Hello! I just donated to your riding association, although I happen to live in the PM's riding. I wonder what he is thinking? I did this to reward your courage in standing up for the constitution and voting against inexplicable party lines on Bill C-13. I am no lawyer, but it does seem dubious for a federal law to cite a provincial law that is itself still under judicial challenge as a possibly unconstitutional piece of legislation. I hope this small gesture helps the Liberal party understand the folly of incorporating the dishonest, cynical Quebec language law into Bill C-13, which I was impressed to see you voted against. Meanwhile others in your caucus chose either to put water in their wine as they answered the whip, or step down (such as the honourable MP for NDG-Westmount, Marc Garneau). I was born in Sherbrooke and now live in Montreal, with two children educated in the CSDM and a third (as well as a grandchild) educated in English school boards (in a half-half English/French curriculum). I have never lived outside of Quebec, yet have always felt less than fully welcome here, but also not quite at home in any other province I have visited - the classic anglo-Quebec conundrum, eh? I am afraid my French is good but not great. Meanwhile I am proud that my kids' French is as easy for them as their mother tongue. I imagine this is a similar story to others you have heard over the years, from more than a few of your own constituents. Learning French to the level required for much of this province's employers' needs is a great challenge for so many Canadians who are also English-speaking Quebecers; we try to learn and understand and speak and use French well enough to fit in. We hope to not only find our place, but to thrive in this environment that is becoming more and more unforgiving to those who cannot claim to be fully francophone.
So the last thing we need is for Ottawa to abandon the vision of a bilingual country.
Proficiency in one of the two official languages (but not the other) must not mean lowered expectations from our fundamental Charter rights if it is the "wrong language" of the two for the province in which they reside. I appreciate that you get this, and that you are (bizarrely) alone in the Liberal caucus in trying to maintain the integrity of the Charter in this way.
I recall my own MP, Justin Trudeau, celebrating the Charter's anniversary in earlier years as LPC leader, and I am gobsmacked that today he doesn't seem to understand the importance that his own father - and every other preceding LPC leader since - had placed in the inviolability of the Charter.
The Charter is the culmination of everything our ancestors built to distinguish us as a polity and it should be revered across the land, full stop. Allowing it to be degraded, and legitimizing its degradation by enshrining a provincial law that brazenly and even seditiously undermines it, is an abomination to the document signed in 1982 by QEII, and puts us subservient to any lickspittle Canadian-opportunist to wriggle their way up from the muck, be they a Bloqist or a Pollievre.
I attach here a picture of my great-great-great grandfather, Norman Murray, taken somewhere around what is now Cookshire, QC. He was a Scotsman by birth, pushed off his ancestral land by British loyalists; he and others of my ancestors from Ireland, Scotland and England all found their way to the Eastern Townships of Quebec, not necessarily as Empire Loyalists, but as people hoping to find a future in a fair and just new world, where the weight of old grievances about heritage might be shed, in favour of building a fresh future in a new world of egalitarian hope.
He did just that. My whole family line did, in fact: McCallums, Hodges, Richardsons, Stevensons, Cowans and others that landed in the Eastern Townships in the 18th and 19th centuries. My wife is a French Canadian with at least one family name of Scottish descent, but raised bilingual and comfortable in both the English and French communities - or if you will, our common, unlabeled, community. My 9-year old daughter's best friend, meanwhile, is a Nigerian immigrant who is striving to learn French (his Mom too) and adapting in an environment that sadly tells him systemic racism isn't a thing in Quebec, at least, according to the Premier.
In short, I don't want my kids or theirs to have to bear labels that render them somewhat less free than their fellow citizens. Listening to you in the local media, I feel that inherently you know how to make this case within your caucus, in a way that escapes the criticism of being hyperbolic or alarmist.
I hope you know there are many more Montrealers and Quebecers that applaud you and hope that we can keep the Charter inviolable (and indeed, restore the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms to its own original expression of collegial high-minded clarity), as all individual rights ought to be in a free and democratic society such as ours.
To see our rights subjected to blanket use of the notwithstanding clause - used so cravenly by the CAQ in Bill 96 - is not becoming of a supposedly modern constitutional monarchy. And if the constitution part is left to the whims of any populist government that comes along, then all we are left with is the other part. Now, I beg your pardon, but I don't believe King Charles III is at all up to the task, leaving us with a political black hole of gravitational heft to suck us all into itself. So my contribution to your riding association is meant both as a thank you, and to foster a little more oxygen for the fire in your belly.
As the Honourable Clifford Lincoln said, "rights are rights." Mr. Trudeau, copied here, I know you have bravely stood up for many politically difficult but important principles, and for that I remain a supporter. But how could you forget the Charter!? Mr. Housefather is right on this one.
Godspeed!
Scott in Montreal
ADDENDUM
Here on the 20th November, 2023, I now find myself rather at odds with Mr. Housefather - but on another matter.
Turns out he is a turncoat to justice, happy to make common cause with the fascistic Conservatives informed by their evangelical Christian doctrines that seek to bring upon the Apocalypse, and undermine the message of the Canadian Prime Minister, who is working to forestall genocidal treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza by the completely off-leash Israeli government under the criminal Netanyahu.
If Anthony Housefather had an ounce of integrity he would hold Netanyahu to the same smell-test as his own party leader.
The fact he has flown to Israel to support this criminally overblown, inhumane, response and its nakedly genocidal tendencies that level-headed Jewish scholars find they need to call out, leaves me heartbroken. What Hamas did on October 7 was absolutely horrific, but I don't want to live in a world where this overblown response from Israel is in any way justified.
This is the 21st Century. There is no supremacy of any race, creed, religion or mother tongue.
Enough!+
E
FUCKIN
NUFF
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