Mollari

I'm in the process of planning a move to a new city. This new city is not very far from where I live now: in fact, it is merely across a river. Since the river in question is the Ottawa River, the other side of the river might as well be a different country. The language is different, the culture is different, and things are very different.

On this side of the river lies the city of Ottawa; on the other side is Gatineau. Rents are radically different between the two cities: there are three bedroom housess in Gatineau which rent for less than studio apartments in Ottawa. Even more bizarrely from my perspective, Gatineau has some of the highest rents in the entire Province of Quebec. Further, compared to the rest of the country, Quebec lacks a large number of the social problems which afflict us, and have a media landscape which is very different.

Frank discussions of class issues with regards to things such as carbon taxes in the news, a focus on public transit on the part of the media and governments, rather than the malign neglect which characterizes them in most of English Canada, or the fierce way in which Quebec law protects unions all contribute to a very different cultural and political landscape. The roots of this difference date back to the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, but I only just realized there is a reason for them. I need to thank Kimberly Steele for this: in response to a comment I made on the odd disparity between Quebec and English Canada, she said the following:

"My neighborhood is like that -- white salary classers see the signs in Spanish and the dilapidated buildings and they are like RUN FOR THE HILLS!! This place is the best kept secret in the Midwest. We have the best dive bars, we can walk to several grocery stores, and it's like 1978 with kids riding bikes in packs and neighbors who help each other out when needed. Meanwhile, their part of suburbs looks and feels like that horrific movie Vivarium."

This brings us to the Quiet Revolution. Prior to this, Quebec was much like the rest of Canada, aside from a large number of rural people who spoke French. In Montreal, then the largest city in Quebec, and indeed Canada, in the 1950s it was hard to find service in French; large parts of Quebec City were chiefly Anglophone, and the main language of government was English.

Major cities, such as Quebec City, Montreal, or Hull (today Gatineau) were all increasingly dominated by an Anglophone middle class, and increasingly ringed by suburbs. This changed in the 1960s, as the Quiet Revolution got underway. The Quiet Revolution was really only complete with the 1980 sovereignty referendum, but from the start it marked a shift: the language of power became French, and a new, French, political elite came into being.

This had an effect which was clear by the middle of the 1960s, which was that the English middle class bolted from the province. Meanwhile, many of the Francophones who do rise to the Middle class leave Quebec: the jobs tend to be elsewhere, and the government of Quebec is ruthless in preventing wealth consolidation, as part of their struggle with the English economic elite.

The result is that compared to the rest of North America and most of Europe, the middle class is small, and at the provincial level, holds less political power than their numbers would dictate. Since the middle classes usually hold far more power than their numbers would dictate, this is a major distinction between Quebec and everywhere else.