James Moore, Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages,
(Source: CBC.ca) Heritage Minister James Moore paid a visit to Q Tuesday morning to discuss arts funding and defend recent decisions by the Conservative government to deny grants to certain organizations.
A well-spoken Moore spoke with host Jian Ghomeshi for just over half an hour – slightly longer than scheduled – and touched on the current cultural climate in Canada.
“Culture in Canada is so widespread, so diverse, so impressive … One of the things we do best in Canada is intellectual property, that’s to say arts, culture, movies, television,” he raved.
The interview later turned to indie theatre festival SummerWorks, who lost federal funding, in part some speculate because of its decision to put on a play about a Toronto 18 member.
Moore said the decision was not in response to the controversy generated by that particular play but rather that money had gone to other worthy organizations.
He invited SummerWorks to apply next year.
Moore went on to address the CBC’s funding, saying that while there will be no privatization of the public broadcaster anytime soon, he expects all corporations to trim costs.
The Rabble and the Haunted were Montreal’s two coolest anglo bands in the second half of the 1960s. If the Haunted were closer to the raw, blues-based sound and bad-boy image of the Yardbirds or the early Rolling Stones, the Rabble were farther out in terms of both music and look. They were, more or less, our answer to Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. Oddly enough, though, frontman Pimm and lead guitarist Mike Harris wrote some of the catchiest hooks this side of the Beatles.
[...] “A lot of the stuff that happened here was encapsulated here,” Pimm said. “We heard about the Staccatos from Ottawa and the Ugly Ducklings from Toronto, but they never heard of us. It just didn’t work both ways. Even so, Quebec was a neat place to be. The audiences were great and they welcomed original stuff. They were excited about the music. But you were kind of trapped in Quebec unless you really started to travel around and get promoted somewhere else. A lot of memories stayed in Quebec. Good memories. A lot of great bands came out of here, but it just didn’t really have a chance somehow.
“Part of it may be that English Canada wasn’t that interested in this province,” Pimm continued. “Maybe they were a little lost about the two languages going on.” Although the Rabble recorded in English, he pointed out, much of the group’s audience was francophone.
[...] “Way before the Rabble, I wanted to be a professional musician. I didn’t give a damn about stardom or notoriety or being invited to a party because I was in this band. So I moved to Toronto, where there were a lot more choices at the time.”
Just tripped across an excellent Fagstein blog post from last month breaking down the heightened response to Epic Meal Time’s appearance on Tout le monde en parle (scroll to bottom for video of the show). The West Islanders conducted the interview in English and response was swift. Even though this is an old story, we thought the Fagstein analysis was worth sharing. Click the title for the complete article, which includes highlights of the flood of Twitter response, video responses from Youtube, and discussion of education policies, anglo guilt, entre autres… Definitely worth a read.
I put in a request with Epic Meal Time’s agent (yes, they have one), but have heard nothing yet. For the sake of argument, let’s assume they’re like me and many others from the West Island and that they went to English public school. Let’s also assume they know some French but not enough to have an in-depth conversation.
It makes me wonder if I would have been judged so harshly if I had been on the Plateau of this show, and with a mix of nervousness and a desire to be clear I had asked that the interview be done in English. My conversational French is okay, but my grammar is awful. There’s a reason I don’t blog in French often. I have too much respect for the language to expose people to my destruction of it.
That in mind, it seems perfectly understandable that two guys from the West Island who make Internet videos aren’t the best French speakers and prefer to express themselves in the language they’re most comfortable in.
And yet, it bothered me.
It wasn’t so much that they were talking in English. But they had earpieces during the interview, which means they needed the questions to be translated. That’s kind of a depressing statement about the state of French-language education in English schools in Quebec (again, assuming that’s how they were educated).
But even that didn’t bug me as much as this: They didn’t even try.
One thing I’ve learned about Quebec’s French language protectors (at least the reasonable moderate ones) is that they appreciate effort. It’s the thought that counts.
When Brian Gionta introduced the Canadiens at the beginning of the season in quite possibly the most atrocious French anyone has ever heard this side of an Alberta public school, the fans appreciated it. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t pronounce the numbers right or that he called Maxim Lapierre “Maxim Laperrière”. He acknowledged that French is the language spoken here and he wanted to make an effort, if only a tiny one, to speak to them in that language.
But Morenstein and Toth couldn’t manage even a “bonsoir” or a “merci”, perhaps because they were playing their tough-guy characters, or perhaps because they just didn’t care and had no respect for the show, the host or the audience they were addressing.
