The Quebec government is destroying our universities

 

The campus at McGill University, Montreal, 1906

One day last fall, in 2023, Premier Legault of Quebec walked out of his Montreal office, which is across the street from the Roddick Gates entrance to McGill University, and decided, as he described it at the time, that he could hear too much English being spoken and, he claimed, this was to the detriment of the French language, and therefore it had to end. And who did he blame for this linguistic pollution? He blamed out-of-province and foreign students although he probably would have liked to have included all English-speaking Quebecers. This was the beginning of the Quebec government's attempt to destroy English language university education in Montreal and Quebec. 

Here is the scenario we were presented with by Premier Legault justifying cutting provincial funding and doubling tuition for out-of-province students at the three English-language universities in Quebec, Bishops University, Concordia University, and McGill University. The money from this drop in funding would go to French-language universities; the three English-language universities would now subsidize the French universities; however, Bishops was later exempted from this attack on English universities. Legault made the situation even worse; out-of-province students would now have to pay a higher tuition fee than they were currently paying (it was doubled but a few months later McGill and Concordia announced they would will subsidize students affected by this) and these students would also have to take French language courses that would add a semester to their studies, courses that are possibly beyond the ability of most Francophone students. Almost immediately applications to study at McGill and Concordia began to fall, the three English-language universities are now subsidizing French-language universities. As well, Moody's downgraded the credit rating of both universities based on Legault's pronouncement.

The gates to McGill University, McGill College Ave, August 25, 1869.

Of course, many of us in the English-language community are in shock over this, it feels like being stabbed in the heart; it is the wilful destruction of what has taken over two hundred years of work, dedication, and commitment to build. It is the legislated cancelling of McGill University and Concordia University, two of our most important institutions. These universities define our community but they have also been a welcoming place of learning for the majority French language community and they have helped generations of immigrants get ahead in Quebec. And it doesn't matter to Legault that McGill is one of three internationally recognized Canadian universities of excellence, the two others are the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto, or that McGill is a 203 year old institution with a reputation for excellence in learning, teaching, and research. Or that McGill is the equivalent of a head office of a prestigious company and brings more revenue to Quebec than it costs to have it here. As for the threat to the French language, based on demography, this is bogus and it's an excuse to attack the English-speaking community; compare the linguistic make up of Montreal or the Province of Quebec in 1976, when the Parti Quebecois was first elected to office with today, and it is obvious that the French language in Quebec is flourishing, and in all respects English is declining. All of Quebec, French and English speaking people, should be proud of McGill for its long history and international reputation; instead, Premier Legault and his cohort see McGill as a bastion of the English community even though about 25% of McGill students are Francophone. There is no reasoning with irrationality, ethnocentricity, and bigotry; no matter what concessions and compromises we make, Legault and his cohort are intransigent about their disdain for anyone who is not Francophone, white, and culturally Roman Catholic.

While Premier Legault blamed foreign students for the dystopian crime of speaking English in public, what he was also attacking was the very existence of McGill University and Concordia University and English-language higher education in Quebec. Here is a hypothetical (but equivalent) situation to what is happening to McGill University, it would be if the premier of British Columbia visited the Vancouver UBC campus and, apparently, just on a whim, announced that he was cutting funding for the University of British Columbia because the student body is more than half Canadian born Asians and 25% of the student body are foreign students; all of Canada would be appalled by this, the situation would be denounced, Federal politicians would be shocked and demand redress; Justin Trudeau would be apoplectic. What we have in Quebec is a racist attack on the English language community, an attack on both McGill and Concordia; it is an attack on our community's history and presence in Quebec. It is an attack on higher education. What Legault wants is a white French speaking province of Quebec that is ethnocentric and isolated from the outside world; if you aren't white and pure laine, then you are not a part of the Quebec nation, they want you gone. But since this atrocity is happening in Quebec, and it is against our English-language community, it is greeted with silence and even applause by our Federal politicians. From them we hear absolutely nothing, it is total silence, they want the French vote in Quebec no matter that it is destroying our community.

Redpath Museum on the McGill Campus, Montréal, QC, circa 1893

And so, we see that the government of Quebec has targeted our institutions, our language, and our history;  Premier Legault's plan is the elimination of the English language in Quebec, whether it is English language signage, all evidence of our extensive historical role in Quebec, or our hospitals and institutions that the English-speaking community founded, or speaking English on the street or, inevitably, speaking English or any language other than French in the privacy of one's home. This is a very dark, dystopian, and shameful period in Quebec and Canadian history.

