​Sheila and I were at the Theatre Morin Heights play and, arriving early, we found a table right up-front – a table for four. Who would join us? We remarked that, while we knew a lot of people doing the organizing, there were few other familiar faces. Soon, though, we were joined by the two other members of the audience that we knew best, Shirley Adelson and Brenda Burridge. The play, Perfect Timing by Kristi Kane, was a romp, just entertainment, with nothing to think about after. Adding to the humour of the playwright’s craft, the play featured some local talent, retired or close to it, portraying much younger people in a comedy of romantic misunderstanding. There were two notable young actors too, portraying women in their late teens and early twenties. Both were naturals, but astonishingly, they were also portraying ages that were not their own: They were both 14. The story’s throw-away lines and the acting made it all work.
 
It is relaxing to go to a show for the pure entertainment of it, without any other agenda. Somehow, though, one always takes something away from such an event, and for us that day it was conversations during the intermission. Sheila got things going looking for Adelson family news. Sheila has known the Adelsons since her high school days. 
 
The conversation touched on our son’s return from England, where he had lived for 18 years, and some of his impressions. Shirley mentioned her arrival in Canada, also from England. Brenda knew Shirley had come from England, but Sheila was taken by surprise and asked her when she came.
 
“It was 1939 or 1940. I was nine years old and we came on a ship, part of a convoy, just after the declaration of war with Germany.” This was significant to me. I know people do not like to see themselves as a part of history, but I was suddenly listening with greater intensity. The ship, I learned, was filled with children and some parents, evacuated from Great Britain to Canada for their protection.
 
In September 1939, the Duchess of Atholl brought 997 passengers here from Britain, before being commandeered the next year for the transport of Canadian troops to England, and it certainly did not return empty. In the face of the war, the spirit of cooperation was so great that, shortly after their arrival in Montreal, another family offered Shirley’s family their own house in Outremont for the summer months, while they went away to the country.  
 
Brenda mentioned that her grandfather, the captain of some of the earliest icebreakers, came out of retirement at the beginning of the war to advise the navy on navigating in the North Atlantic. He was Captain John O’Hearn, with many stories to tell, passed on to her family, about the early icebreakers. For example, in the earliest days, icebreaking on parts of the St. Lawrence had to wait until farmers had finished transporting their produce across the river on the same ice that the ships broke.
 
What fascinated me was seeing that these two women’s families were connected through international events well before they ever met. We rarely think about these things while they are happening, but they are etched into our history, recoverable to eventually give events life again. You rarely know that something you are living will prove significant to future generations. Listening to Shirley, Brenda and Sheila talk, I could see those times, how knowledge was being shared and where it wasn’t. Shirley and Brenda both have a deep awareness of those events, Shirley because she lived them and Brenda through the stories of her family’s service to the military. Everyone alive in Canada at that time was affected by the war, lived in that reality and saw their lives change. Aside from her grandfather, Brenda had two uncles who served. Shirley’s own father served with the RAF, and one of her uncles was transferred to Canada as a flight instructor.
 
War was something every young man assumed he would experience first-hand. In the 1800s and earlier, there was a pride, a sense of honour in that. My great-grandfather served in 1885, and his record shows how celebrated the soldiers were, and describes the efforts his leader, General Strange, and their opponent, Big Bear’s young chiefs, took to assure that no-one was hurt unnecessarily. Upon the company’s return, there was a fanfare and celebration.  Yes, there are vicious wars, but not all wars were vicious.
 
Then came World War One, the first industrialized, mechanized war. People still volunteered to serve with pride and honour – my own grandfather served on horseback. They were celebrated as heroes upon their departure, but many returned broken, disillusioned and often abandoned by their own society. Even so, the pride of service still was apparent when World War Two began, and again people volunteered. My own father served, also in aviation, but he died when I was a child. When I was a young man, I asked an elderly neighbour what military service had been like. Others I had asked just went silent. After a moment of nervous reflection he said, “When your war starts, join up fast so you can learn how to survive.”
 
Shirley’s father, Joseph Bender, already in his mid-thirties at the outbreak of the war, fought the Battle of Britain as a firefighter and later joined the air force as a navigator. He flew 33 missions and was more than ready for retirement when he was called up for one last mission at the time of D-Day. That close to the end, he died when his plane was shot down. He was buried in the Netherlands. Brenda’s grandfather, in his retirement, advised the naval convoys crossing the North Atlantic, contracting pneumonia while at sea. He was flown home from Greenland, but he did not survive the flight. 
 
A play may entertain you, but stick around for the intermission.  
 
Special thanks to Shirley Adelson and Brenda Burridge

The Celtic culture once spread from near the Black Sea to Ireland, and from Scotland to Spain. It was a bridge between earlier Indigenous cultures and the Roman conquest of most of the Celtic territories. The Celts had a calendar spanning the four seasons, the solstice or equinox of each season in the middle of theirs, and the year ended at sunset of the last day of the autumn equinox. That day is celebrated in our calendar as the last day of October, with the next year coming at sunrise the next day, November 1. In Celtic tradition, the night between was a crack in time, a period when spirits and faeries were free to move, a night of numinous experience when anyone might see into that otherworld space from which some never recover.
 