Epic Meal Time's Harley Morenstein and Sterling Toth on Tout le monde en parle (photo: Karine Dufour for Radio-Canada)
The language of poutine
It’s funny because Epic Meal Time has probably been one of the best ambassadors for Quebec cuisine of the past decade. Just two days before taping TLMEP, they released this video of them heading into the woods and preparing a meal that included tourtière and tire sur la neige (words that Morenstein utters in slightly accented but perfectly understandable French).
One of their earliest videos was of the Angry French Canadian, a “meal” that included poutine, steamés and maple syrup on a baguette.
Portrait, qui date de 1786, d'une femme haïtienne longtemps considérée comme l'esclave de l'artiste François Malépart de Beaucourt (1740-1794) en sol québécois. PHOTO: FOURNIE PAR LE MUSÉE MCCORD
Le Musée McCord a 90 ans cette année. Pour souligner l’événement, le musée d’histoire de la rue Sherbrooke Ouest a choisi, dans le million et demi d’artefacts que contiennent ses fabuleuses collections, 90 objets qui racontent autant d’histoires, et encore plus.
Le choix des objets exposés au Musée McCord n’a pas été fait au hasard. Le musée a en effet demandé aux six conservateurs des différentes collections de choisir 15 artefacts chacun. On sentait bien lors de la visite de presse cette semaine que chaque conservateur aurait aimé en présenter au moins le double, et même beaucoup plus.
Nous avons fait le tour de l’exposition en compagnie de l’un d’eux, le responsable des archives, François Cartier. Les histoires que nous racontons ici sont surtout les siennes.
M. Davis Ross McCord, avocat de Montréal dans les années 1880, était un grand collectionneur passionné d’histoire. Celle des autochtones, celle des Français qui ont perdu la guerre et des Anglais qui l’ont gagnée en 1760. On retrouve donc, dans une vitrine à l’entrée de l’exposition, trois artefacts représentatifs: un petit panier perlé, un document signé par Frontenac en 1690 et… une mèche de cheveux de Wolfe conservée dans un médaillon.
There’s a genuine student theatre freebie happening at Centaur Theatre on Tuesday night. That’s when the National Theatre School’s Revealing Talent Tour, which is playing five cities across Canada, will be making its Montreal pit stop. This 25-minute collage of audition pieces is performed by the current graduating class, under the direction of Jonathan Goad, Brendan Healy and/or Sherrie Bie. No charge, and no reservations necessary.
Anyone who took in the National Theatre School’s amazing Greek tragedy kAdmOs – Damned Be the Hands That Did This Thing, directed by Yael Farber, will be eagerly anticipating their next English production: Arctic Ocean, by student playwright Jill Connell, directed by Denise Clarke.
Quebe Community Groups Network president Linda Leith appeared on CBC this morning to discuss a report about Quebec’s Anglophone community, released yesterday by the Senate Standing Committee on Official Languages.
“We never really counted, nor did we ever claim it was perfectly 50-50. But you know what? Anglophones who see the film comment on how much French there is in it. And francophones comment on how much English there is.”
(For the record, the original screenplay was written entirely in English, with Galluccio then choosing several scenes throughout that would be translated into French.)
Having broken the 100-responders mark, we thought you might like to see what trends are emerging in our survey of artists and cultural workers working in English in Quebec. Click here to see what we’ve learned so far.
If you haven’t already, please take ten minutes to take part in the survey yourself (I did it in 7). Your responses will help ELAN to better understand your professional life and better tailor our services to shared needs.
And, if you’d like to go the extra mile tell your friends and colleagues to visit our results page and encourage them to fill out the survey too!
We’ve been getting good response rates from the regions.
Would love to hear more from students and emerging professionals.
Your time, expertise and assistance are most appreciated,
Geoff Agombar
Office Manager
Des Anglos, bien sûr. Surtout. Mais qui ont, je le répète, choisi Montréal pour créer. Pour créer en anglais. Bien sûr, j’aimerais qu’ils puissent converser en français. Ça les rendrait encore plus glorieux.
Last week at Montreal’s Concordia University, a seminar described as the first of its kind gathered academics, teachers and community leaders to address the question, “What place should anglophones have in Quebec’s collective narrative?”
“We never really counted, nor did we ever claim it was perfectly 50-50. But you know what? Anglophones who see the film comment on how much French there is in it. And francophones comment on how much English there is.”
