Canadian government lost on this battlefield
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the overriding sentiment was that we here in North America couldn’t let what happened change the way we live our lives. If we did, then the terrorists win. Sadly, that is exactly what happened in Quebec this week. Granted, the threats made by the militant Quebec separatists had not yet resulted in violence, but they were enough to make the Canadian government cower under its collective desks.
Here’s what happened. The federal government’s National Battlefields Commission (NBC) planned to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham by showcasing a battle reenactment. This is the battle at which the French lost to the English leading to the fall of New France and placing what is now Canada under English control. In other words, this battle is why the majority of Canadians speak English and not French, and it’s a subject that a minority in Quebec would rather forget and deny than commemorate.
The problem is that this minority is loud and potentially dangerous. And these militants not only threatened protests, but violence. As a result, the NBC retreated and cancelled the event.
André Juneau, the president of the NBC, told the Montreal Gazette that the decision was the fault of “separatists,” noting that the commission could not guarantee “the safety of the public [after] a cacophony of accusations and barely veiled threats.” He added to the Toronto Star, “They never said to us blood would be spilled, but there were significant threats.” One threat warned that tourists would “not forget their visit for a very long time.”
Not surprisingly, the militants are now wallowing in their victory. Patrick Bourgeois of the Réseau de Résistance du Québécois told the Star he sees this as a triumph “at the expense of the Canadian government.”
Sure, Juneau and the government may have saved themselves a headache, but they did the wrong thing for a number of reasons:
1. Giving into terrorists only emboldens them and leads to more terrorism – and make no mistake, those who threatened violence at the planned reenactments are terrorists (their goal was to terrify people, and they succeeded).
2. Cancelling the reenactment amounts to historical censorship. Even if you think this was an unfortunate and ugly time in Canadian history, it is dangerous to deny one’s history and scrub it clean of all the things you don’t like. As philosopher George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The best thing to do with history is to learn from it, not wash it and its lessons away.
3. This is an attack on free speech and goes against the spirit of the Canadian constitution, which guarantees freedoms of thought, expression, belief, peaceful assembly, and association. This would seem to protect the reenactors from going ahead with their plans. The fact that the federal government couldn’t see this is a constitutional travesty.
4. The planned event was a “commemoration,” not a “celebration.” Language militants certainly understand the power of language, so it’s no surprise that they tried to use language against the event itself. No matter how many times the reenactment was called a “commemoration” of a piece of Canadian history, the militants labeled it a “celebration” of French defeat. Propaganda is always the first weapon of terrorists.
5. Cancelling the event was not something a majority of Quebeckers were lobbying for. In fact, some of the reenactors have ancestors who fought and died on the Plains of Abraham.
6. On a more practical note, the reenactment was going to be a bigger summer moneymaker for Quebec City. Over 2,100 people reportedly planned to take part in the reenactment, many of them from the United States. So all these people and their families – as well as history buffs who were not taking part in the event – planned to come to Quebec, stay in hotels, eat in restaurants, and spend lots of money, even at a time of economic downturn.
Those against the reenactment had every right to complain and to make their case publicly – even to protest the event. They also had a right not to attend the event, a decision that a number of Quebec politicians had already made. But no one has a right to make threats of violence – veiled or otherwise. And you would think the federal government would understand this.
These quebec separatists are totally nuts! They’re even crazier than southern confederates. There are countless reenactments of Civil War battles every summer and many are battles where the south lost yet the reenactments go on and there are no big outcries that these events are just excuses for celebrating the victory of the northern aggression over the south. History is what it is and their province is still valued (tho less and less due to the separatist tactics) and protected by the federal government. Perhaps the English could have been even more aggressive and forced the French out or to become English! Their continuing angry and terrorist type tactics only serve to diminish their hopes of ever achieving success.
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