W
When you approach Quebec City from the west, you might think that you’re visiting any other city in North America. A few concrete towers rise from the valley as you come down the heights of the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, as if the city wanted to show off its Americanness. The eastern approach tells another story. The road is narrower there, cramped between the Beaupré cliff and the St. Lawrence River. At a turn of the road, the river widens and you suddenly see a citadel guarding the door into Canada’s interior. From this angle, Quebec City, with its black, silver, and red roofs, looks much more like St-Malo in Brittany than St. Louis, Missouri.
These two perspectives communicate a stark truth: We Quebecers don’t share the same cultural content with Canada. Or the content we share is not Canadian but American and “Globish.” The Canadian artists we know, for instance, we know through America. The only Quebec artists Canadians know have already been filtered through the American prism (think Celine Dion), and they are familiar only with their English-language work.
We’re not even on the same cultural continent. Quebec’s cultural universe certainly orbits America’s, but its content is closer to the French-speaking world than English Canada. A successful Quebec artist, like Loud, a Montreal-based rap singer, will sell out the Olympia in Paris long before he’ll try his luck in Toronto.
The main obstacle to a shared culture is, of course, language. But even though language makes the content of the culture differ, Canada and Quebec share an analogous experience: the risk of being absorbed by the neighbouring cultural behemoth gives each a deep sense of uncertainty about the future.
Remembering and Forgetting
Is there a shared Canadian culture? Canada is a big country, and Anglo-Canadians must entertain the question of whether the ties that bind Halifax to Vancouver are stronger than those that tie them to Los Angeles or Boston, or perhaps even Liverpool.
But what has Montreal to do with Toronto?
The nineteenth-century historian Ernest Renan noted that one of the essential traits of a common national identity is that “its individuals have a lot in common, and also that they have forgotten many things.” He called on the duty of every French citizen, for example, to forget violent episodes of unification, like the Saint-Barthélemy massacre of the French Protestant minority. Canadian and Quebecer identities are likewise forged in a strange exercise of remembrance and forgetfulness.
Only when Quebec is forgotten or when what it remembers is ignored can you assume there is a common Canadian culture and adopt the deforming perspective that Quebec City is similar to any other North American city but just happens to speak French.
There is general agreement in Quebec that we are different from the rest of Canada. Quebec is a “distinct society,” a notion that Quebec wanted to see recognized in the Canadian Constitution. Quebec is also a nation. Even the most ardently federalist of Quebec’s political parties call themselves nationalists and have no qualms about affirming that the province has every right, if it wanted, to form a distinct nation-state. To quote Robert Bourassa, the staunchly federalist premier of Quebec: “English Canada must understand, very clearly, that whatever is said, whatever is done, Quebec is, today and forever, a distinct society, free and able to assume its own destiny and development.”
While North American politics has been dominated by culture wars over social and economic issues, Quebec’s has been dominated by a different culture war, between those who want to continue to live in the Canadian Federation and those who want to see Quebec’s future as an independent nation-state. Our politics have been dominated, then, not by the Right and the Left but by the Sovereignist and the Federalist, which are difficult to distinguish on their economic platforms. The political question of independence is not whether Quebecers feel more part of the Canadian or Quebec culture but whether the Quebec nation could better thrive within the Canadian Federation or outside it.
While Quebecers’ attitudes toward the Canadian state range from a strong desire to leave to an unflinching loyalty to it and the Crown, their attitude toward Canadian culture is different. That attitude is mostly one of indifference, or even doubt that there is such a thing as a Canadian culture. For most Quebecers, Canadian culture is simply part of larger Anglo-American culture. The uniquely Canadian element of it is difficult to distinguish.
Quebecers, for example, were probably no more affected by the Tragically Hip’s Gord Downie’s death than an Albertan was by Quebec singer Karl Tremblay’s. In Quebec, Tremblay’s death was announced on the front page of every newspaper and met with mourning across the province. Can you talk seriously about a shared culture when the death of an icon is met with complete indifference by the other part of the country? Can we talk about a shared culture when most people in the rest of the country don’t even know who Karl Tremblay is?
The untimely death of Prince, however, was, I believe, shared equally across the country. The culture we do share is more often the creation of Hollywood studios than of, say, the National Film Board of Canada. Is a movie like Blade Runner 2049, which stars Ryan Gosling, who grew up in Cornwall, Ontario, and was directed by Denis Villeneuve, who was raised a few kilometres downriver in Bécancour, a shared Canadian cultural artifact? Or is it a participation in American cultural hegemony?
The existential question at the heart of Canadian identity is this: What makes the country distinct from its American neighbour?
I do not wish to leave this as an open question: The culture shared between Quebec and Canada is not Canadian. It is American.
