Québec is Killing Me

Terry A. Crowley is an associate professor of history at the University
of Guelph and the author of Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality.

That the voices of youth anywhere, despite their creativity, are seldom
coherent is amply demonstrated in McGill University law student Helene
Jutras’s scathing indictment of Quebec culture and the
sovereigntists’ movement. Her work exudes a passionate individualism
at variance both with contemporary currents and with her own age group.
As such, it bears a slight resemblance to Quebec artist Paul-Йmile
Borduas’s 1948 manifesto Refus global, but it will not have a similar
impact to that historic affirmation of individual values as the
wellspring of creativity.

The book begins with two letters Jutras wrote to a Montreal newspaper.
In the middle section Jutras addresses her critics before she expounds
more generally on the state of Quebec and the world. She portrays
Québécois culture as something that refuses to grow as she has—from
sovereigntist to federalist—but her own identifications are never
reconciled with her resolutely individualistic position. While it is
easy to dismiss much of her plea as ruminations predicated on the
profound intellectual idealism of the young, many of the author’s
particular insights are sufficiently keen to make her work worth
reading.