The wilful destruction of an institution of excellence, based on hate and hubris, is evil. 

Addenda: enrollment is declining at Concordia University due to Legault's defunding English-language universities in Montreal. 29 August 2024.

Read this re McGill's "sustained excellence", https://reporter.mcgill.ca/sustained-excellence-mcgill-tops-macleans-rankings-again/

The Parasitic Mind by Gad Saad

 

I highly recommend Gad Saad's The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense (Regnery Publishing, Washington, DC, 2020). It’s an excellent book that deals with revealing truth and common sense in a world corrupted by a progressive woke ideology. Towards the end of the book Professor Saad, who teaches at Concordia University in Montreal, writes,

Everybody has a voice. Activate your sense of personal responsibility. You have agency. Participate. Do not be a bystander as truth, reason, and logic call out for your help. Do not subcontract your voice to others. Do not self-censor. You and your children have a stake in the outcome of this battle, so don't be afraid to speak up. Do not succumb to the Tragedy of the Commons (as popularized by the ecologist Garrett Hardin in 1968), in this case a tragedy of collective inaction. (p. 172)

The promise of the 15 Minute City

     

I'll move myself and my family aside
If we happen to be left half-alive
I'll get all my papers and smile at the sky
For I know that the hypnotized never lie

--The Who, “Won't Get Fooled Again"

Here is a definition of the 15 Minute city, from a Wikipedia article; it is  

an urban planning concept in which most daily necessities and services, such as work, shopping, education, healthcare, and leisure can be easily reached by a 15-minute walk, bike ride, or public transit ride from any point in the city.[4] This approach aims to reduce car dependency, promote healthy and sustainable living, and improve wellbeing and quality of life for city dwellers.

The 15 minute city sounds lovely, we can all live in small communities and have all the amenities of life within walking distance, no cars, no traffic, no hustle and bustle, no hassle! Only pollution free air as we ride our bicycles waving to each other, to the fellow walking on the sidewalk by a florist shop where he stops to converse with the shop owner and buy a few roses for his partner. It is all happiness and community living! And if you suggest the opposite, that the 15 Minute City is a nightmare waiting to happen, a way to control the movement of the population, you are a right wing conspiracy nut. But that is exactly where we know the 15 Minute City is leading, we all know it; for instance, a CBC article published on 26 June 2024 reads "Edmonton promises residents 'freedom of movement' to calm concerns around 15-minute cities". 

Urban planners have not solved the problem of homelessness so why would we believe they can provide the utopia of a 15 minute city? We saw how major cities in China, during the covid episode, isolated parts of cities with walls and guards, the movement of inhabitants were strictly controlled, some were kept isolated in their apartments and were supplied with groceries only out of the kindness of relatives and friends, some went hungry. Some people managed to escape and buy groceries outside of the area of their very real imprisonment. The 15 Minute City is ideal for times of pandemics, it is designed for limiting people's freedom of movement, and limiting information being communicated from one group to another. It is also a time for the abrogation of freedom of speech.

What we now have in all of our cities — homelessness, unemployment, and food insecurity —won’t be solved by the 15 minute city; there is no quick fix for these social problems and the 15 Minute City won’t change this, it will only make it easier to control people. It occurs to me that some 15 minute cities will be homeless encampments, isolated to protect the inhabitants of other 15 minute cities from poor people, drug addicts, and people labelled undesirable by what remains of the middle class. We already have this, it is part of urban living. Problems that aren't solved now won't be suddenly solved by the  15 minute city; they will only continue and get worse. This is common sense.

In different ways our society is disintegrating, what we had is a thing of the past and what we are left with is the detritus of the past. For instance, in Canada we live in fear of losing our family doctors, the family doctor is increasingly a thing of the past as is the middle class and the aspirations of the middle class: too many people can no longer afford to buy a house in which to raise their family, some can't afford to rent an apartment; a growing number of people are unemployed and unhoused; food banks can't keep up with the growing number of people using their services; there are a growing number of people who are addicted to fentanyl and other drugs. The 15 minute city is a fairly shallow diversion from these growing problems; the old society has collapsed and the new society is one defined by globalization and progressive ideology. We are deluged with immigrants, they are cheap labour, just when citizens can't find work and are criticized for not taking low paying jobs; in the 1980s and 1990s we exported our jobs to the Third World, now we are importing the Third World to work here. Under the present regime our population has exploded to 41M people; the floodgates for immigration are open and yet our society can't house, employ, or feed our current population. 