This poses the existential question at the heart of Canadian identity: What makes the country distinct from its American neighbour? Because Quebec’s French culture represents something distinctly Canadian, Canada has a political interest in imagining Quebec as part of its culture. Canadian political philosophers (such as George Grant in Lament for a Nation) have often underlined Quebecer culture as an important justification for Canada’s political and cultural independence from the United States. Canada needs Quebec, at least unconsciously, to assert a common distinction from its louder, more powerful neighbour to the south. To be Canadian is, at its heart, to be Canadien.
But there is a complicating factor. While Canadian identity must incorporate Quebec’s distinctiveness into itself to assert its independence from American identity, for the sake of national unity it must downplay these same distinctions.
A true hybrid Canadian culture would consist of real, vibrant, entwined French and English communities across the country (which used to exist but today barely exist outside Montreal). Canada is made up of what we call two solitudes: a marriage in which the husband and wife do not speak to each other, let alone sleep in the same bed, let alone make children together. An arrangement made more challenging by the third party in the relationship. It’s like two lovers trying to have a conversation at a punk rock show while America plays on the loudspeakers.
Je Me Souviens: The Art of Remembering
Perhaps the way to cultivate an authentic community is to partake together not in Renan’s forgetting but in the exercise of remembering. So allow me to share the things we remember in Quebec that English Canadians may have forgotten and that Americans might not even remember having forgotten—things that are part of the national narrative we hear both in school and around the table in our homes.
Within the Parliament building in Quebec City lies the Delphic-like inscription that has become Quebec’s motto: Je me souviens, “I remember.” It is commonly believed that the motto refers to the stanza of a poem affirming Né sous le lys j’ai grandi dans les roses, “Born under the lily, I’m growing among roses.”
This floral image is Quebec’s story: a tumultuous infancy in which a child is taken from its birth parents and placed under the care and supervision of another family, of another culture. Sadly, it is a scene too common in Canada’s colonial history.
Quebecers remember being “born under the lily” very fondly. The foundational myth of New France is a world of its own. In this narrative, which we learned in school and through the writings of many passionate popular historians such as Serge Bouchard recently or Catholic historian-friars such as Lionel Groulx, the French regime is seen in contrast to the foundational myth of the English pilgrims. While the pilgrims came to establish a new Jerusalem of religious freedom in America, the French colonial narrative is one of trade and evangelism.
While France was being torn apart by religious war, New France would be decidedly Catholic: Protestants were allowed to visit but had to convert to be allowed to settle. Counter-Reformation zeal was a defining force in the development of the colony. The natives who were baptized were given French names and from then on considered French subjects.
The settlement of Montreal was explicitly designed to evangelize the natives of the area, all the way up to the Great Lakes region. (In French Canada, “up” and “down” refer to the current of the rivers. This usage dates to the colonial era, when the Great Lakes were called les pays d’en haut, “the highlands.” From Montreal, one would go down to Quebec City but go up to Toronto or Ottawa.) Also in contrast to the English colonies, the idea of the frontier was not really present in the historical narrative. As soon as they established themselves in the St. Lawrence valley, the French would explore large areas but leave little permanent presence.
The frontier was not a line but a porous gradient. The local authorities often complained that the settlers they brought from France at a high price had the tendency to leave their lands and go live with the natives out west. The stories and journals of those who lived among the natives and learned their ways and language tell of fascination and encounter. Some works, like that of the Baron de Lahontan, show that Frenchmen enjoyed having long debates with the natives and were willing to see their own ways and perspectives challenged. Aside from the early days of Montreal, you don’t feel the clear distinctions between the “whites” and the “Indians,” the “civilization” and the “wilderness,” that you see in Hollywood westerns.
The first hundred years or so of the colony of New France were marked by an existential battle of the French and their native allies against the Iroquois confederation and their European allies (first the Dutch of New Amsterdam, then the English). The great peace of Montreal, reached in 1701 through long diplomatic efforts, established peace between the tribes and the French. This opened the entire heart of the continent for trade, from Quebec City to New Orleans. French culture seeped and mixed and coloured the heart of America through the process of métissage, of weaving together different people.
The national narrative is not one of a “conquest” of the West; it is first one of the creation of a new Canadien race of mixed French and Native stock, steeped in the rigours and spaciousness of the American continent. This term, Canadien, was the preferred way my people used to refer to themselves, in contrast to both English and French people, up until the 1960s. Conquest, in the mind of Quebecers, always refers to something that happened to us, not that we imposed on others.
Growing Among Roses
The conquest is our national tragedy, our fall of Jerusalem and exile. The British took Quebec City in 1759, but the treaty of Paris, at the end of the Seven Years’ War (what the Americans call the French and Indian War), confirmed that France abandoned Canada to Britain, preferring to keep its profitable sugar plantations in the Caribbean. Most of the elites were evacuated to France, leaving behind what wasn’t practical to move: the cattle and an uneducated peasant class of about seventy thousand people—our parents. The French elite was quickly replaced by a foreign, English-speaking ruling class that, in a social structure not unusual in history, dominates the economic and political spheres to this day.
