It is as though I have lost touch with half of my own soul. My on the grounds of the Si. Boniface basilica. horse, or a house he was reputed to have stayed in, sagged on its foundations less than a mile from my home. I Kived in St. Boniface for the first five years of muy life, saturated in z French-Canadian, Catholic society. The aunts and uncles I mostly saw spoke French, although French we knew, except for a few ‘The Gauvrean sidc of the family had rocts going back more than a century in Quebec, before mon grandpapa moved out West. So when I refer to a sense of alienation from Quebec, | am not Bos Se speaking just from a redneck Western angio perspective, al- though I have certainly acquired a degree of that over the years. There are still hundreds of Gauveaus in Quebec, but I don’t know them. Of my mother’s im- mediate family, however, there are none left in La Belle Province at all. Last year Uncle Bill and Aunt Mary moved to Toronto, seers chmen and women who have clung tenaciously to their slice of Oc- cupied French North America. I say ‘‘occupied,’’ since it was seized from the Iroquois, Algon- quins, etc. When the British came in and occupied France’s colonial holdings it was, in fact, a Second Conquest. Twice conquered, Quebec re- mains a French bastion. I don’t T Savored the Meech Accord precisely because it does move in the direction of decentralization, although admittedly at the cost of trampling all over what few rights native people have managed to hang on to.”’ Thirty years before, they'd left St. Boniface to go to what seemed to them like the “‘old country.’ Montreal, to them, was Mecca. But over the years they discovered they could no more move back to Quebec after having been brought up elsewhere in Canada than Second Generation Japanese-Canadians could possibly te-assimilate in Japan. Even though their French was impeccable, it was provincial. There’s a snobbery among Quebecers that is every bit as bad as the arrogance of real Frenchmen to Canucks. My uncle and aunt found that they were outsiders in their “home’’ province. They could never really be accepted by the tight-knit little exiled race of Fren- Cut from Canada Grade ‘A’ CHUCK BLADE STEAK ; Village 3230 Ccnnaught Cres. North Vancouver $87-7917 suppose it has ever been quite as French as it is now since the day before the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. The Quebecoise may have lost control of their economy and po- litical infrastructure for a couple of centuries, but in the end they succeeded in gathering the power to control their own destiny back in their own hands. The process of resurrecting New France was essentially completed the day Robert Bourassa banned outside signs in English, in de- ff) 307 of the Supreme Court, and t+ federal government, under axother French-Canadian, did not step in to defend the rights of English-Canadians in Quebec. That was the day Canada, as a centralized federation, took the hit Fresh California Grown HONEYDEW MELONS .86 Kg Upper Lonsdale 3030 Lonsdale Avenue North Vancouver 987-6644 17th & Lonsdale 1632 Lonsdale Avenue North Vancouver 987-8911 39° HUNTER that will eventually sink it as one nation. Well, not necessarily en- tirely. We could be drifting toward a kind of political archipelago, something perhaps as loose as the Swiss federation, which is divided up into cantons, that enjoy a sovereignty-association relation- ship with each other. What I like about the Swiss system is that the presidency is rotated automatically among a supreme council every year, so that no one canton is able to dominate the others. It is about as fair and truly egalitarian as any political union in the world. Certainly it is a lot fairer than what we are stuck with now in Canada. I favored the Meech Lake Accord precisely because it does move in the direction of decen- tralizaiion, although admittedly at the cost of trampling all over what few rights native people have managed to hang on to. The Accord may be aborting be- fore our very cyes, but the process it represents has built up a momentum of its own. Quebec is straining to break out of its cen- turies-old bondage to English Canada, at the very time that “English Canada”’ is melting in a pot of multicultural identities. And my only feeling about it is: Au revoir, if that’s what you want. Whatever Quebec has become, it sure as hell isn't anything recognizably ‘“‘Canudian"’ to me any more. Just Frenche Ferry traffic up in May MAY TRAFFIC figures show in- creases in BC Ferries’ passenger and vehicle traffic. Neil Vant, minister of Transpor- tation and Highways and minister responsible for BC Ferries, said: “The operational figures for May 1989, showing substantial increases over May 1988, tell us people are continuing the ‘‘shoulder’’ season travel trend; they’re not just con- fining their travels to the peak summer season.”” On the Tsawwassen/Swartz Bay route, May’s figures show a nine per cent increase in both passenger and vehicle traffic over the same period last year. There was an eight per cent in- crease in passenger traffic on the Horseshoe Bay/Nanaimo route and an I! per cent increase in vehicle traffic. “*All three major routes experi- enced traffic growth during May,”’ said the minister. 5 —— CUSTOM ——- a WINDOW FASHIONS SAL Bq ° Mini-Blinds i © Window Shacks * Woven Woods we) 525 8722 Appsanms ba Your Home ed Caro! Gorosh “IN EVERY. 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