A study at McGill University  (from McGill’s Institutional Communications, 21 June 2024) is redefining the 15 Minute City, 

Published in the Journal of Urban Mobility, the study examines travel behaviour and geospatial data from Montreal and finds, contrary to expectations, that only a small fraction of households can feasibly meet all their daily needs within 15 minutes of home using active transportation.

"Our study challenges the notion of a one-size-fits-all approach to urban planning,” says Ahmed El-Geneidy, Professor at McGill University’s School of Urban Planning. “While the 15-minute city concept has gained momentum globally, our research emphasizes the importance of locally relevant strategies that consider the diverse needs and realities of communities."

The research suggests a 30-minute model may be more realistic for North American cities, provided appropriate urban-design changes are made. Furthermore, the researchers underscore the need for urban-sustainability strategies that address not only travel behaviours but also neighborhood characteristics, household dynamics and social equity concerns.

If the 15 minute city becomes a 30 minute city, and then the 30 minute city becomes the 60 minute city, then what we have is what we already have, a “city” with the same problems that we are now facing. The 15 minute city is about social control and keeping citizens isolated; don’t be fooled again, it is a false utopia as are all utopias, nothing else. 

Addendum: in this article published on 27 August 2024 citizens of Brandon, Manitoba, fear the 15 minute city will be imposed on them. 

"What is it that a Poet Knows" by Louis Dudek

 

Louis Dudek

What is it that a poet knows

                that tells him ­­ 'this is real?'
Some revelation, a gift of sight,
granted through an effort of the mind ­­
                                    of infinite delight.

All the time I have been writing on the very edge of knowledge,

heard the real world whispering
                    with an indistinct and liquid rustling­­
as if to free, at last, an inextricable meaning!
Sought for words simpler, smoother, more clean than any,
                            only to clear the air
of an unnecessary obstruction
Not because I wanted to meddle with the unknown
        (I do not believe for a moment that it can be done),
but because the visible world seemed to be waiting,
                            as it always is,
somehow, to be revealed

Reading at Rare Books and Special Collections at McGill University, April 2018

Not sure I'll ever watch this, like some others I don't like seeing myself in videos... This was a reading I gave with some old friends at Rare Books and Special Collections at McGill University, on 26 April 2018.

Vehicule Days, part two

More of my photographs of "Vehicule Days", exhibition and reading, on the evening of April 26, 2018 at McGill University's Rare Books and Special Collections.

John McAuley and Tom Konyves

Endre Farkas and Carolyn-Marie Souaid

Adrian King-Edwards and Donna Jean-Louis

Chris Lyons

That's me.

Tom Konyves

Vehicule Days at McGill University

Here is my group photo of the Vehicule Poets from our reading on the evening of April 26, 2018 at McGill University's Rare Books and Special Collections. From left: Endre Farkas, Tom Konyves, John McAuley, Claudia Lapp, and Stephen Morrissey. Missing: Ken Norris.

Meeting F.R. Scott in 1971

Reading one's old diaries or journals is like meeting a stranger you used to know, that stranger is yourself when younger. Back in November 1971 I was at a reception at Thomson House, part of McGill University, for the English poet Michael Horowitz. I remember this only because I wrote about it in my journal. I met Marian Dale Scott, F.R.Scott.'s wife. She was very nice as was Frank Scott who I met later that evening. Apparently, and I don't remember this at all, Earle Birney was also there. What I can see from this diary entry is that all of these were lovely people who were kind and considerate to this kid they'd never met before. I heard Patrick Anderson read a few days before and Frank Scott said that Anderson regretted not knowing the younger poets. One thing that might interest Brian Busby is that Marian Scott said that her husband and John Glassco would walk on Crescent Avenue and talk about the past, the days of the Montreal Group of poets. Let's see, that was almost fifty years before the Thomson House reception and right now is about fifty years after the same reception. Time flies but you have to write something down or it's all forgotten. 

On Leo Kennedy

On the right is the Kennedy family home on Rushbrooke Avenue in Verdun where they lived in the 1920s.
They had a private tennis court adjacent to their property. 

