"Should I Stay or Should I Go?"

It’s disheartening — frankly, incomprehensible — that a Montreal newspaper on life support would tacitly approve the recommendation that young anglophones leave Quebec.

While I don’t know with certainty what possessed The Gazette’s editor to approve an article literally advocating for the collapse of Quebec’s anglophone community — and, by extension, their future readers and advertisers — I suspect it is the kind of decision influenced by the blind pursuit of clickbait over real journalism.

The decision was, above all else, a slap in the face to the few remaining Gazette journalists trying to put out the last near-daily English-language newspaper in Quebec.

Moreover, let’s not kid ourselves: This wasn’t a provocative, boundary-pushing think piece. It was a plea to surrender. I’ll return to my criticism of The Gazette later in this article. First, the specifics of former school administrator Ronald G. Macfarlane’s arguments deserve closer scrutiny.

To begin with, Macfarlane argues that, for many years, anglo parents worked hard to ensure their children were educated such that they attained the level of French proficiency necessary to live and thrive in Quebec. He then states that the “level playing field” parents had worked so hard to attain was no longer possible, and that this is therefore sufficient cause for the young of Quebec’s anglo community to leave.

This is illogical. What about all that hard work undertaken by the anglo community to master the French language and better integrate into mainstream of Quebec society? This has been going on for 50 years! Now we’re all of a sudden going to give up? I would argue that Quebec’s anglophone community has done — and continues to do — what is necessary to bridge the linguistic and cultural divide. That most Quebec anglophones are bilingual and use French in their daily lives is proof of this.

Like most Québécois — irrespective of mother tongue — I am unhappy with the direction in which “Generalissimo Franco” Legault has taken this province. But, as with all politicians, his days in office are numbered. With approval ratings as low as his are right now, his political career likely won’t survive the next election. It’s possible he may take the CAQ along with him.

His policies are not carved in stone; the next government may change them. This has happened before.

I can absolutely guarantee this will not occur if anyone heeds Macfarlane’s suggestion to pack up and leave for any other part of this country. But consider this as well: Is our culture and identity interchangeable with any other part of the nation?

Is this not our home?

I would argue it absolutely is. The anglos ‘belong here’ and are as a historical reality no different than Quebec’s historical reality as the dominant French-speaking region of Canada. In the same way you can’t simply tell French-speaking Québécois they should move to France if they don’t like it here, you can’t tell anglos to move to Ontario for the same reason.

And what kind of message is Macfarlane sending the youth of this community by telling them to flee in the face of adversity anyway? Capitulation shouldn’t be in our vocabulary.

Macfarlane also places far too much stock in the decisions of Frank Lego’s CAQ party and insinuates that they’re genuinely reflective of the opinions of the majority of the population. Most politicians are idiots on a good day, and few of them have any genuine concern in representing anyone but their own myopic self-serving interests. Saying François Legault’s policy decisions represent the will and aspirations of the people of Quebec is like saying Netanyahu represents the interests of the global population of Jews. It’s completely absurd, and certainly not sufficient grounds to advocate for another mass anglo exodus.

Macfarlane further justifies his argument in saying that those who stay “will suffer the constant chipping away of rights.” Perhaps — but the community has a much better chance at retaining its rights if it encourages its youth to stay and fight the good fight.

Moreover, when dealing with xenophobic ethno-nationalists, Quebec’s anglos have common cause with the province’s Indigenous communities as much as recent immigrants finding it hard to integrate. A century ago, there was no ‘anglo’ community — there was English-speaking Quebec, and it was composed almost exclusively of people from the British Isles. Thirty years ago, when the last sovereignty referendum was contested, ‘anglo Quebec’ was championed by ‘the ethnic vote’—first and second second generation Italian, Greek and Eastern European Jewish Québécois. The strength of our community has been cosmopolitanism, adaptation and integration.

If there is a lesson for Quebec’s anglo youth, it is to find common cause with everyone the CAQ and other ethnonationalists make uncomfortable. L’union fait la force, after all. That I don’t need to translate that sentence for this audience more than makes my point.

On a final closing thought, there is no better representation for what The Gazette has become than platforming an octogenarian referencing 45-year-old song lyrics to tell young people they should give up and quit. I would argue it’s an apt representation for much of Montreal establishment anglophone media, which has made little effort to appeal to (or engage with) the younger cohorts of the community in decades.

It’s not my responsibility to advocate for a competitor, but The Gazette is an important part of anglo Québécois culture and a foundational element of the anglo Montreal community’s history. But that alone will not be enough to save it, particularly since the newspaper’s editorial direction over-focuses on platforming angryphone hysterics at the literal expense of sustaining an evolving community. Find me a Montreal anglophone and, more times than not, I’ll show you someone who has either cancelled their subscription or is seriously thinking about it.

I had the profound misfortune of flipping through an anemic copy of The Gazette recently. It was depressing. A full page advertisement on a faux front page. A masthead you can count on one hand. Pages of advertisements geared uniquely towards senior citizens. A National Post insert no one ever asked for, filled with vile culture war propaganda written by libertarian half-wits and Jordan Peterson fan boys. Whatever I was looking at, it wasn’t Montreal, and it certainly wasn’t Quebec’s anglophone community.

I can’t imagine most Gazette staff are happy with what has become of their paper, or what Postmedia has forced it to become. If this is the case, fight back. It’s far better to go out kicking and screaming than laying down. Perhaps the biggest story The Gazette could ever tell is how its parent company ran a successful 246-year-old institution into the ground.

That’s a far better story than, “would the last person out remember to turn off the lights.” ■

Read more editorials by Taylor C. Noakes.