conclut Ricard, avec laconisme et un regard quelque peu désabusé. « Sous couvert de changer la société, la vie ou la culture, la subversion n’avait d’autre but en realité que de faire place nette, de disqualifier l’héritage des générations précédentes, afin que les nouveaux maîtres n’aient aucun compte à rendre ni aucune continuité à assumer » (p. 217). Ce chapitre sur les idéologies décevra sans doute le chercheur en analyse du discours parce qu’on n’y trouve pas d’étude serrée des différents corpus. Mais si on accepte de le lire comme la reconstitution d’un climat intellectuel, alors il prend toute sa force et sa pertinence. L’auteur suggère au passage l’existence d’une alliance objective entre la génération lyrique et les élements progressifs des générations aînées, avides de changement et de modernisation. L’hypothèse est à peine développée et elle mériterait sans doute d’être réexaminée de plus près. Il est difficile d’évaluer la portée de l’ouvrage de Ricard. Livre qui se situe à la frontière de plusieurs genres, à la fois essai, analyse sociologique et portrait littéraire d’une génération et de ses rapports aux autres, il est en quelque sorte inclassable. Sa grande qualité est sans aucun doute de parvenir à traduire le climat social d’une époque. Cet essai, qui puise largement dans l’expérience québécoise, s’applique-t-il aussi aux autres sociétés comparables, notamment au reste du Canada, aux États-Unis et à la France? L’auteur tente de le faire croire et présente le cas québécois comme une sorte de cas typique susceptible d’être généralisé. Cette perspective est probablement l’aspect le plus contestable du livre, car il est loin d’être sûr que cette analyse puisse être aussi facilement étendue à d’autres sociétés. Deux raisons expliquent cette réserve. Tout d’abord, le baby-boom n’a pas eu la même importance en Europe qu’en Amérique et les traits typiques de la génération lyrique n’ont pas pu s’y déployer avec autant de facilité, ne serait-ce qu’à cause du poids des institutions et du contexte historique différent d’après-guerre. Aux États-Unis, la modernisation de la société s’était imposée bien avant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, alors qu’au Québec elle a en quelque sorte accompagné la vague du baby-boom de l’après-guerre. Ricard soutient que la géneration lyrique a trouvé, avec l’avènement de la modernité, le climat social et moral qui lui convenait parfaitement. Il a probablement raison dans le cas québécois. Mais cette correspondance semble plus difficilement observable ailleurs, d’où l’interrogation sur la portée de l’analyse.

La génération sans nom Après la description d’un monde marqué par la légèreté, voici celle d’un monde dénudé. Quel contraste entre la génération lyrique et la génération X, entre la vie des premiers-nés et la vie des derniers-nés du baby-boom, qui sont venus au monde à la fin des années 1950 et durant les années 1960. Generation X. Tales for an Acceleratcd Culture est le premier roman d’un jeune auteur originaire de la Colombie-Britannique qui peint la vie quotidienne de trois amis — Andy, Claire et Dag — et les histoires qu’ils se racontent. Ce roman est en fait le portrait sociologique de la génération qui a eu vingt ou trente ans et