The ‘numinous experience’ is a human attempt to describe the indescribable, that otherworldly power that defies our limited senses, that overwhelms the personal shoreline of our being under waves of fear, dread, majesty and awe, leaving a barren emptiness, sometimes more than temporarily outside of the secure space of personal identity. The experience is deeply subjective and personal, but is papered over with religious interpretation and hidden in our most frightening and inspiring stories going back to the earliest times of oral history. Every human is susceptible to it and every religion struggles to harness it. It is personal but cannot be possessed. It is what we belong to. Its character may be in the soil, in the wind, in the running water, in colours, the sky, the sunsets, faeries and the distant stars, or all of the above. It is no-one’s place to tell you what it is, but it is. It is your personal challenge to confront, and you will, if you haven’t yet.
 
The surviving Celtic Irish still call the harvest season Samhain, and it ended with cattle brought from their pastures in the downs and highlands. On that first night after the end of the harvest, bonfires burned and spirits returned to the living, feared, if not honoured and fed. The people, by that last evening of harvest, were exhausted and no doubt vulnerable and exposed to powers beyond their control and comprehension. Long departed ancestors may return that night, expecting to sit at their place at the table, and woe onto you if their place was not set and they were not treated well.
 
 
The power of tradition, especially when reinforced with supernatural – numinous – beliefs and fears is hard to overcome. Whether they are formulated into a religion or live as stories, they bring people into a culture. They can be indelible, too, staying with people and spreading even after the culture appears to be gone. The Roman Catholic Church attempted to exploit this by systematically absorbing these numinous influences into their celebrations and sacraments, papering them over and harnessing them in their process of colonization of the human mind. In that way, they absorbed and attempted to obliterate any possible challenger to their homogenizing, domesticating, influences. The long night at the end of Samhain, though, took some time to paper over. It was a real crack in time, space and reality. There are others.
 
The Church created a different feast to celebrate the unknown saints and martyrs, but their objection to celebrating any force that could not be interpreted as benevolent and controlled uniquely through their interpretation meant that the long night at the end of harvest in the Celtic culture remained a pagan event. They could not celebrate the first night at the end of harvest when powers not in the Church’s control prowled the darkened world.  Some scholars argue that it was the British Catholic Church that initiated the solution in the 8th century as a way of countering its influence. They began celebrating All Saints’ Day on November 1, even though, in 610 CE, Pope Boniface IV had designated May 13 as the celebration of the Blessed Virgin and the martyrs. The objective behind the British move was to eliminate the Celtic numinous interpretation of the last night of the Celtic year, thereby eliminating any force that could not be benevolently interpreted by the Church. Also called All Hallow’s Day, the celebration began on the eve of the day, All Hallow’s Eve, celebrating all departed holy people. The Church thereby attempted to limit the Celtic numinous memory to include only good, holy people. The celebration of the saints and martyrs was soon moved to this new date displacing the May 13 date throughout Christendom.   
 
The jack-o’-lantern, a turnip carved to hold a light within, symbolized the light of the sun staying with the fruit of the field during the long night. It was also associated with the Will-o’-the wisp, a bog light that suggested a lantern and offered guidance to a place of false hope. A thousand years after the creation of All Hallow’s Day, these new fires began to appear in Ireland and parts of England, as though signalling that the Celtic numinous was still with us, still seeping through that crack in time. This small carved vegetable was recalling the bonfires that once burned strong. Both the small lantern and the fires were intended to ward off the faeries and ghosts. When the Irish arrived in North America in the mid 1800s, the pumpkin they discovered here displaced the carved turnip. The Celtic numinous interpretation had simply adopted the name given to that night when the crack in time, space and reality opened. It is still with us and has been gaining popularity at an amazing rate across most of that old Celtic region of continental Europe as well.  
 
Remember this Hallowe’en to set an extra place at your table – or offer a treat – so you can avoid the wrath of the faeries, ghosts and unhappy ancestors who come knocking at your door with their tricks at the ready.  