On Leo Kennedy

Ken Norris told me that in the 1970s he and a Montreal publisher invited Leo Kennedy to publish a book of poems, it would have been Kennedy's first book since The Shrouding (1933). Kennedy arrived at the meeting with a garbage bag full of poems (not an auspicious beginning!) and the meeting failed to produce a book; it would have been only his second book in forty years. One wonders about this meeting. Did Kennedy sabotage an opportunity to publish a second book so late in life? Was it a way to get out of publishing what may have been inferior work? Did he dislike my friend or the publisher and not want to work with them, then why go to the meeting? Or was there some psychological complex that had held him back from writing new poems or publishing them? Still, despite the dearth of new poems by Kennedy he always insisted that he was a poet, he was not shy about his place in Canadian literature, nor should he have been.

When I heard this story about Kennedy I thought that he was a fool to have passed up on a publishing opportunity; however, I've known other poets like him who had lots of talent but who never fulfilled themselves as poets, they stopped publishing for several decades or never published again after some early success. Am I the only one to think of this as a failing on Kennedy's part? Perhaps I am. During the years after The Shrouding Kennedy didn't publish much original poetry but he did publish book reviews and even some poems in Poetry (Chicago). Patricia Morley in As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy's Story (1994), her biography of Kennedy, mentions that these reviews were perceptive and incisive. As well, Kennedy was also interested in socialist ideas that were at odds with his work in an ad agency as a copywriter for consumer goods. Kennedy was one of the early "Mad Men" as depicted in the television show by that name. It seems that his creative energy went into copy writing.

Perhaps the circumstances of Kennedy's personal life need to be considered. After 1935 Kennedy had to make a living to support his family; he had a second marriage and years later he took care of an invalid wife. Indeed, he had a successful career in copy writing and the family moved several times because of his work. He had three sons—one with his first wife and two with his second wife—and he helped raise two grandchildren which is what brought him back to Montreal in the 1970s. Kennedy was no puer aeternus, the Jungian term that describes a man who does not take on full adult responsibilities like gainful employment, maintaining long term and meaningful relationships, supporting his family, and being a fully functioning adult in society. He lived a responsible life of stability and middle class respectability and was well-liked and respected by his colleagues; however, perhaps (solely as conjecture) this middle class life conspired to end his career as a poet even though others have lived middle class lives such as his and they continued being poets. So what gives?

What gives is that after hearing of the "poems in the garbage bag" episode I saw Kennedy in a new light, as a kind of archetypal trickster, a coyote figure in mythology, someone who punctures the appearance of respectability in others. The anecdotes that Morley recounts of Kennedy shooting squirrels and storing them in his freezer, and other stories, suggests to me that Kennedy had a bit of the joker in him; perhaps even his copy writing career is a job suited to the jester, to someone aiming to sell stuff to people who don't want or don't need the stuff up for sale. This is just to suggest an explanation for some of Kennedy's behaviour and perhaps his work as a poet.

Kennedy is someone who had lots of talent as a poet, he is a formalist in his work, in some poems he is counting syllables, he has an incredible vocabulary in his work, and his images, metaphors and similes can be stunning. There is also something "old fashioned" in his work, I am not sure that he is a truly modern poet except that he was active as a poet in the Modern period; he's some kind of an aberration, a solitary voice that is self-invented. Kennedy has a depth of perception that is sometimes greater than the other Montreal Group of poets from McGill University. But I don't think he felt included among the Westmount poets who dominated English language poetry back in the 1930s. F.R. Scott made some cracks about Kennedy coming from working-class Verdun even though Kennedy had as much talent as FRS as a poet; Kennedy was not truly a working class person, his father owned a successful business located in Old Montreal and their home in Verdun was substantial. It is ironic that Scott is the defender of the working class, one of the founders of the CCF, a precursor of the NDP, and yet he is snobbish with Kennedy. Could Kennedy not have been offended by this, or contemptuous of Scott because of this? A response to Scott and his patrician lifestyle and social class might be to become even more eccentric. This, of course, speaks to the considerable class divisions that English-speaking Montreal experienced in the past; the wealthy lived in Westmount and had little or nothing to do with the English in Verdun, NDG, Griffintown, or elsewhere in the city of Montreal.

It's also curious that in 1926 AJM Smith published a poem entitled "The Shrouding", seven years before Kennedy published his book with this same title. Was there some conflict between them because of this? Small things divide poets! A friend published a poem with the same title as one of my poems and I always wondered what that was all about. BTW, his poem was inferior to mine... But I also published a poem entitled "Heirloom" after reading AM Klein's poem "Heirloom"; with its allusion to Klein my poem was to honour the older poet and it was published years (in the mid-1970s) after Klein's death. Was Kennedy making some kind of a comment, positive or negative, about Smith or the poems that Smith was writing by using Smith's poem title for his book?