203 IJCS / RIÉC des poussières au tournant des années 1990. On y découvre l’envers du décor planté par François Ricard : le monde n’apparaît plus ouvert, mais il est au contraire fermé, hermétique; l’élaboration de grands projets globaux a été remplacée par la navigation à vue; l’abondance a cédé la place à un certain épuisement. Après la génération lyrique, la génératron sans nom. « We have the same group over here and its just as large, but it doesn’t have a name — an X generation — purposefully hiding itself » (p. 56). Andy, Dag et Claire sont suréduqués et sous-employés, isolés les uns des autres malgré l’amitié qui les lie, cherchant désespérément à tomber en amour. Ils regardent le monde avec cynisme. Il se contentent de petits boulots et de McJobs, d’abord parce que le marché ne peut pas le plus souvent leur offrir autre chose, mais aussi parce qu’eu-mêmes refusent d’accepter ce que les bons boulots ont à offrir. Occuper ces bons emplois signifierait souvent accepter d’arrêter de vivre à vingt-cinq ans. « Many want to work for IBM when their lives end at the age of twenty- five. (Excuse me, but can you tell me more about your pension plan?) » (p. 106). Coupland émaille son récit d’un lexique, sorte de clé de lecture de la situation de cette génération sans nom. Voici quelques exemples de définition. • Poor buoyancy : the realization that one was a better person when one had less money (p. 82). • Lessness: a philosophy whereby one reconciles oneself with diminishing expectations of material wealth (p. 54). • Boomer envy: Envy of material wealth and long-range material security accrued by older members of the baby-boom generation by virtue of fortunate births (p. 21). • Historical underclosing: to live in a period of time when nothing seems to happen (p. 7). Bien évidemment, ces définitions ont de faibles chances de se retrouver un jour dans de sérieuses encyclopédies de sociologie. Elles ont cependant l’intérêt d’appuyer une description vivante, bien écrite et avec beaucoup d’humour, d’un monde et d’une société dans lesquels les critères de classement et d’allocation des places ne sont pas seulement la classe sociale, l’ethnie, la langue ou le sexe, mais aussi la date de sa naissance et la génération à laquelle on appartient.

La jeunesse en mutation L’ouvrage de R. Bibby et de D. Posterski est d’une facture toute différente des deux précédents. Les auteurs analysent les résultats d’un sondage mené en 1992 auprès de 4 000 jeunes adolescents, sondage comparable à celui qu’ils avaient effectué en 1984 et dont les résultats avaient été présentés dans The Emerging Generation (1985). Ils disposent donc d’un point de comparaison dans le temps qui leur permet de tracer le portrait de deux générations différentes. Non seulement les jeunes des années 1990 s’opposent-ils aux adultes, mais encore s’opposent-ils aussi à la génération des jeunes qui les a immédiatement précédés. Les deux auteurs identifient cinq configurations de traits passés qui sont en mutation dans la génération des jeunes des années 1990 et cinq configurations de traits nouveaux qui leur paraissent en émergence.

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Premier trait en mutation, la valorisation des relations sociales semble quelque peu décliner en importance, même si celles-ci restent élevées. Cette observation est importante, car elle va à l’encontre de la thèse connue de Edward Shorter qui posait, dans son histoire de la famille, que les relations entre jeunes et parents étaient marquées, dans la société postmoderne, par l’avènement d’une sorte d’indifférence. Or, tel n’est pas encore le cas d’après les données des deux auteurs canadiens. Ceux-ci prennent cependant soin de souligner que leurs observations vont dans cette direction, qu’ils préfèrent identifier sous la tendance d’un individualisme accru de la vie canadienne. Bibby et Posterski remettent en question le fait que les valeurs centrées sur le moi et les valeurs matérialistes soient en régression. En fait, ils ont découvert plutôt le contraire d’après leurs données. Le mariage et la maternité/paternité restent importants pour les jeunes, mais ils s’inscrivent parmi un ensemble de choix différents, qui laissent place à une grande combinaison de possibilités. Les jeunes profitent aussi des acquis de la révolution sexuelle des années 1960. Ils remettent à plus tard le mariage, tout en étant sexuellement actifs plus jeunes. La vie religieuse de son côté a été l’objet d’une transformation paradoxale. Les auteurs notent à la fois un regain d’intérêt pour la spiritualité parallèlement à une désaffection plus marquée vis-à-vis les institutions religieuses. En fait, c’est moins la spiritualité au sens strict qui gagne du terrain qu’un certain ésotérisme, fortement influencé par les médias, et entre autres teinté par la pensée Nouvel Âge. La configuration des traits nouveaux ou en voie de s’accentuer révèle l’appartenance des jeunes à un monde élargi, aux horizons plus étendus. Tout d’abord, ceux-ci sont mieux informés que jamais et le champ de leurs connaissances est probablement plus étendu qu’il ne l’a jamais été, grâce aux progrès de la scolarisation, mais surtout grâce à l’omniprésence de la télévision, et en particulier de la télévision américaine. Celle-ci apparaît comme le filtre quasi-exclusif des images qui atteignent les jeunes, à l’exception des jeunes du Québec, moins consommateurs d’images américaines. Mieux informés, les jeunes sont-ils mieux formés? À cette question posée maintes fois ces dernières années et qui a donné lieu à bien des discours alarmistes sur le déclin de la formation fondamentale, les deux auteurs apportent une réponse qui va quelque peu à contre courant : les trois R (reading, arithmetic, writing) ne sont peut-être plus aussi essentiels dans le monde contemporain. De nos jours, même les professeurs de mathématiques ne font-ils pas leurs comptes personnels avec l’aide d’une calculatrice? En fait, c’est la réflexion qui semble faire défaut aux deux auteurs de l’ouvrage, c’est- à-dire la capacité de faire des choix dans la masse des informations disponibles. Ce quatrième R leur paraît ainsi devoir prédominer sur les trois autres. Second trait manquant : les jeunes voient des problèmes partout. L’environnement, la violence, la discrimination, sans oublier les questions personnelles (l’argent, l’école, le sexe) préoccupent les jeunes, sans aucun doute avec raison, mais ceux-ci sont enclins à voir tout ce qui se passe dans la société comme problématique. Ici encore, les médias ont joué un rôle clé dans cette construction du monde comme problème. Le troisième trait est peut-être l’un des plus marquants : les jeunes n’ont jamais eu autant de choix. Choix étendu et élargi en matière de consommation marchande, de modèles de vie, de carrières, de valeurs, de produits culturels. L’ouvrage reprend un thème favori de l’un des deux co-auteurs (Bibby) : le

