FindArticles / Reference / American Review of Canadian Studies / Spring, 2004

The drama of identity in Canada's

francophone west
by Jane Moss
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The imaginary community that was French Canada began to disintegrate in the 1950s as Quebec
emerged from the Grande Noirceur, as historians have come to call the long and oppressive rule
of conservative Premier Maurice Duplessis, and entered into modernity. During the 1960s, the
social, economic, educational, and political transformation of Quebec that is known as the Quiet
Revolution, revived nationalist impulses and gave rise to new demands for Quebec sovereignty.
It is during this period that Quebec francophones begin to call themselves "Quebecois" rather
than "French Canadian," when they began to speak of la nation quebecoise rather than la nation
canadienne-francaise. These changes are momentous since they mark Quebec's determination to
shape its own future as a geopolitical entity, separate from the Acadians and the francophone
minority communities living in other Canadian provinces. The breakup of French Canada
became painfully obvious during the tumultuous 1967 meeting of the Etats generaux du Canada
francais. Turning its back on the old notion of French Canada, Quebec told Acadians and its own
diaspora "Hors du Quebec, point de salut!" Later, Parti Quebecois leader Rene Levesque put it
bluntly when he called French speakers outside of a separate and sovereign Quebec "dead
ducks." Novelist Yves Beauchemin was slightly less brutal when he called them "des cadavres
encore chauds" (cited by Paul Dube 80).

Francois Pare refers to these events as a "rupture catastrophique" and describes the impact on
francophones outside of Quebec:
L'emergence d'un Quebec quebecois et non plus "canadien-francais"
vers 1968 a jete les collectivites francophones vivant a
l'exterieur des frontieres quebecoises dans le desarroi, ce qui a
provoque la panique et produit chez elles le profond sentiment
d'avoir ete injustement trahies, deinvesties, debaptisees,
excommuniees. (Pare 1994, 47)

As Quebec divorced itself from French Canada, francophones in the other provinces were not
only faced with the prospect of losing their status as a privileged minority group in a
multicultural Canada, they were also forced to define new identities for themselves. While their
first reaction was to bemoan their plight as "orphelins d'une nation" (Theriault 11) and to accept
that assimilation was inevitable given their isolation and small demographic presence, they soon
began the difficult work of fashioning new identities as Franco-Ontariens or Ontarois, Franco-
Manitobains, Fransaskois, Franco-Albertains, and Franco-Colombiens. Given their history,
Acadians already had a strong sense of their separate national identity so it was less traumatic
for them to re-think identity in
regional terms such as Acadiens du Nouveau-Brunswick, de la Nouvelle-Ecosse, de l'Ile de
Prince Edouard, de Terre-Neuve. The question for them all was, as Raymond-M. Hebert puts it,
"Peut-on posseder une identite sans territoire?" (63). The Quebec government clearly did not
believe that it was possible and began to use the expression "[la] population canadienne" to refer
to what it called "[les] groupes deterritorialises" (Hebert citing Brisset 1988, 290).

In their groundbreaking study, Du continent perdu a l'archipel retrouve (1983), Laval University
geographers Dean Louder and Eric Waddell argued that what remains of l'Amerique francaise,
the lost continent, should be called Franco-Amerique: at the center is the mountain of Quebec
with its 80 percent majority speakers of French; the surrounding foothills are New Brunswick,
Eastern Ontario, and Northern New England with their large francophone minorities; beyond
that lies a string of francophone islands. The fragmentation of French Canada has also been
theorized by cultural geographers and sociologists (Theriault, Louder, Trepanier, Waddell,
Morisset, Stebbins, Gilbert, Dumont) who began to substitute the notion of les espaces
francophones for the older visions of l'Amerique francaise and le Canada francais. The term
espace is used to denote "un lieu d'action et de pouvoir," a space occupied and controlled by
speakers of French constituting a base for development. A francophone space is not a territorial
space, it is a linguistic and institutional space where one can live in French because of
francophone schools, radio stations, businesses, theaters, cultural centers, social and
governmental services (Gilbert 1998, 16, citing Cardinal; Hebert 65-66). In 1991, the leaders of
what had been la Federation des Canadiens francais hors Quebec but which changed its name to
la Federation des communautes francophones et acadiennes du Canada, issued a document
called Dessein 2000 calling for "un espace bien a elle' ... qui ne soit pas 'uniquement relie au
territoire, a la geographie'" (Dube 83):
"Il peut s'agir d'une region, du quartier d'une ville, d'une
paroisse, d'une ecole, d'une radio, d'un groupe d'alphabetisation,
d'une troupe de theatre, d'une entreprise electronique ... Cet
espace ne pourrait donc pas toujours se trouver identifie sur une
carte geographique." (Cited by Dube 83)