​Heritage conservation is only sort of possible because much of our heritage is dependent upon our use of it. When I was young, I moved to the Eastern Townships, to a community that consisted of farms, one beside another. Over the years, most of the farms had been acquired by city folk, but they bought them to be in a farming milieu and spent money to keep the farm seeming like the one the farmer they bought from would have recognized. We fell in love with the farming heritage and participated as much as possible, working to keep my uncle’s farm feeling like a real farm.
In the spring of 1978, we returned to the Laurentians, me in Arthur Hutchins’s truck with a large amount of hay and grain, fencing wire, a cow, a calf, a dog, a cat, and three hundred chickens. The cow was the prize. A pure-bred Jersey called Maple Cliff Dawn Horizon. Her first freshening, having a calf and milk, had taken so long that we called her Maybe. I will never forget the expression on my brother’s face as I watched from the cab of Mr. Hutchins’s old truck, pulling up to my mother’s long-abandoned stable.
The three hundred chickens were not the only cause of the long face. Mr. Hutchins’s truck had broken down trying to climb the unfamiliar, long hills of the Autoroute – we were very late. If Mr. Hutchins wasn’t old by my standards today, his truck was. He was one of those farmer-Townshippers that I enjoyed living among. He supplied us with woodchips, a whole truckful every three or four months – ideal bedding for the beef cows on my uncle’s farm. We invited him in for supper if he arrived late in the day with his woodchips, and he seemed to enjoy himself. Arthur ate well, smiled a bit and never talked, except in short, one- or two-word answers to questions once he was sure they were addressed to him. I could not tell you if he was more comfortable in English or in French. He was more comfortable in silence.
 
When he went back to his rig, we inevitably found a two-dollar bill – remember those? – under his plate. The reddish-pink bill featuring a younger queen on one side and Inuit hunters on the other, commemorated Canada’s presence in Resolute Bay and the far north, where they transferred Inuit to stake a territorial claim during the Cold War.  A young Inuk described them as human flagpoles. The government could not transplant their community heritage in which their lives had been founded for millennia, and the experiment was a disaster for the flagpoles. Arthur’s two-dollar bill contained a message for us, too. We could take a cow and calf, chickens and fencing, but we could not take the farming heritage – it had to be where we were going to be useful. The calf would teach us that. Mature cows can be docile, but growing calves test fences endlessly, and where the calf goes, the cow will follow.
 
 
Our menagerie summered at Mom’s stable while we moved into a little log cabin I had built in my teens. Our plan was to build a new house with our own four hands, slaughter and sell the chickens, aside from the 6 laying hens, and then move the hens, the cow and the calf into the log cabin before winter, just after we moved ourselves out of it. We worked on the new building through the summer, taking only two days off. It was returning from one of those days off that we discovered the calf problem.
 
When we left the Townships we acknowledged that we would not be able to milk the cow twice a day. We would have no electricity or refrigeration in the log cabin or in the stable, no sanitary way of keeping the milk. I went to the Stukely auction and bought a little bull calf, a Holstein, black and white patched, that would be the lucky beneficiary of good Jersey milk. I roughed-out an enclosure with an electrified barb wire fence and visited the stable’s new occupants once or twice a day. I didn’t make it over there before leaving for the second day off.
 
Coming home, as we drove down through the pine forest above Rolland Deslauriers’ house, to our surprise he was on the road, signaling us to stop. If Arthur Hutchins wasn’t really that old, Rolland Deslauriers was. Behind him was his log farmhouse and the red pine forest that he had planted in a field, he had once told me, in 1949, the year I was born. Rolland and his wife Rollande were the last family to have farmed along our range road. All the farms, fields and most of the buildings were long gone, the fields grown into trees, but the lines on Rolland’s face still showed his farming heritage. They expressed his life, but not his speech. When he talked, there was no twinkle, no creases of laughter, just clear words that I was left to interpret. The calf and cow, he said, had broken through my fence, but assured me they were back now. He slowly described how he had spotted them coming down the road, followed by half the neighbourhood, the current owners of the old farms, running, calling and yelling “Here!” “Heel!” “Home…!” His stone-carved face expressed nothing else until a tear formed in his eye and ran down over the lines, as his whole inner being convulsed in laughter, visible only through that lone tear. We had made his day.
 
Thanking him and following the road onward to our cabin, we sat in silence, both realizing that our dream of keeping a cow had just ended. We were like the Inuk on Hutchin’s two-dollar bill. Without the social heritage, this was not a home for Maple Cliff Dawn Horizon.
 
We knew what to do with the calf.

​Many of us hope to record our family history. I am no exception, but one of the reasons to do so, in my mind, is to share with my descendants what we know about the world of our ancestors, to provide stories of the family’s past for the younger members to maintain a sense of belonging, a connection with their elders, with their family’s past.  
I did not have that intention when my oldest grandchild turned two. I just wanted to reach out, to maintain a family bond across an ocean, another continent. I made a booklet with photographs of his toys playing by themselves, then I went to an online site called Blurb.com, and those together with a few sentences. From there, the story told itself and for a very modest cost, Blurb turned it into a small hardcover book and delivered it across the sea.
Children have access to a lot of books aimed at them and many describe marvelous adventures. But imagine what it must be like for a child to recognize personal items in a book, to perhaps see their own parents, or even themself. Imagine seeing the adventures of a stuffed animal that they know and seeing themself sharing that adventure. With the technologies available, this is not that hard to put together.
 
Blurb.com and other such sites are very helpful if you allow yourself the patience to learn to use them. I have three grandchildren, and from ages 2 to 6 or 7, they were happy to receive the birthday present of a book featuring familiar spaces and toys, seeing themselves sharing in the strange world of the imagination.
 