Montreal, in a sense, became an Alexandria on the St. Lawrence.
We left the lily for the roses just at the time when British North America was about to fracture and its French subjects were played as a pawn in the great game of emerging empires. The British operated under different cultural policies through the years: assimilation, then compromise, then assimilation, then compromise, and so on. After the conquest, assimilation was the goal, but the rising tensions in the thirteen colonies forced Britain to adopt a more compromising attitude.
The Quebec Act of 1774, which promised Quebecers a place to flourish that included an enormous territory around the Great Lakes up to the Ohio River and offered many concessions in the matters of religion and administration, sealed the loyalty of Quebecers to the British Crown, especially that of the Catholic clergy. The rebels’ invitation to make Quebec the fourteenth state was left unanswered.
Conquest, in the mind of Quebecers, always refers to something that happened to us, not that we imposed on others.
But this loyalty to the British Crown cost Quebec dearly. The Paris treaty of 1783 amputated Quebec from the territory south of the Great Lakes. In 1791, the province was broken in two: the western half, called Upper Canada, was given to displaced American loyalists, while the eastern part would be named Lower Canada. These two now-distinct colonies would soon seek more political autonomy from Britain. In the 1830s, various rebellions tried to establish republics in both Lower and Upper Canada but were violently repressed.
Following the recommendation of Lord Durham, who was sent to investigate the causes of the rebellions, Britain once again changed its policy toward the growing French population to one of assimilation. Lower Canada was forced into a proto-federation with a debt-laden, underpopulated Upper Canada with Britain ensuring French political under-representation by giving each province the same number of representatives.
This gave rise to a new dynamic common around the British Empire, in which the more moderate policies of London were often opposed by the more radical settlers. In one such instance, Canadian Parliament, then in Montreal, was burned by an English mob following an act seeking to compensate the people affected by the previous rebellions.
The Act of Confederation of 1867, which established the Dominion of Canada, was supposed to create a more stable political order. Many in the French Canadian elite were convinced by the narrative of a state made of two “founding nations.” Now that they were less numerous than English Canada, the equal representation system was abolished.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a concerted assimilation policy toward French populations outside Quebec, and in every region except Quebec, French instruction was systematically restricted. Even in Quebec, pictures from the early twentieth century show that English was almost exclusively displayed and spoken in public, even in rural areas. I remember my grandmother telling me that while she was shopping at a department store in Montreal in the forties, a French-speaking friend of hers working there spoke to her in English (which she didn’t understand), explaining later that it was store policy and that she could lose her job for speaking French.
The sixties saw the rise of a nationalist movement, a trend common in many parts of the world in this period of decolonization. Some radical groups even planted bombs and kidnapped a provincial minister, which led to the October Crisis of 1970. At that time, the War Measures Act was invoked, leaving memories in my parents’ generation of mass arrests and tanks in the streets. This led to the election in 1976 of the independentist Parti Québécois. In 1980, a first referendum on independence was defeated, which pushed the Parti Québécois leader toward a new approach called le beau risque (the beautiful risk): instead of seeking independence, Quebec would try to negotiate multiple constitutional demands.
This was an auspicious time to do so, as Ottawa was in the process of repatriating the Constitution from Britain. A long process of negotiations between the provincial governments and the federal government took place, but a deal was reached in the middle of the night in the absence of the Quebec delegation. Not only were Quebec’s constitutional demands ignored, but its own assent to a new constitutional order was considered unnecessary.
The conservative government of Brian Mulroney made two attempts to mend this process, but both failed. The 1987 Meech Lake Accord was derailed by the provinces of Newfoundland and Manitoba in part because the recognition of Quebec as a distinct society was deemed too contentious. Another round of constitutional negotiations, the Charlottetown Accord, was defeated by referendum in 1992.
In 1995 another referendum on independence was carried out in Quebec but was defeated by a very narrow margin (50.58 percent No, 49.42 percent Yes). The independence party called foul play after it was discovered that campaign financing rules were not respected by the federalist camp, and that Ottawa fast-tracked the naturalization process of thousands of immigrants in the weeks prior to the vote.
These events created major political unease in the Quebec I grew up in. Immigration was seen more and more as a ploy by Ottawa to dispossess Quebecers of their right to self-determination. Here, too, the attraction of American culture played a role, aligning most immigrants closer to the political interests of English Canada.
Since 1995 Quebec has been in a kind of political limbo. The question of independence has slowly taken less and less space, while participation within Canada is still uneasy. All the while, English Canada seems oddly comfortable with the fact that one of its founding peoples has still not signed the Constitution. In fact, most people under forty, or immigrants who arrived after 1995, are oblivious to the whole constitutional struggles of the nineties. Today, no party, either federal or provincial, proposes to reopen the constitutional debate.
