Marshall Mcluhan Curious Connection to Quebec
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Jonathan R. Slater 39 MARSHALL MCLUHAN’S CURIOUS CONNECTION TO QUEBEC Jonathan R. Slater SUNY Plattsburgh Abstract Marshall McLuhan writes that during the Quiet Revolution, Quebec Francophones leapfrogged from colonial times straight into the 20th century. Making such observations from the peaceful vantage point of Toronto, McLuhan was not unmoved by the abrasiveness surfacing in Quebec between French and English populations – a mutual alienation often referred to as “two solitudes,” coined from the title of Hugh MacLennan’s 1945 novel. Nonetheless, McLuhan may have played a role in stemming Quebec’s revolutionary aspirations, apparently having counselled Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau about effectively using mass media in the Canadian government’s dealings with the population of Quebec. Résumé Marshall McLuhan a écrit que, pendant la Révolution tranquille, les Québécois francophones sont passés directement de l’époque du colonialisme au 20e siècle. Même s’il a fait de telles observations à partir d’un paisible environnement torontois, McLuhan n’était pas pour autant indifférent à l’atmosphère abrasive qui faisait surface entre les populations francophones et anglophones, une aliénation mutuelle souvent nommée « les deux solitudes », du titre du roman de Hugh MacLennan paru en 1945. Néanmoins, il est possible que McLuhan ait joué un rôle dans les toutes nouvelles aspirations révolutionnaires du Québec, ayant apparemment conseillé le premier ministre Pierre Elliott Trudeau sur la façon dont le gouvernement canadien pouvait utiliser efficacement les médias de masse dans ses relations avec la population québécoise. 40 JOURNAL OF EASTERN TOWNSHIPS STUDIES The October Crisis The year 2015 marked the forty-fifth anniversary of the October Crisis, which began on 5 October 1970, when members of the Front de libération du Québec (the Québec Liberation Front), or FLQ, kidnapped James Cross, the British Trade Commissioner, from his home in Westmount, Quebec. Front members threatened to execute Cross if the federal and provincial governments did not meet the group’s demands, which included the public broadcast of a manifesto. The federal government partially gave in, allowing a Radio-Canada anchorman to read the FLQ’s manifesto over the air, and in so doing hoped the population of Quebec would see the FLQ for a bunch of terrorists. Ironically, much of the manifesto’s content struck a chord among many Québécois. Trade unions, student activists and members of the Church hierarchy, among others, openly sympathized with the tenor of the manifesto (Dagenais 1990). Shortly after the broadcast, the FLQ announced the postponement of Cross’s execution. Quebec’s Justice Minister, nevertheless, rejected all but one of the FLQ’s other demands – safe passage out of the country. Another FLQ cell then abducted Quebec Labour Minister and Deputy Premier Pierre Laporte from his home on Montréal’s South Shore, threatening him, too, with execution. On 12 October, the provincial government entered into negotiations with the FLQ, and on 13 October, the federal government deployed Canadian Forces troops to Ottawa in order to protect government buildings there (CBC News 2010). Troubled by the visible military presence in the capital, a CBC reporter asked Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau how far he was willing to go to thwart the designs of the FLQ. In a response that took on additional meaning in the television age, Trudeau flippantly retorted, “Just watch me” (CBC Digital Archives 2013). While baseball fans in Montréal were tuned to their radios and televisions for the final match of the World Series that pitted the Baltimore Orioles against the Cincinnati Reds (Baseball Almanac 2013), anywhere between 1000 and 7500 Canadian soldiers – depending on whose account one trusts – had taken up positions in and around Montréal as part of Operation Essay. Ostensibly at the invitation of Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa, the soldiers had been deployed in order to contain a perceived threat of insurrection against the elected government of Quebec. At 4 a.m. on Friday, 16 October, Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act, automatically suspending civil liberties throughout the country. Later that day, he announced his government’s decision on television, calling the FLQ “bandits” (CBC Digital Archives 2013). The Canadian government immediately Jonathan R. Slater 41 declared the clandestine FLQ an outlaw group, and provincial authorities began to jail people without a warrant, restrict the movements of ordinary citizens, and impose censorship on print and broadcast media. With the military keeping the peace on the streets, police concentrated on searching for