In one of the stories, I told of a stuffed animal who decided to visit my granddaughter. She had played with the stuffy at our place, so it was something she already knew. The story described in images the efforts that the stuffy went to in order to travel from Canada to England. Eventually, the stuffy discovered that she could do anything she wanted in a book, so she told the story of travelling to see her friend, my granddaughter, and the adventures they had together. She described how much fun it was feeding my granddaughter chocolate pudding, or stretching herself out on the page as long as a rope so she could be as tall as my son, the ‘daddy’ in the book.
 
When my own children were little, I told them bedtime stories, and I described them as having been told to me by a person whose name was a composite of their middle names. This same person became the author of the birthday books for their children, so even the author of the books was a part of a story. In the frontispiece, I declared the book the sole property of the grandchild, with no right to be copied, partially because I liberally borrowed online images to flesh out the pages. Using images that way is fine on a one-off basis with no commercial or broad distribution, and the point of the story is that it is personal, not a market item.
 
I had great fun doing these, although they took a lot of time to produce. I learned that there was a site called gimp.org that allowed me to edit images. Before the children could read, this was important to keep their interest. My objective was simply to encourage them to establish a personal relationship with books and with stories.
 
I could do some absurd things with these photos, like describing my grandson falling through a hole in the snow into an underground world where the inhabitants, a bunch of photoshopped ladybugs, were waiting for him to come because he was a human, and as such, he must be the train engineer who was going to solve a problem with their train. Of course, the problem could be solved simply by good listening, and so the human succeeded in solving it. Other stories involved another planet in which the trees were in charge and were very concerned about our world and how our trees are being ignored.
 
To my surprise, the children did not get bored with the stories. I was also fortunate that their parents encouraged both generations. My elder son observed that if they were too young for the story, they inevitably went back to it months later, as they grew.
 
When the eldest was soon going to turn ten, I suggested that perhaps I should grow up with him and ask what kind of story he wanted me to tell. When he told me that I should write a book about his family history – where he came from, I realized that he had set a challenge for me. Born in England to a mother from Kenya whose parents’ families were from Goa, a Portuguese-speaking part of the Indian subcontinent, and a father from Canada whose parents’ families had roots in France, Ireland, Scotland, Australia, Turkey, Ukraine and Poland, this would take some serious research, including interviewing as many family members as I could find.
 
Blurb offered a flat-book format that allowed for large maps, and that helped. The book was a success – you could say it sold out, and it stands together with the original story books on a bookshelf, a permanent record for him and his sister and cousin, with more books added to the shelf every year, elaborating on various branches of the family histories.
 
The following years, and for as long as they care for me to continue, I can elaborate on aspects of the times of their great-greats. I imagine these more serious stories will outlast the early child adventures and become personal reference books for the grandchildren.
 
Starting with a vague hope that one day I would have time to record family stories for posterity, thanks to modern technology, I have found myself doing so and delivering them to the safety of the future. 

Starting an early winter fire in my woodstove, I discovered I had used several pages of a Main Street paper from April 2011. I was scrunching page 58. It was a bit of a shock to be confronted with this weight loss by our community’s paper, as though we as a community are accepting to shut down.
Over the past decade, I have been living under a rock, finishing a book that took years to put together, and I acknowledge that I have a much better understanding of how the mythical Rip Van Winkle felt, waking up after his decades-long snooze. The world is a changed place. It is easy to blame the growth of social media and the advent of COVID 19, but do we share no responsibility? Is there not more we can do as a community to reach out to each other and see who is still here? The energy invested in this publication gave it – and us – a sense of ourselves. It is true that 4Korners is taking up some of the slack, and they have helped many rural Anglos get online, reaching the isolated elderly, many of whose children have moved away to other provinces. It goes way beyond that with some interesting programming on ZOOM, but it is not a replacement for Main Street, the Laurentian Club and other initiatives of the past. Are we accepting that our small, rural community is simply dying out?
 
This autumn we attended an English play at Theatre Morin Heights. It was well-attended. One of the organizers told me that a lot of the audience were new English residents, part of the urban exodus triggered by the pandemic. These people are not yet integrated into the community, but Theatre Morin Heights managed to reach out to them, so it is possible. Perhaps we need that organization’s help for ideas of what to do to further our reach. As Jack Burger said when he reached out to us, our population would constitute the second-largest town in the Laurentians. Evidently the demographics have changed, but have we also changed? Are we, the English still here after all these generations, accepting the Legault picture that we don’t really belong? Is there no fight left in us?
 
The issue goes beyond the English community. We need to stand up again and fight back. This is not simply a problem for an aging cohort of the Laurentian English. It is an endemic problem with the current mentality that has come to accept that the majority has dictatorial power. It doesn’t. At the same time, “English community” is somewhat of a misnomer. It should at least be understood as the English Communities, or more pertinently in the face of a dictatorship of a homogenous majority, we should see ourselves as a part of the Minority Communities.
 
