I’m married to a Quebecker, albeit an Anglo (but with a French surname—but, as his Ancestry DNA results revealed, no French blood, thank you, God). And he and I and my friends were all talking about that very thing the day after the murders:
What the hell is wrong with Quebec?
That is, on top of all the other stuff that’s already wrong with Quebec: the supremacist arrogance, the extortion—”stick French on everything and pay us trillions of dollars, or we’ll turn back into the Canadian IRA”—its “dark history of anti-Semitism, religious bigotry and pro-fascist sentiment,” as McCullough writes in his catalog of the not-so-Belle Province’s multitude of sins.
Which, in true dysfunctional-family form, no one is allowed to talk about.
Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!, Mordechai Richler’s 1992 lampoon of the province’s berserk anti-English language laws, was seriously compared to Mein Kampf, and its author—one of Montreal’s most famous sons—sniffily dismissed as not “a real Quebecker” (cough JEW! cough…).
