Barrel Strength

By now you may have seen this. A poor Quebecois artist goes to the star chamber in Ottawa to beg for funding for his music festival, to be met by a group of anglophone judges who neither speak French nor understand the cause the poor artists represents. It is preposterous and effective. Why effective?

Because it exploits every French-Canadian cliché’d perception of les Anglais.

a) poor misunderstood French Canadians in an alien environment

What can you say about a person whose image of Ottawa dates from 1916? When was the last time you met a unilingual English Canadian in an arts funding job in Ottawa? 1963?

b) no French Canadian bureaucrats in Ottawa

When was the last time a French Canadian artist dealt with a unilingual arts bureaucrat? Answer: possibly the last time he dealt with a fellow French Canadian from the Canada Council.

c) Anti-sexual English puritans

This is the racial stereotype that is believed by the French with all their heart and soul: the English are anti-sexual, we French have  a better  sex life, they are too hung up. Perhaps some people confuse the fact that English Canadians shut the bathroom door when they use it with embarrassment about what to do in the sack. Having been to bed with several dozens of English Canadian women I have never noticed any reluctance to get at it. Maybe my sample size is too small. I had better work on that.

Imagine the equivalent.

The English Canadian cultuiral festival seeks funding from a Quebec government agency. Mrs. Watson and Mrs Dobell got to Quebec City to speak to officials of the Agence Culturelle Québécoise.

a) The officials speak no English, of course, and are aggressively rude to the ladies for having the tenmerity to ask for funding for their Lennoxville arts festival which is in English.

b) they smoke and make offensive sexual references throughout.

c) they rail against the applicants for humiliating them in 1763 on the Plains of Abraham, and because a unilingual  relative of theirs was spoken English to in Eaton’s department store in 1957.

Come to think of it, except for the indoor smoking, what have I exaggerated?