How will it help us to see ourselves this way? First, it establishes that we are genuine Quebeckers, not tolerated guests. Second, as a part of a minority community in Quebec, we are the people for whom the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms was written. Any modification of that document must be discussed with the minority communities that it was designed to protect.
 
Jack Burger’s Laurentian minority community has become a sleepy town, overwhelmed by cultural illusions promulgated by the Quebec majority. We must wake up, find our minority companion communities, and work together to fight back. Jack managed to find all of those communities, but it is a never-ending task to keep in touch with them all.
 
Here are some of the concerns we need to address:
 
1) The official rewriting of Quebec history for our school children. See Sam Allison and John Bradley, in the Spring 2019 issue of Quebec Heritage News, page 20, in which they accuse our English educational leaders of collaborating in the dissemination of a false history of Quebec.
 
2) The erasure of our names. The first that comes to mind is the disappearance of St. Andrew’s East, but there are many, many more.
 
3) Bill 21 and Bill 96 of this government, telling us how to dress and over-riding our Charter rights in an attempt to suffocate the English language.
 
4) Local concerns: We must learn to reach out to all cultural and linguistic minorities, encouraging their voices.
 
5) English schools: for many years our school taxes were multiples of those in the French system, so people changed over, allowing the government to assume that we did not care enough to support our schools.
 
Quebec’s minorities have always risen to the occasion, to stop the tendency to homogenise that has been present in Quebec’s culture ever since Champlain invited the Recollet Brothers to come and administer the colony. Immigrants from non-French-speaking and non-Catholic areas in France were absorbed as French Catholics.  French Huguenots, victims of violent ethnic cleansing in France, were forced to become Catholics here.
 
The English minority has been scapegoated for the sins of the Catholic Church. From the beginning of the transfer to the Protestant kingdom in 1763, French businessmen began to flower, some out-competing English and Scottish entrepreneurs, until the Catholic Church dropped its dark robe upon them in the 1840s. Today, the goals of the Catholic Church are being fulfilled through an aggressive program of secularization.
 
Join the conversation: What does it say about our region that we do not have a popular community organisation to represent us? Watch events posted on Quescren and QAHN. Our situation here is not unique and English-language groups are doing what they can to help us wake up to the situation and stand together for our Charter rights. Heritage Canada, and even the Quebec government are helping underwrite their costs. If we do nothing, then the Quebec government can demonstrate that they were there to listen, but we stayed silent. Our sleepy little town must awaken. 

​Kenneth Gordon Savery, known simply as Gord, was born in Papineauville at the end of March 1955, but he always saw himself as a person from Val Morin who had moved to Sainte-Lucie. Gord, a key player in countless people’s lives, was a modest person who never saw himself as the centre of anything. His sister, Sandra, said he would be very surprised to think that he would be praised in a write-up.
 
Gord was the animator of a Rube Goldberg balancing people’s needs and we were a part of it. He explored deeply into the meaning of each of us and kept things going, balancing this and that, sometimes just making sure that we knew how to finish building the bathroom, or posing insightful questions about our personal interests, regardless of their complexity. He would report back to us over a beer, our friend and sounding board.
 
Gord could be anywhere in his finely balanced social construct. Everywhere he was, he kept us laughing – reflecting us back to ourselves. Like the time he was building a Formica-covered cabinet and our five-year-old son, David, watched, explaining to him with a son’s swagger: “My Dad would use a chain saw.” “He knows his dad,” Gord added, opening another beer.
 
Gord also travelled the world, and as his brother-in-law John Richard recalls, explored North America in his green Scout, converted into a camper complete with denim curtains. John also observes that he was an early environmentalist, repurposing almost anything. Gord’s colleague on many jobs, Claude Plouffe, referred to his stockpile as Reno-Gord. He often arrived with stuff that he proposed we re-use. He had a huge collection of things, because he didn’t want to see them discarded. If everyone thought like Gord, our whole society would go through a paradigm shift that would save our planet.
 
I remember calling and checking with every appropriate store for a modern propane adaptor to attach to my old gas stove. No-one could be bothered to help. When Gord dropped by, I told him what I had been looking for. “Oh,” he responded, “I have a couple of those in the back of the car.”
 
We could not find a small stainless-steel sink for the screen porch. Gord came to the rescue again, inviting us to drop by his place at the lake and choose one. He guided us through the various departments of his warehouse and its displays – under the trees – until we came to the one that consisted of small, stainless-steel bar sinks. Most remarkable, and no doubt a huge challenge for Kerry, his daughter, is that Gord knew exactly what he had and where it was in his incredible collection of… things seeking a loving home.
 
Gord built the porch, rebuilt most of the house and added a tower that looks like a silo on our gambrel-roofed house. We travelled to Ireland and brought Gord and Kerry a map of the Kingdom of Kerry in Ireland. He and Kerry made a map for us, showing the addition to our house and calling it ‘The Kingdom of the Tower.’
 