I also question some aspects of Patricia Morley's biography of Kennedy; she treats Kennedy in a benign way, but you also get the feeling that she thought of him as her personal pet project, she was writing his biography and she was proud to have him captive. She insinuates herself into his life story and becomes a part of Kennedy's biography. She comments that there is no biography of AJM Smith; Anne Compton's A.J.M. Smith, Canadian Metaphysical  (1994) is not a biography but a discussion of his work. Kennedy has a biography and the biography was a big deal for Leo Kennedy as it would be for any poet. It must have made him more impressive with his family and with other poets, it also returned him to public attention. I doubt we would pay him as much attention as we are (for instance this essay) if the biography hadn't been published, it raised interest in Leo Kennedy, poet. Kennedy was serious about the biography but he must have realised how little he had achieved in poetry; indeed, later he has difficulty collecting any archival material when requested to do so. There are no extensive Leo Kennedy Fonds; he came up with very little archival material.

Now, I'm just thinking about Leo Kennedy and trying to figure him out and maybe he's not a trickster at all. One of the things critic do, one of the things some readers do, is try to figure out some explanation of the writer or the writer's work that he or she is currently reading. Another thing is to build on what we read, to develop some of the ideas we read and make them a part of out own insights into life. We find something curious, or something that appeals to us, or something that deepens our feelings and understanding about life, or we find something that speaks to us as human beings and we need to explore that writer or his or her work for ourselves, to apply it to our own understanding of life. That's what I've tried to do here.

Note: Kennedy may have published a second book in 1972 or 1992, Sunset in the States published by Diane Press; this seems to be a summary of some kind of legislation in Michigan, it is not mentioned in Morley's book on Kennedy. Perhaps it is not Kennedy's work but wrongly attributed to him.

18 January 2018

"Drummer Boy Raga" and Cut-ups

Vehicule Poets at Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University
giving a group reading on 26 April 2018

Like a collagist, selecting and snipping, Stephen immersed himself in the text, emerged with bits and phrases words, even syllables. Sometimes, his selection was to introduce fragments of what was to come, sometimes a reflection (refraction) of what had just passed. His breaking up the text in this fashion turned the piece in on itself, its meditative aspect. The work was now reaching inward as well as outward. He did not add one original phrase, not one external element, yet his contribution was instructive. In visual terms, he zoomed in on the fabric, the material, offering the work as “object”, built with breaths, words, thoughts. 

                                                    —Tom Konyves on “Drummer Boy Raga: Red Light, Green                                                         Light” (Poetry in Performance, The Muses’ Company, 1982) 

By chance, I just reread Tom’s commentary on my participation in “Drummer Boy Raga: Red Light, Green Light”, a poetry performance we gave at Vehicule Art Gallery, on April 16, 1977. I believe the project was originated and coordinated by Tom Konyves; the performance included John McAuley, Ken Norris, Tom Konyves, Endre Farkas, Opal L. Nations, and Stephen Morrissey. My participation in writing the text amounted to cutting-up what others were writing. Then the cut-ups were assembled and returned to Tom who distributed the new work to the next person. These were my first published cut-ups. Finally, as a group, we performed the completed “Drummer Boy Raga: Red Light, Green Light”. Thinking back, this must also have been our first written group project as the Vehicule Poets; the next group collaboration would be A Real Good Goosin', Talking Poetics, Louis Dudek and The Vehicule Poets (Maker Press, Montreal, 1981). This was an interview or dialogue between Louis Dudek and the seven of us young poets. We were known as the Vehicule Poets because we all hung out and organized poetry readings at Vehicule Art Gallery. Our first group anthology, The Vehicule Poets (Maker Press, Montreal, 1979) wasn’t a collaborative work as such; it was an anthology of our work as individual poets, not work written in collaboration with each other. And now, here is Tom’s text, from above, cut-up: 

Like a collagist, selecting and snipping turned the piece in on itself, its meditative emerged with bits and phrases words, inward as well as outward. he did not add was to introduce fragments of what was element, yet his contribution was instructive (refraction) of what had just passed. His fabric, the material, offering the work as Stephen immersed himself in the text thoughts. even syllables. Sometimes, his selection aspect. The work was now reaching to come, sometimes a reflection. In visual terms, he zoomed in on the breaking up the text in this fashion “object”, built with breaths, words,