It's a nice long drive to come here and speak to you folks.
I have a document here. I'm just going to summarize this because this would probably run on a little bit more than five minutes.
When we deal with people who work in the arts, there's often a lot of misunderstanding about the situation of the English language artist in Quebec. I just want to give you a little bit of historical context.
During the 1960s and 1970s, as you know, there was a lot of turmoil in Quebec, and people reacted to it in many different ways. It would be oversimplifying the situation to say that all the people who were unhappy with the change left, while all the people who stayed were totally ready to embrace the new situation. However, in the case of artists—because artists tend to be a lot more mobile than, say, factory workers—the artists who chose to stay in Quebec in general stayed there because they were very comfortable in the environment, they sought to become bilingual, they sought to fit into the environment, and they worked closely with their francophone colleagues.
In the early 1970s, you had the situation of this artist community trying to set down some roots and trying to establish itself in a completely different context from that of generations that had come before. You find a number of organizations coming together as these artists are trying to represent themselves, to express their new identity. In the document I list a number of different organizations that were founded. The theatre people founded first; in 1989 they formed the Quebec Drama Federation. One of the first things that the Quebec Drama Federation did was to establish a seat on the board of the
Conseil québécois du théâtre
so that there was a permanent dialogue between the anglophone and francophone artists.
Subsequently, you have the publishers form an organization, the writers form an organization, and then two years ago, all of the different artists who spoke English in Quebec came together to form what's called ELAN. ELAN is really a very new organization. Just by way of an anecdote, as we were trying to bring people together at a summit to see if there was an interest and a need to form an organization to represent artists, we encountered a great deal of friction. People were very, very disinclined to identify themselves as anglophones. Most people, like myself, work largely in French.
My wife is Francophone and my children are being raised in French.
A lot of people were very, very reluctant to identify themselves as anglophones.
As I was giving the keynote speech at the summit, where people were still uncomfortable about whether they should be there, whether they wanted to be there, I told an anecdote about working with different producers.
I often find myself surrounded by Francophone producers and colleagues, and, at some point, people start talking about the nasty English. After a few minutes, I say that I'm English, and I ask them whether they really think I'm like that. Then they always answer that I'm not really English.