Regardless of the emergency or the situation, Gord never seemed fazed. John recalls that, back in the old days of Auberge Mont Sauvage, a rambunctious friend pushed Gord into the pool before the last call was to end a Friday post-work 5 à 7. Gord calmly climbed out, shed his wet clothes and made it to the bar for the last round.
 
A generation after David bragged about his father’s skill with a chainsaw, David’s daughter, Ozara, learning to talk but having trouble with her Rs, began calling him “Go-d.” We all laughed of course, and Gord took it in stride. Go-d was, after all, her ‘uncle’ who in her eyes could do anything and loved us all.
 
Having a beer… or a couple of beers…with Gord was a ritual. I figured when I stopped drinking beer, switching to shandies, and then just ginger ale, that Gord might feel our ritual was threatened.
 
He was too practical for that. He was concerned that, with his occasional few beers and no help from me, our supply would not stay fresh. Whether we were home or not, Gord would come by and replace our beer with a fresh supply. “It doesn’t keep, Joe. You have to use it up.”
 
He respected and valued things in his own clear way. I found some items in the recycling bin and asked Gord about them, saying they’re not on the list of things that can be recycled. “I recycle those…” he quipped.
 
At least I thought it was a quip until I heard a Quebec environmentalist on the radio saying in answer to a caller’s question, “Put them in the recycling bin. If enough people do, they’ll find a way to recycle them.”
 
One of the challenges in our relationships with Gord was that we had to share him. He was driven by emergencies. Urgent jobs would be completed…to a point. Then he risked being called elsewhere, to another emergency, in his huge social matrix.
 
Many people depended on Gord. Our dependency was also punctuated with emergencies and was one of friendship, but Gord went where he was needed the most, and in our need, we imagined – projected – a long friendship with some rocking chairs and a few cold beer awaiting. I am sure all who knew him had similar expectations.
 
Still, when the animator stopped suddenly on November 5, the Rube Goldberg stalled, and it took a while to realize that we must remain animated with or without Gord’s attention. To move forward in the big machine that Gord oiled and pampered (and always had the replacement parts for) is what we must do to honour our friendship, to honour Gord. 

​The Quebec government has created the Secretariat for Relations with English-Speaking Quebecers. We have become a mystery to them, perhaps from as early as Josée Legault’s 1992 publication L’invention d’une minorité: Les Anglo- Québécois. We, the “invented minority,” seem to lack a strong sense of belonging. Of course, the Secretariat’s existence acknowledges that we exist, and the idea that we are a fictional minority seems to be understood, generally, as false. The Secretariat’s first job, according to an excellent article written by Guy Rex Rodgers for the Fall ’21 issue of Quebec Heritage News, was to figure out who we are. Though well-intentioned and welcomed, the Secretariat’s creation is a good example of how difficult it is for a colonizing power to understand how to decolonize itself, to examine its own history thoroughly and with an open mind before drawing conclusions about its minorities.
 
I know, your first reaction is to wonder how I can call Quebec a colonizing power. There is little question that Quebec has dominated and colonized its territory. There are many Indigenous examples of this, the first one that comes to mind is the Oka Crisis, but there are many other incidents, before and since, that indicate a cultural hierarchy inherited from France.
 
We, the English-speaking people, are those who chose to stay in Quebec when we did not have to. We endured the closed attitude to hiring our children in the public service and the slow decline of our cultural voice, until our only significant number of remaining members was in Montreal. There are expectations that we will die out and whoever of our descendants remain here will become real Québécois, somehow. The Secretariat and the majority thinking may not rise to the challenge of decolonization, but they are inviting us to share our voices.
 
The first item on the list is to tell the truth about our history. If Quebec was abused in its past, it was by the Catholic Church. Both here and in France, the Church looked after its parishioners and was responsible for over half the services we receive today from our provincial government, but beyond its tithe, the price it charged was to reformulate its people, changing the way they thought and functioned. Its influence was mitigated in a lot of other European countries for better or worse during the Wars of Religion, but Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII’s prime minister, set in motion the destruction of French protestants, the Huguenots, and Louis XIV completed it.
 
New France was the dream of the Huguenots who made four or five attempts to establish it in South America, the Carolinas and here, but the homogenizing vision of Richelieu left no room for minorities. In the 1620s, the cardinal forbade Huguenots from doing business in New France, and all births, marriages and deaths could only be recorded by the parish priest. That served to define French culture right up to the present. Even the French Revolution did not kill it. Difference is not tolerated.
 
 
With no Huguenots allowed legally in the colony, the Church took over administration and their shared objective was to create a Catholic colony by converting the people who were here already, and accepting colonists who were obliged to declare themselves as Catholic. Even so, a great number of those colonists were Huguenot and that is coming out in genetic research today. They were oppressed in France and hoped to be able to find greater freedom here. They were the Canadiens.
 
