Canadians (44 page)

Madeleine got her increase, but not much further notice. After she died in 1747 another century would pass until her story began to be told again and again, with new details added in. It was a time when it seemed the whole world was searching for heroic figures, and the colony, now British, was no different. Madeleine de Verchères answered the need perfectly.

Lord Grey, a great romantic, heard the story when he got to Canada, fell in love with it, and swiftly launched his long campaign to have a statue erected in her honour. In Coates's account, the new governor general dispatched an emissary to meet with Lomer Gouin, the premier of Quebec, and “fire Gouin with the desire to find such money as may be required to signify the great entrance to Canada by the erection on Verchères bluff of a figure which will tell the immigrant that the heroic virtues are the bedrock foundations of Canadian greatness.”

Canada's Joan of Arc would be everything, and more, that America's Liberty was. Madeleine, he said, would stand for “the highest ideals of citizenship.”

Grey failed to get the provincial government to cough up the required funds, but he did get the federal government to start the work with $25,000 seed money. Famous sculptor Louis-Philippe Hébert was given the commission and—after some admitted struggles to ensure the young girl remained true to her sex and did not become a cross-dresser— Hébert's masterpiece was unveiled in 1913.

The statue hasn't changed since, nor have many of the charming stone buildings of the pretty village of Verchères. But the province itself has changed profoundly since that day.

YOU DON'T NEED to go far to discover this. You merely have to strike up an idle conversation with the young woman planting tulips around the small park in which the statue of Madeleine de Verchères stands staring out defiantly over the choppy water.

Marie-Eve Lainesse, who grew up in Verchères, was twenty-five years old this fine spring day when I happened to stop by the statue. She was born the year of the first Quebec referendum on sovereignty: 59.5 percent voting to stick with Canada, 40.5 percent for going it on their own. She was roughly the age of Madeleine de Verchères when the heroine held the family fort during the much tighter second referendum in 1995: 50.56 percent voting no to sovereignty, 49.44 percent voting yes.

And now, as a young woman of voting age, there was already talk of a third referendum coming as a further possible fallout from the growing sponsorship scandal. Another, more certain response, of course, was the fall of the Liberal government and the collapse of its traditional Quebec base.

Marie-Eve Lainesse went to elementary and high school here, went off to Collège d'enseignement général et professionnel (CEGEP), studied landscaping, and landed a job working for the area parks. She has a wide circle of friends, is very sociable and, contrary to what the pollsters and pundits routinely say of her demographic, is deeply and profoundly passionate about politics. The Gomery inquiry had galvanized her generation.

“We're all upset,” she said as she brushed a smudge of planting soil off her cheek. “All very, very angry.” She and her friends, she told me,
watched the Gomery proceedings as closely as, in winter, they might watch the Montreal Canadiens play. They read the newspapers and talked endlessly about what it means for them.

And what it means, she believed on this fine spring day by the river, is an end to Canada, the last rites for Confederation.

“C'est finis,”
she said.
“Finis.”

MARIE-EVE LAINESSE knew people her age who, whenever that next election came, would vote for the Conservatives, even though she herself considered Conservative leader Stephen Harper to be merely “George Bush the Second.”

She predicted, with surprising accuracy, the coming Conservative blip in the province. When the election was finally called for the end of January 2006, the Conservatives would pick up ten seats in a province where only months earlier it was said they had no chance of even one.

The growing fury toward the Liberals, she claimed, was simple to understand. The sponsorship scandal had the rest of the country looking at Quebec as a province of “criminals and thieves.” This stereotype had all Quebeckers with their hand in the till, not just a handful of greedy advertising types in Montreal. It was just one more slight, she believed, to add to the ever-growing list that stretched from the hanging of Louis Riel to conscription, from the unnecessary arrests during the October Crisis of 1970 to the Night of the Long Knives that had duped the province on the Constitution, from the rebukes of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords to the sponsorship scandal.