205 IJCS / RIÉC monde s’offre aux jeunes comme une immense mosaïque. « We now have not only a cultural mosaic but also a moral mosaic, a meaning-system mosaic, a family-structure mosaic, and a sexual mosaic, to mention just a few. Pluralism has come to provide Canadian minds and Canadian institutions » (p. 100). R. Bibby avait déjà critiqué dans un autre ouvrage la politique canadienne de multiculturalisme; voilà maintenant qu’il étend cette critique à l’ensemble de la société. La possibilité de choisir dans tous les domaines est à la fois positive — l’espace des contraintes sociales recule — mais elle est aussi porteuse d’insécurité et elle peut même conduire à une certaine déconstruction sociale. Les jeunes sont davantage attachés aux valeurs de justice sociale et d’équité. Ils sont en fait une sorte de « Charter generation », élevée dans l’esprit du respect et de l’importance des droits individuels, ce qui est un aspect nouveau de la culture politique du Canada. Le racisme et le sexisme en particulier sont chez eux l’objet de vives critiques. Enfin, les attentes et les aspirations n’ont jamais été aussi élevées que dans le groupe des jeunes interrogés en 1992. C’est un fait connu que les aspirations croissent plus vite que les possibilités objectives qu’offrent la société. Ayant des attentes plus élevées, les jeunes d’aujourd’hui ont aussi à faire face à bien des difficultés qui les forceront peut-être à recevoir moins que les générations passées. D’où d’importantes désillusions qui les guettent au tournant de leur entrée dans la vie active. Ces tendances d’ensemble prennent des configurations quelque peu différentes dans deux sous-groupes : les jeunes du Québec et les jeunes femmes. Les auteurs reprennent la thèse que le Québec forme une société distincte par un certain nombre de traits. Les jeunes s’y marient moins, ils ont leurs enfants plus fréquemment en dehors du mariage, la religion à la carte y est plus marquée qu’ailleurs au Canada. Les jeunes du Québec valorisent aussi davantage la vie familiale, ils sont moins consommateurs de médias américains et ils ont moins voyagé ailleurs au Canada. L’on pourrait ainsi allonger la liste des traits distincts. Cette énumération d’aspects sur lesquels les jeunes du Québec se différencient des jeunes du reste du Canada ne va pas sans soulever un problème important, peu abordé dans le livre : suffit-il d’aligner ainsi des aspects différents pour conclure que le Québec est une société distincte? En fait, la distinction n’est-elle pas d’abord à rechercher dans la construction de soi qui s’oppose à un autrui significatif dont on cherche à se démarquer, bien plus que dans la recherche de caractéristiques typiques différentes? Les jeunes hommes et les jeunes femmes se différencient sur un grand nombre d’aspects. Les jeunes femmes valorisent davantage les relations humaines et elles se montrent plus préoccupées par la violence et l’insécurité que les jeunes hommes. L’aspiration à l’égalité est à toute fin pratique la même chez les deux sexes, même si certains stéréotypes persistent encore, notamment à propos de l’image que l’on se fait de la femme qui semble aux auteurs encore marquée par les représentations dominantes dans l’ensemble de la société, représentations qui jugent les femmes inférieures sur plusieurs plans. Cet aspect est sans doute trop rapidement esquissé dans l’ouvrage et il aurait gagné à être mieux analysé. La seconde partie du livre scrute le rôle des différentes institutions dans la vie des jeunes : la famille, le système d’éducation, les institutions religieuses, les medias. La référence au rôle des médias mérite qu’on s’y attarde davantage. Ici, il nous paraît nécessaire de revenir à l’analyse que Ricard propose dans son