In 1629 a French Huguenot, David Kirke, sailing for the English king, took Quebec, but then England was forced to return it to France. The colony would remain French Catholic until 1763 when it was transferred again to the British, under the guidance of Jean Louis Ligonier, the 77-year-old Huguenot general who masterminded the British side in the Seven Years’ War. Once again, New France, Quebec, became a British colony where Christian religious freedom was accepted. Still, the homogenizing of culture is there, in our French history. It goes beyond its roots in the Catholic Church and guides policies of immigration and assimilation in both France and Quebec. For Quebec to properly decolonize itself, it must first accept that it is a North American culture, that its greatest victory was earned through the recognition of its people, les Canadiens, as a nation at La Grande Paix de Montréal in 1701. It must also acknowledge that the Church stole that victory and did it again, in the 1830s, when it undermined – instead of assisting in establishing – the secular and multicultural vision of Louis-Joseph Papineau. For the first time, Quebec became Roman Catholic during that decade, a step deeper into the Catholic culture than the Gallican Catholicism that prevailed in the French and then British colony. Throughout the 1800s, this new Church drove its people ever deeper into the Catholic hierarchy, even to the point of raising the first international military force in Canadian history to protect the Papal States. The Grande Noirceur was not caused by the English, but by the Church. If the British Colonial Office had a role, it was in being completely outflanked by the extraordinary minds at work in the Church.
 
We, those minorities that the Secretariat wonders about, succeeding those Canadiens who came for religious freedom, are the spiritual heirs of the Huguenots. Our claim to Quebec runs very deep, right back to its founding, and while Captain David Kirke was capturing Champlain’s Quebec in 1629, the English navy was attempting to save the French Huguenots at La Rochelle from the ethnic cleansing of Cardinal Richelieu.
 
Joseph Graham’s new book Insatiable Hunger reinterprets our historic understanding of the colonial period, here and in New England. It tells some of the stories that we were not taught in school.

​Everything seems to be going faster… with fast food, ever faster computers, internet speeds and deliveries, we really do seem to be in a hurry. ‘Now’ is gone when the word is said. The people of The Long Now, created in 1996, are trying to stretch that out a bit. The objective is to stretch the present, the ‘now.’
 
Brian Ellis, co-founder of The Long Now, described its 10,000-year clock project and is encouraging us to think in millennia instead of in short election cycles, with its ‘now’ that is just the actual contact point where past and future seconds meet. He wants us to see the current year as part of these ten millennia and record it as 02021. Explaining his reasoning, Ellis said, “When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 02000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 02000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.”
 
Thinking like his is about much more than a clock. The Slow Food movement is another way of looking at the need to stretch the ‘now.’ Megan Stubblefield, an environmental scientist and policy expert, describes it this way: “The slow food movement is a global initiative focused on encouraging people to stop eating fast food, instead taking the time to prepare and eat whole, locally-sourced foods. The focus is not only on nutrition, but also on preserving culture and heritage as it relates to food.” Some of us grow our own food – it is for the environment, but that environment extends to our taste buds and gut biome. Indigenous time, the foundational thinking of this set, is described as circular, a ‘long now.’ Every generation must plan seven generations forward, and that implies appreciating seven generations back.
 
The consequences of our fast-paced ‘now,’ captured in the second between the past and the future, include the impact it has on our social memory. For example, as a society, we had virtually forgotten about the Spanish flu epidemic, and at the time of the Montreal smallpox epidemic of 1885, the huge anti-vax movement  had forgotten that their ancestors, two generations earlier, had stopped smallpox cold by accepting vaccination. In the plague of 1885, the anti-vaxxers were responsible for the death of over 3000 people in the small city – a dubious distinction. Montreal had to be quarantined from the rest of North America. Facts like these should be a part of our ‘now’ and at our fingertips. Then, when we hear people claim all kinds of plots and lies from their governments, their information can be considered in the context of our longer ‘now.’
 
How do we remain aware of our own time, all fourteen generations of it, seven back and seven forward? To me, the very first step is to remind ourselves when things go wrong that, not too long back, things went well – and conversely, when everything is going well, temper the satisfaction with the memory that in our own experience, not long ago, everything seemed to be going wrong. By conditioning ourselves with such an exercise, slowly our own minds will extend and expand beyond ourselves to our social experience, even beyond our own lives. One does not have to be a historian, but simply self-aware. Each of our minds is overwhelmingly beautiful, capable, and intricate.
 
If you are looking for ways to expand the ‘now,’ learning a bit about our history can help. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography is a good resource. Be careful not to get too lost in it… each of the people mentioned in one short biography is linked to others. For example, if your great-grand-uncle is written up, you will likely find his worst rival in the same story, and you can go read that person’s story too. Since it is hard to have no slant in writing about history, you will find that one contributor’s hero can be another contributor’s antagonist.  
 
CBC’s Massey Lectures is another. I recently listened to Ursula Franklin talking about technology and was so fascinated by her insights that I read a reprint of her 1989 lectures, with four chapters added ten years later. In it, she described the internet, not as the wonderful Information Highway people thought it would be in 1999, but as the Information Junkyard it has become some 20 years after she foresaw it. She was 79 years old and, as a respected elder, she could even explain why that would happen: She said it creates asynchronicity, no sense of order in time, and no proper references. She did not discuss the Long Now, which had been created during that same half-decade, but she was clearly concerned about the damage that the internet could cause to our understanding of time and of the proper order of the world.
 
