Peter Black, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

peterblack@qctonline.com

Feb. 14, 2024

Where is a Marc-Antoine Dequoy when you need him? 

As folks may recall, Dequoy, a player on the Montreal Alouettes football team, unleashed an epic tirade on RDS after his team unexpectedly won the Grey Cup, blasting the Canadian Football League (CFL) powers-that-be for having scarcely a word of French at Tim Hortons Field in Hamilton, where the game was played in November. 

The same scenario basically repeated itself at the NHL All-Star festivities in Toronto recently, which, for the amount of Canada’s other official language to be found, could have been staged in any generic English-speaking city on the planet.

There was no potential Dequoy equivalent in attendance at the All-Star festivities, most likely because the roster did not include even one francophone player from Quebec. The only Quebec content was non-French-speaking Montreal Canadiens captain Nick Suzuki (from London, Ont.), who was there because all 32 NHL teams got to send a minimum of one player.

The snub – arguably on the same scale as Taylor Swift’s breezy obliviousness to Céline Dion at the Grammys – did not go unnoticed in Canada’s 80 per cent French mother-tongue jurisdiction. 

This comment about the unilingual English All-Star event popped up on my Facebook feed: “The RoC [Rest of Canada] does not have one gram of respect towards the French minority, and considering the Canadian content, it is just another sign that the RoC is rapidly becoming a USA clone. We who believe in a strong, bilingual Canada are not helped by this kind of parochial behaviour in Toronto, or by the NHL. I am disgusted.”

That was from an anglophone Quebecer.

Let us state, for the record, neither the National Hockey League nor Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment – 37.5 per cent owned by Montreal-based Bell Canada – are legally mandated to promote Canada’s bilingual status. 

That said, surely someone involved in organizing such an extravaganza in Toronto might have put up their hand and said, “Gosh, wouldn’t it be nice if the bilingual version of the national anthem could be sung, eh?” 

Nope, but organizers did manage to find a singer who draped herself in pro-Palestinian protest garb to warble the “Star-Spangled Banner” before the game. 

In more hard-core Quebec nationalist quarters, the All-Star game’s bilingual blindness was largely acknowledged as more of the same. The ever-quotable Journal de Québec/Montréal columnist Mathieu Bock-Coté chose to mock Quebec federalists for putting up with the rampant indifference to Quebec’s French fact.

“For them, it will always be better to negotiate down the defence of Quebec’s interests and reduce its identity than to mark a red line that must not be crossed, otherwise they would choose independence,” Bock-Coté wrote. “They prefer to see the Quebec people drown in English rather than break with federalism.”

A recent Leger poll shows support for sovereignty, despite the Parti Québécois’ recent rocket-riding under leader Paul St-Pierre-Plamondon, at 35 per cent of respondents, 21 points behind support for a united Canada. 

Whether or not a slight at the Grey Cup or NHL All-Star game or any number of compounding examples of disrespect for French – not to mention looming Supreme Court rulings on Quebec “identity” laws – will create what former premier Lucien Bouchard called “winning conditions” for a sovereignty referendum is an open question.

Bock-Coté, though, is more confident. He wrote: “Support for sovereignty is growing. Quebecers are coming back to life. And waking up. The next independence referendum appears on the horizon. The Oui camp has a good chance of winning. History is in progress. The independence of Quebec will be achieved.”

Maybe. One thing seems certain: Quebec independence likely would mean the end of a bilingual Canada from coast to coast to coast, as flawed as it is. And French would not only be scarce at the Grey Cup game, but pretty much everywhere outside the province.

As Dequoy said in nuancing his rant, his “emotions were high” because “I just felt disrespected for me and for my province and for my heritage.”

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