She herself had given up hope for political solutions. The federal parties had all failed her generation, she said, including the Bloc Québécois, which had set out for Ottawa in 1993 with sovereignty association the stated goal and which had, in her opinion, slipped from its goal to its own form of establishment politics. What was the point of relying on the BQ, she asked, “when the rest of Canada does not trust it? Nobody speaks for us. Nobody.”

The only political sense she'd heard in recent weeks had come from, of all sources, Alfonso Gagliano, the former federal cabinet minister who'd
overseen the tainted sponsorship scheme. The prime minister and his inquiry, Gagliano had said on Radio-Canada, “is going to destroy the party and break up the country.” It might not happen immediately, the disgraced minister went on, “but I think at this stage the separation of Quebec from Canada is not stoppable. It's a question of time. It's going to happen.”

Marie-Eve Lainesse believed the same.
It's going to happen
. There would be another referendum, she was convinced, before she'd turn much older. Her own parents, who voted “no” in the last referendum, would change their minds in the next. Now they would vote “yes.”

Why?

“Gomery.”

And how will this referendum, the third one, play out?

Marie-Eve Lainesse stared out over the water, her glance remarkably similar to Madeleine de Verchères's faraway look behind her.

“Cinquante-quatre percent ‘oui,'”
she said.

The following morning, my own paper,
The Globe and Mail,
would produce with
Le Devoir
a far more scientific survey that would hold precisely the same result: 54 percent of Quebeckers would vote in favour of sovereignty. If, of course, a vote were held at that precise moment.

IF BRUCE HUTCHISON COULD admit to not understanding Toronto, I must confess the same personal shortcoming for Quebec. I am a small-town Ontario Anglo. I studied French in high school and even went off to a bilingual university, Laurentian in Sudbury, and took conversational French, including an “advanced” class. But I haven't the nerve to speak the second official language—except, of course, the moment I step outside of Canada. When I'm in parts of Quebec where the francophones are often unilingual, I can get by—but barely.

It is a common affliction—Hugh MacLennan, who lived and taught in Quebec most of his life, said his inability to speak French was “a constant shame to me, and I recognize it as the severest handicap in my entire life.” Personally, I plan to leave whatever is left of my mind to science so that they'll be able to determine what, exactly, is missing in the Canadian Anglo brain to induce such absurdity.

And yet, in other ways, I know Quebec fairly well. I've covered most federal elections since 1979, and each one has taken me much farther into Quebec than my usual quick forays into Montreal. I've also covered several of its provincial elections and—even if the copy might sometimes read like radio signals from outer space—I've talked to people across the province, from the Anglo enclaves of Montreal and the Eastern Townships to the sovereigntist
bluets
of the Saguenay region and the political sophisticates of Quebec City.

I've reported on a decade of hockey in the province, written about the Quebec Carnival, spent months with the Crees of Northern Quebec, been in the Oka standoff, covered the referenda, toured the province with the Spicer Commission, and holidayed in the Gatineau, in Quebec City, and in the Laurentians.

And yet I can't pretend to understand Quebec. The only comfort in this, thin as it is, is that I've never been fully convinced
anyone
does.

It does not take a great mind, however, to notice the delicacy of it all. If Confederation is a cat's cradle where every pulled string compels another string to tighten, Quebec is the scissors threatening from the table—a constant caution, even if never employed, that the game must be played with the utmost care.

I've never been quite sure where the
Je me souviens
of the Quebec licence plate comes from, but it seems to have taken on a sense that throughout the province everything will be remembered at once, as one single political psychic force. It makes Canada, such a polite country, reluctant to use the word “conquest” when referring to the British victory at Quebec City in 1759. Louis Riel, hanged for treason in 1885, may yet have a statue erected in his honour on Parliament Hill, one that might even go so far as to call him a Father of Confederation.

Hard to believe, at times, that back in the 1870s Montreal cigar manufacturer S. Davis & Sons issued a series of outlaw cards that included one of Riel. But that, of course, only underlines how differently he can be interpreted, largely depending on which official language is spoken.