The Massey Lectures are an annual event. They began in 1961 and have included John Kenneth Galbraith, Noam Chomsky, Stephen Lewis and Tanya Talaga. Each speaker addresses their subject in their ‘now,’ and listening to any one of these talks helps us understand how long our ‘now’ can be, how we can live in a larger present moment and gain insight and the stability to help us navigate through the next 7979 years. 

English-speaking Quebecers are the second-largest official language minority in Canada after the obvious one of French-speaking Quebecers. In fact, there are more of us (1,103,475, according to the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages) than there are francophones outside of Quebec (1,024,198).
But that is not to say that the issues and challenges facing these three groups are the same. The small and widely dispersed francophones spread across Canada outside of Quebec absolutely need the support of law and budgets to guarantee that they can survive and strengthen their language and culture in the North American sea of English. And while the Québécois have similar challenges, they have powers that are not available to the other two groups: a government to call their own at the provincial level, and all parties at the federal level who pander to them for their votes.
While francophones outside Quebec benefit from the force of the Quebec demands for linguistic protection and recognition, Quebec Anglophones have no representation of their interests at either the federal or provincial levels.
As anglophone Quebeckers, we have, throughout our lives, been encouraging bilingualism and acceptance of the minority status of Quebec Anglophones while actively defending and promoting the rights and needs of English-speaking Quebecers in the Laurentians.  We struggle to maintain our cultural identity even while we are stuck between the aggressive ethnic chauvinism of a series of Quebec provincial governments and uncomprehending, vote-hungry federal parties and governments.
Many may know the Laurentians through visits to Mont-Tremblant, but they should be aware that Mont Tremblant does not represent the reality of most of the residents of the region. Through the infusion of great amounts of government and private money, it has become an international tourist centre and has been able to work around or ignore many of the language regulations that serve to suppress the viability of the English-speaking population away from that centre.
We are disturbed by the thrust of the new proposals for an updating of the Official Languages Act that ignore the real problems of ethnic chauvinism and the needs and realities of the English-speaking community of Quebec, an increasingly bilingual language minority in Canada. Over many generations, our community has built up schools, universities, hospitals and cultural institutions to serve us and the broader community around us. But we are facing a collapse of support, instigated by an increasingly ethnic-nationalist Quebec government, aided and abetted by the federal government, no matter which party is in power. In a constant pandering for votes, the federal government has ceased to recognize our needs to be protected and promoted in ways that both resemble and are very different from the needs of francophones outside of Quebec.
Over the years, the Anglophone minority has become increasingly bilingual and has accepted its minority status in Quebec. It is our way of contributing to the need to secure the French language and culture.  We want to be proud Quebeckers, but our names, or perhaps the subtleties of our accents, ‘other’ us. We have disproportionately little presence in the public service. Our children ensure their futures by leaving.  We are treated as people who have unjustifiable advantages when we ask for our rights to be respected. When the elections come, the candidates of all the parties support the majority, leaving us unrepresented in Quebec and in Ottawa. We watch in frustration as our rights are trampled on through mean-spirited legislation and as the federal government acquiesces to capture the support of the majority. Recently, Jagmeet Singh declared that the latest Quebec legislation, Bill 96 and its proposed changes to the Constitution, are purely "symbolic" and will not impact Canadians outside the province. The large minority that we are members of, with a population greater than each of the individual Atlantic provinces (and several combinations of them), are inside this province and we are a real part of Quebec and of Canada.
Our ancestors and contemporaries have helped build the province, but we are asked if we feel welcome here. Who else is ever asked if they feel welcome in their own home? This is our home – we are not guests here, welcomed through the sometime goodwill of our “hosts.” Our history is regularly erased: place names changed, our contributions denied, visible minorities stigmatized, minor irritants introduced until they are normalized and then more are added. This passive-aggressive behaviour on the part of the majority is a form of ethnic cleansing.
The CAQ, through Bills 21 and 96, is making direct, focused attacks on Quebec's minority population. We have been and continue to be subjected to this non-violent ethnic cleansing, choking off all the channels that allow a community to grow and thrive, while witnessing infinite time, thought and money being invested in strengthening French.
 
The update to the Official Languages Act stresses the need to single-mindedly protect and promote French across the country. The incomprehension on the part of the federal government of what we are dealing with leads to a deep sadness in us. We have become a bilingual minority in Canada, and instead of being celebrated, we are berated. Our children, leaving the province but determined to remain bilingual, find it possible to continue the French education of their children, even in Alberta. Yet, if those grandchildren return here, to Quebec, they will be as ostracised as we are, because their perfect French will have the wrong accent. The situation in Quebec is not one of protecting French but of protecting and promoting one ethnic group at the expense of others. This ethnic chauvinism is the issue, the problem. This is what needs to be addressed.