With Quebec talk-show hosts waxing indignant about Stéphane Dion's flubbed interview, Gilles Duceppe has stepped forward to defend a man sovereigntists have reviled for years, and will again on Wednesday — if not sooner. And no one does humiliation better than the Bloc leader.
According to M. Duceppe, francophone politicians suffer from a linguistic double standard in that “many English-speaking politicians have little or no ability to speak French, yet francophones are somehow always expected to be perfect.”
Tonight, as we listen to Jean Chrétien defend M. Dion, we'll be reminded that Mr. Chrétien's heavily-accented and imperfect English did not stop him from winning three consecutive majority governments — mostly thanks to voters outside Québec. Moreover, it's a bit rich for M. Duceppe to be complaining about YouTube videos at this point in the campaign, as William Johnson reminds us in today's Globe and Mail:
In Québec…the cuts in cultural grants have been presented as an attack on the province's very identity. The incredibly effective campaign has been symbolized by a spoof video in which popular songwriter Michel Rivard is turned down for a grant by ignorant anglophone panelists because his song La complainte du phoque en Alaska is interpreted as using a four-letter word.
Anglophobic, anti-Canadian, untrue. It has supplanted the issue of secession by one of cultural persecution, even genocide. It has saved the Bloc Québécois and sunk the Conservatives.