206 Trois regards sur les générations ouvrage sur la génération lyrique. La télévision exerce une fascination naïve d’abord parce qu’elle est un instrument de communication pure. Elle accroche et montre, elle digère et simplifie. Le monde est découpé en clips qui sont autant d’instantanés sur le réel. Ricard évoque l’hypothèse de Enzensberger pour caractériser la place de la télévision : plus la télévision étend son empire, plus le sens, plus le besoin de sens diminue. Or les jeunes, peut-être plus que tout autre groupe ou toute autre génération, paraissent particulièrement marqués par la télevision. Celle-ci constitue non seulement un nouveau mode de socialisation qui vient en concurrence avec l’école ou la famille, mais encore elle paraît structurer leur façon de connaître et de percevoir le monde. L’exposition continue aux problèmes qu’elle met en scène, tant dans les dramatiques que dans les émissions d’information — rappelons-nous l’adage No news is good news — n’est sans doute pas étrangère au fait que la jeune génération ait une perception du monde marquée par l’étendue des problèmes. Bibby et Posterski insistent enfin sur un certain nombre de contradictions qui leur semblent caractériser la vie des jeunes. Ainsi, ils ont devant eux plus de choix à faire, mais les critères pour prendre des décisions sont devenus plus flous, notamment à cause du déclin de l’autorité institutionnelle. Autre exemple : les jeunes valorisent les relations sociales, mais parviennent plus difficilement à avoir de bonnes relations avec les adultes. Cet ouvrage dresse un portrait de la jeunesse canadienne bien construit et bien documenté. Des extraits d’entrevues menées auprès des jeunes complètent bien les analyses statistiques, qui restent cependant à un niveau assez sommaires. Lss diagnostics portés sur l’ensemble de la société canadienne, vue à travers sa jeunesse, restent malgré tout peu développés. L’individualisation accrue ou la remise en cause du multiculturalisme auraient mérité d’être plus développées. De même, les auteurs parlent de la culture canadienne sans trop définir ce qu’ils entendent par là. En d’autres termes, voilà un portrait réussi de la jeunesse canadienne des annéss 1990; reste à esquisser plus clairement comment celle-ci s’inscrit dans les traits du Canada en profonde mutation.

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Ces trois livres que nous venons de commenter sont bien sûr fort différents et ils appartiennent aussi à des genres littéraires bien démarqués. Mais du roman à l’essai à l’étude sociologique, un même constat ressort : l’appartenance à une génération ne peut plus être négligée dans l’analyse des phénomènes sociaux contemporains.

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