Louis Riel was born in 1844 at the Red River Settlement near present-day Winnipeg. He studied for the priesthood in Montreal and then took
law, working at it briefly in the United States before returning to St-Boniface when he was twenty-four. The following year, 1869, Ottawa sent in surveyors to the district, confident that Canada's push to purchase Rupert's Land from the Hudson's Bay Company would go through with Great Britain's help.

The Métis of Red River—most of mixed French and Native heritage— had grown increasingly alarmed at the prospect of coming under Ottawa's control. They feared, justifiably, that more people and the reality of trains coming through the West would mean the end of the buffalo they hunted. They were further disturbed by aggressive early settlers arriving from Ontario on the understanding that Canada would be taking over and opening up these fertile prairies. These new arrivals were invariably Protestant Anglos and usually members of the Orange Lodge—meaning they had little time for the French-speaking Catholics along the river. The Métis organized, Riel emerged as a leader, they blocked the survey crews and, with relatively little effort, captured Fort Garry.

When a number of English-speaking settlers tried to mount a counter-rebellion they were rounded up and imprisoned. Two were sentenced to death, and one execution, of surveyor Thomas Scott, was carried out by firing squad on March 4, 1870.

Ottawa sent word that everything could be worked out. Promises were made concerning various rights the Métis were demanding and all seemed relatively in order—with the obvious exception of the fallout from the Scott execution. Ottawa wanted a quick and quiet solution to the problem. The Catholic Bishop of St-Boniface was dispatched to Red River with a federal proclamation of amnesty, the bishop as well as the Métis convinced it would cover all actions to that date, including the execution. The bishop persuaded Riel to release the few remaining prisoners and then to head for Ottawa for the final negotiations regarding the creation of the new province.

This outraged the Ontario Orange Lodge. Instead of punishment for Scott, its members cried, the Catholic Métis were being rewarded with provincial status. Manitoba would come into being on July 15, 1870, the French would have certain rights, including Catholic schools, and
aspecial land grant of 1,400,000 acres would go to the Métis. There was, however, no official mention of full amnesty. The Ontario Orangemen were demanding that justice be served.

Ottawa dispatched a military force under Colonel Garnet Wosleley to Red River that summer, and Riel, convinced it was coming for him, fled to the United States. Meanwhile, in Ontario, a reward of $5000 was offered for the arrest of Thomas Scott's “murderer,” widely taken to be Riel himself, though he wasn't even present at the execution.

So volatile was the situation—Ontario screaming for Riel's head, Quebec calling Riel a hero for defending language and faith—that Prime Minister Macdonald pleaded with Riel to remain in exile. Macdonald even secretly arranged to send Riel money if it would only keep him away. It was as if Macdonald instinctively knew what would happen if Riel came back.

Riel did not stay away, returning to the new province and even running for a federal seat, which he easily won. He reached the House of Commons but they threw him out when Mackenzie Bowell, future prime minister and an Orangeman, tabled a motion demanding his expulsion. Riel ran for office again, won again, but this time didn't even attempt to take his seat in Ottawa.

“Imagine,” George Bowering wrote in
Stone Country: An Unauthorized History of Canada,
“how the Central Canadians felt when their disruption in the West, Canada's most wanted outlaw, was sent by his people to Parliament.”

The Riel colleague who had actually ordered Scott's execution was arrested, charged, and found guilty. He, too, was condemned to death, only to have the sentence commuted to a short term in prison. It took until 1875 before Ottawa could get a motion through granting Riel his amnesty—but by then Riel had suffered a nervous breakdown, had spent time in an asylum, and was said to be often delusional. He called himself “David” now, and his calling, he told friends, was to establish a new form of North American Catholicism with its own pope.

Since part of the amnesty deal was that he leave Canada for at least five years, Riel returned to the States and even briefly became an American
citizen. But in 1884 he came back to Canada when a group of Métis in the Saskatchewan Valley begged him to come and help them fight for their rights, which they felt were being trampled by the flood of new settlers from the East and around the world.