Quebec + Parliament = RAGE
The cover on the right was the latest cover of Mclean's Magazine, and it caused something of a stir in Quebec. Bloc Québécois MP Pierre Paquette put forth a motion in parliament to denounce this story, which was passed by a majority vote. Parliament expressed with one voice "its profound sadness at the prejudice displayed and the stereotypes employed by Maclean’s magazine to denigrate the Quebec nation, its history and its institutions."
Okay, first aside here: fuck you, parliament. Do not "denounce" articles in the national media because they piss some of you off. In May 2008, when Maclean’s defined British Columbia as "a world crime superpower", the House of Commons did not express "profound sadness" at that cover story (the BC MP's response was to make himself available to discuss the fact that BC might have a crime problem, which to my thinking is a much better reaction than the Quebec MP's YOU FILTHY LIARS approach). Spend my tax dollars elsewhere, fuck you very much.
At the exact same time that this was happening, the French equivalent of McLean's, L'Actualité, ran it's cover story on the Front de Liberation du Québec (FLQ) and the 40th Anniversary of the October Crisis. For those not in the know, the FLQ were Canada's very own terrorist outfit who between 1963 and 1970 committed over 200 violent crimes (bombings, bank holdups, kidnappings) in which several dozen people were injured and at least five innocent people were killed. British trade commissioner James Cross was kidnapped, and Qubece labour minister Pierre Laporte was kidnapped, killed, and left inthe trunk of a car. The FLQ, as their name suggests, wanted "liberation" for Quebec. Separatist activists and extremists.
The cover story title translates as "The FLQ: Who Sacrificed Pierre Laporte?" The article suggests that Laporte was "accidentally" killed by young, overeager separatist volunteers. It suggests that he wasn't quite dead when the FLQ abandoned him for police to find (even though their communique announced they had "executed" him), so the Quebec police are at least partially to blame for his death by not responding fast enough to the tip. It also makes references to rumours that suggest that it was the fault of Laporte himself: he had been strangled only after seriously wounding himself when he shattered a window in an attempt to escape, to call for help or to kill himself with the broken glass.
There are two other articles in the magazine dealing with the FLQ. One is about Mario Bachand, the FLQ operative imprisoned for four-and-a-half-years for bomb attacks, detailing the RCMP's involvement in his mysterious death. The article about Bachand is called "The Last FLQ Victim". The other article is about five FLQ supporters and their 1971 trial, and is called "Five Strong Heads and a Judge".
So, second aside, then: I breathlessly await all of parliament rising up and denouncing this horrific rewriting of one of our darker periods of recent history.
Third aside: Of course they won't. We fucking roll over any time Quebec cries foul and we say and do nothing when this kind of bullshit spews out of La Belle Province. I am not lumping Quebecors in general in with this tirade; I have read some perfectly lovely rants online from some Quebecois expressing dismay and outrage at the recent shenanigans in parliament. But I am sick to fucking death of Quebec being able to call the shots like this, and the utter, unmitigated two-faced hypocrisy of demanding an apology on the one hand while finding the other hand perfectly acceptable.
More than anything, I weep for poor Pierre Laporte, strangled to death and left in the trunk of a car for the crime of doing his job, and now having his murder (because he was fucking murdered) sloughed off as, I don't know, youthful indescretion.
I have no good words to sum this up. Here: ANGER. SADNESS. And again, fuck you, parliament.