Cross’ and Laporte’s captors. Before the sun rose, police had already conducted a sweeping search of homes and rounded up and imprisoned 250 people (Radio-Canada. ca 2010). Montrealers waking up that Friday morning were convinced the country was at war. On 17 October, Pierre Laporte was found dead, stuffed in the trunk of a car in a Montréal suburb. James Cross was freed after almost two months in captivity in exchange for safe passage to Cuba for a handful of FLQ members. Other cell members were caught and later convicted. Promising to keep the War Measures Act in force until April, Trudeau withdrew troops from Quebec in January 1971 (Radio-Canada.ca 2010). From Conquest to Compromise In order to fully grasp the circumstances that provoked the October Crisis, we must return to the British Conquest of North America in 1759–1760, when La Nouvelle France went from being a colony of France to a colony of the British Crown. At the Treaty of Paris in 1763, King Louis XV of France signed away Quebec as part of a broader deal to bring peace to the European courts embroiled in the Seven Years War (Bunker 2014, 7). British authorities, anxious not to encourage the gradual assimilation of the French population (Gossage and Little 2013, 60), imposed English Common Law on French Canada and restricted the participation of Catholics in public positions. Catholics were not allowed to hold elected office in an anticipated legislative assembly. Britain rescinded both constraints with the Quebec Act of 1774. The British did so in the expectation that they could secure the loyalty of the French settlers by introducing a degree of leniency into Britain’s rule over Quebec society (Bunker 2014, 275). French speakers were able to hold public office, although there would no longer be an elected legislative assembly. French civil law was allowed to take its place alongside English criminal law. Then, almost twenty years later, the British partitioned its Canadian outpost into the western, English-speaking Upper Canada, ruled by Common Law, and eastern, French-speaking Lower Canada, which retained French civil law. The Canadiens, although free to speak French and continue to practice Catholicism, were hardly a sovereign people. As Pierre Vallières, author of the 1968 manifesto Nègres blancs d’Amérique or “White Niggers of America,” describes them, they became a political colony 42 JOURNAL OF EASTERN TOWNSHIPS STUDIES whose economy always had been directed, controlled and organized by forces external to the needs of the population (Vallières 1994, 404). Vallière’s manifesto became a significant text in the FLQ’s propaganda arsenal. Nonetheless, as Gossage and Little observe, Quebec, “as the sole province in the federation with a French-speaking majority, could claim to speak for one of the country’s two founding peoples” (Gossage & Little 2013, 256). To maintain control, the Roman Catholic Church and the British overlords conspired to conceal the true source of French marginalization and to legitimate French inferiority by encouraging a nationalist ideology devoid of economic rhetoric. The Church in partnership with the ruling English intelligentsia infantilized the majority population and imposed on them their doctrines and educational methods. The Church mobilized the population around devout religious beliefs, an emphasis on the land, and an abdication from modernity. The Catholic clergy earnestly believed that by rallying the French-speaking population around religious and agrarian symbols, they could simultaneously foster francophone self-reliance and shield the English-speaking elite from any competitive threat the French inhabitants might pose. The historical chasm separating French and English in Quebec therefore emerges as a traumatic narrative of colonization and defeat followed by a two-hundred-year political and social compromise – what Maurice Charland describes as a drama of “subjugation, collective affirmation and survival” (Charland 1983, 251). This deeply rooted divide today is euphemistically referred to as “two solitudes” – a coinage derived from Canadian author Hugh MacLennan’s 1945 novel of the same name, which recounts the lives of a fictional, bicultural family in French Canada between the wars, contending with the injustices heaped upon them in English-speaking Montréal and by their parish priest in the provincial countryside. According to Charles Taylor, “the ways that the two groups envisage their predicament, their problems, and their common country are so different that it is hard to find a common language” (Taylor 1993, 24). The two solitudes, Taylor believes, “are like two photographs of the same object taken from such different points of view that they cannot be superimposed” (Taylor 1993, 24). Vallière’s racially tinged metaphor of white niggers reflected both the anglophone and francophone