Whereas the old Canada francais was characterized by its fidelity to the French language, the
Catholic Church, and French cultural heritage, les communautes francophones are more likely to
be bilingual and secular. While Quebec could become officially unilingual and enforce laws to
insure the primacy of French, francophones living in the rest of Canada cannot be authoritarian
and exclusivist about language usage since they have to function in a majority anglophone
environment.

The break up of le Canada francais provoked multiple identity crises that often found expression
in literature and drama. While francophone writers and artists from outside Quebec had
historically gone to Montreal for career purposes if they had serious professional aspirations,
beginning in the 1970s many chose to remain in (or return to) regional centers in order to
participate in the creation of new cultural traditions based on new francophone identities. In
Moncton, Sudbury, Hearst, and Saint-Boniface, new publishing houses like les Editions
d'Acadie, Prise de parole, Le Nordir, and Les Editions du ble were founded to print novels,
poetry, and plays by Acadian, Franco-Ontarian, and Franco- Manitoban writers. Theater groups
in francophone communities across the country began to encourage homegrown drama, to
create regional theater to be performed in addition to French and Quebecois plays (see
Beauchamp et Beddows). Even with financial assistance from cultural agencies at the federal,
provincial, and municipal levels, it was not easy for regional theater groups attempting to make
the transition from amateur to professional status. Playwrights, actors, technical experts, and
spectators were often in short supply. The creation of the Association des theatres francophones
du Canada in 1984 (the name was changed from the Association des theatres francophones hors
Quebec in 1990), helped regional theaters immensely by creating a network that encourages
collaboration and co-production. In cooperation with the French theater section of the Centre
national des arts in Ottawa, the ATFC has sponsored festivals, workshops, and exchanges that
have invigorated theater professionals, creating bridges between the formerly isolated
francophone communities. To illustrate how the assertion of new francophone identities has
played out in regional drama, I'd like to take a few examples from two francophone communities
in western Canada: Saint-Boniface, Manitoba and Vancouver, British Columbia.

Saint-Boniface has historically been the center of French language and culture for all of western
Canada. Before Manitoba became a province in 1870, it had been home to a majority
francophone population made up of Metis (French-speaking Catholics of mixed Amerindian and
French blood) and people from Quebec. The massive influx of immigrants after confederation
has drastically altered the demographic situation and today francophones constitute less than
five percent of the province, according to Statistic Canada, concentrated in Saint-Boniface, part
of Winnipeg, and in a string of small towns across southern Manitoba. Franco-Manitobans are
rightfully proud of their institutions, including the College Universitaire de Saint-Boniface (now
the French-language branch of the University of Manitoba), founded as a Catholic university in
1818, and the Cercle Moliere of Saint-Boniface, founded in 1925, the oldest francophone theater
company in Canada. Longevity notwithstanding, Le Cercle Moliere did not produce any original
plays until the 1960s and its current artistic director, Roland Mahe, acknowledges that it was
only in the 1970s that an authentic Franco-Manitoban dramaturgy began to emerge (5).
Departing from the practice of staging plays from the French repertoire and taking cues from the
new, popular Quebec theater, Franco-Manitoban playwrights began to write plays about their
own community and in their own language. The French-Canadian identity crisis provoked by the
Etats generaux meeting in 1967 inspired these plays in which bilingual Franco-Manitobans act
out the difficulty of being part of a minority community, no longer part of a French-Canadian
nation. These Franco-Manitobans define Quebecois as Others just as they see immigrant and
English-Canadians as Others.

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