So when I’m asked, “Is there a common Canadian culture?” I cannot help but remember the fact that the recognition of Quebec as a distinct society was unacceptable to English Canada. I remember the restrictions on French education which ensured that French culture operating beyond a purely folkloric function would barely survive outside Quebec. I remember the broken promises, the racism, and the denial of racism. I look into the future, and I’m not sure about my culture’s survival.
Even today, when I hear the laudable ways in which English Canada tries to remember things it tried to forget—the residential school system and the systematic destruction of First Nations culture—I cannot help but feel a little angry. What about us? When will you remember us? Do we have to become like the Indigenous for you to remember?
Is there a common Canadian culture? Only if you have taken up Renan’s call to forget many things.

Remembering, Repentance, Resurrection
Robert Charlebois’s song “L’indépendantriste,” released between the two referenda on independence, compares Quebec’s relation to Canada with that of a couple going through hard times. A marriage such as this one, made up of insecure people who are unsure of their identities, who have swept issues in their past under the rug, and who share a deep uncertainty about their future, will often suffer. While we may not share the same culture, we have lived through similar things, and that at least gives us enough mutual sympathy to not go for each other’s throats. But we are more like roommates than lovers.
Being a lover at heart, I find it difficult to tolerate this kind of resignation. I want to aim for something more, a better marriage.
Our future, like our past, is full of paradoxes. Canada’s political independence won’t ensure its cultural survival. Maybe our future depends on our capacity to speak to each other. Maybe it depends on dealing with our past, on repenting of our sins. Maybe there is a way toward some form of common understanding through remembering.
In the Old Testament, Israel is called to remember constantly: to remember God, his deeds, his laws, his covenants. Holidays serve to inculcate these memories in the next generation. Most interesting, though, is Israel’s capacity to remember its own sins. Perhaps we need to do so too.
I remember reading my own Bible as a teenager. Having graduated from my children’s Bible illustrating Scripture in 365 stories, I was shocked to experience how real the real Bible felt, how the heroes of the children’s Bible appeared there in their true human form. The Noah who saved all the animals by obeying God’s command to build an ark, for instance, was also a traumatized drunkard who cursed his own children and grandchildren. In this Bible, sins cling not only to individuals but also to nations.
We all have sinned. Quebec’s sins are many. I share Dalie Giroux’s assessment in L’Oeil du Maître that our current situation hangs on the failure of the nationalist movement to form a coalition with the First Nations at the time of the constitutional turmoil of the eighties. Quebec nationalists then preferred to dream of building their own colonial empire over Nouveau-Québec rather than to imagine a Canada in line with its own history of métissage with the First Nations.
Yet I take hope from the fact that Israel’s decision in exile to remember even the ugly parts of its history didn’t destroy its identity. In fact, the opposite happened. Even today, Israel is a testament to the power of remembrance to “resurrect” in a sense a polity that had disappeared for two thousand years and that now speaks a language that was once effectively extinct.
The authors of the New Testament and the early church that brought together the canon of the Bible followed the same pattern. The New Testament is replete with unflattering pictures of its main characters. The disciples are shown as ignorant, incredulous, and fearful. The early Christian communities are depicted as dysfunctional messes in need of both rebuke and encouragement from their leaders.
I believe that an honest though difficult act of remembrance is necessary. And I believe that the gospel is what gives us the capacity to do it. In the face of historical injustices, we can remember these words: Let him that is without sin cast the first stone. When historical sins are discovered, let’s imitate Zacchaeus: If I have wronged anybody, I will repay him fourfold.
In some initiatives taking place in Canada today, I see this deep gospel pattern at work. I can only rejoice at the attempts, even if they have often been insufficient and clumsy, to reconcile with the First Nations of this country.
They say forgive and forget. The gospel invites us to remember and forgive. This is true not just for individual relationships but also for relationships between peoples, between nations.
I believe that the Christian faith redeems nations by putting them in their right place. The prophet Isaiah says that “the nations are like a drop from a bucket and are accounted as the dust on the scales” (Isaiah 40:15). Nations are not to become idols. Yet at the end of history, the new Jerusalem will be filled with people of all tribes and nations. The wealth of nations will be brought there. Nations are an extension of the call to honour our father and mother, a real and valuable thing in the eyes of God, an expression of being human that is heard in eternity.
I don’t believe that on the other side of resurrection Christians will form nations. There is neither Jew nor Greek. Yet I do not believe that the resurrected will be wiped clean of their national identities, just as Pentecost didn’t make everyone speak Hebrew, or Greek, or Aramaic.
Heaven, I hope, will be a place where eternal praise will take place in French, English, and a thousand tongues to sing. Some that are, some that were, and some that will come to be.
The Christian hope is that praise will someday be the common culture we share.