Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!: Requiem for a Divided Country

Terry A. Crowley is an associate professor of history at the University
of Guelph.

There is no central theme or structure to Mordecai Richler’s explosive
meander among Canada’s current affairs, other than a long, woeful
lament for the passing of the days of the author’s youth. The country
was simpler then, its people nicer, and its citizens generally happier.
While nostalgia does not reign totally supreme in Richler’s
experience, remembrance of things past provides the ultimate support for
his biting but rose-colored perspective.

As part reminiscence, part travelogue, part journalism, and part
history, Richler’s requiem dissects the country’s pitiful divisions
and inability to resolve its constitutional problems. Much of his venom
is reserved for Quebec nationalists of the Parti Québécois variety,
who are portrayed sarcastically as people who conceive of themselves as
the anointed true strain, pur laine. The language laws that were created
to protect such self-deceptions are derided in telling, sometimes
moving, and frequently farcical detail.

As a Jew, Richler occupies a privileged third-party position between
the polarized “French” and “English” positions within the
province of Quebec. Over the past several decades, Quebec nationalists
have become particularly sensitive to the concerns of allophone groups
in an attempt to overcome the racism that animated their predecessors.
It is precisely here that Richler is weakest, and consequently most
vulnerable to rebuttal. While relations between Jews and francophone
nationalists have historically been tenuous, his attempt to tar his
adversaries with anti-Semitism by concentrating on Montreal historian
Lionel-Adolphe Groulx during the interwar years is a travesty.
Richler’s opinionated nostrums do great injustice to those Jews and
Quebec nationalists who have labored so strenuously to overcome the
abhorrent prejudices inherited from a previous era. His funeral Mass is
maddening, dangerous, and essential reading.