Yes, I would certainly agree with that. There was a time when a small number of people, like yourself, sort of hung in there. You know that at the time there were hundreds, maybe...dozens. There just weren't that many professional artists choosing to stay in Quebec. Something happened around 1995. There was a change. Exactly what happened was there were people coming to Quebec for the first time. There were people whose parents left in the 1960s and 1970s who returned. More and more students were staying. The influence of that francophone cultural scene was extraordinary. There was something different about it.
What has shifted in the culture? There was a time when people who were integrated were kind of looked upon as oddities. I remember a few years ago talking at a large presentation of artists and saying that I worked in francophone film production, and at the end of the day, we would sit down and I'd write script in English. The crew was francophone, and we'd sit down and have a beer and they'd start going
“damned English, ha, ha!”.
I would say, “I'm English too, am I like that?”