The New York Times

November 27, 1998

 

Canadians, Estranged, Even in Their Own Pop Culture

By ANTHONY DePALMA

ONTREAL -- Anywhere he goes in Quebec, from a secluded restaurant on the east side of Montreal to the hardware aisles at the Canadian Tire store in suburban St. Leonard, Claude Meunier makes heads turn.

But if the wildly popular star of Quebec's most watched television program, and the man who helped make Quebec the only place in Canada where Pepsi outsells Coke, happens to step across the provincial border into Ontario or anywhere else in Canada, Meunier's puckish face elicits not the slightest whisper or buzz of excitement.

Language, of course, divides the predominantly French-speaking province of Quebec from most of the rest of Canada -- and the rest of North America, for that matter. And since Meunier's comedy and commercials are done in French, his audience is basically limited to the province.

But language doesn't completely explain how different this province is from the rest of the United States' largest neighbor, or why at times like these -- when the province is holding critical elections that will determine whether there will be another referendum on separation -- the rest of Canada seems to be so at wit's end trying to understand what is going on here.

Take, for instance, something as trivial as traffic. Quebec is the only province in Canada that does not allow drivers to make a right turn at a red light. It never has, in part because transportation officials believe it is not safe, despite the experience of the rest of the country, and most of the United States.

Quebecers stand out in many other ways. They smoke more, get divorced more and, according to one recent poll by the Southam Newspaper chain, are more stressed out than people in the rest of Canada.

More of them tend to be apartment dwellers, more of them rent their homes rather than own them and more of them rely on electric heat than anywhere else in the country, in part because Quebec produces more hydroelectric power than any other Canadian province.

"For Quebecers, to be different is good, even if it doesn't always make much sense," said Ted Nation, an advertising executive who lived and worked in Montreal for many years. "Being different helps them express who they are."

But more often than not, the differences are actually reflections of a deep and seemingly unbridgeable abyss that separates the 7 million Quebecers from the 22 million people in the rest of Canada.

"It's not so much a question of character as a perception of history," said Lise Bissonnette, a French-Canadian author and former editor of the separatist newspaper Le Devoir. "It has to do with the way Quebecers see their country and that's the basic difference."

Keep in mind that this is a province where every automobile license plate bears the fighting words "Je me souviens" -- 'I remember' -- and where many people have trouble thinking of Quebec as just another province like tiny Prince Edward Island. Quebec is, they insist, usually invoking the history of New France in North America, a founding partner in the very concept of the nation.

"Basically what makes Quebecers different is that we are trying to help our language and our culture survive, and this keeps us very much alive," said Meunier during a lunch-time interview just after he had finished filming the last episode of the season of his series, "La Petite Vie" (which roughly translates to 'The Daily Life').

The 47-year-old Montreal comic, whose success allowed him to buy a vacation house in Maine recently, said the tension of sustaining a small island of French in a sea of English speakers in North America gives artists and performers in Quebec a spirit that energizes their work.

That is one reason why the arts flourish in Quebec, even though very little makes its way into the rest of Canada. According to one recent survey, of 3,500 French books published in Quebec, only 40 were translated into English. And the record for translating English into French is just as grim.

Quebecers discovered the television program "Baywatch" two years later than everyone else in North America, and they still don't know who Ally McBeal is because the show isn't dubbed in French yet. While most of what the rest of Canada watches on television is produced in the United States, more than 70 percent of prime time programming in Quebec is produced in Canada.

And Meunier's weekly television sitcom is the most popular of all. The streets are deserted in many French-speaking towns when the show is broadcast Monday evenings at 7:30. Several episodes this season reached over 3.3 million viewers, out of 4 million people who were watching television at the time, giving the show the equivalent of a weighty 74 share. By contrast, the recent widely watched interview with Dr. Jack Kevorkian on "60 Minutes" got a 24 market share.

"La Petite Vie" began as a proposed 15-minute filler sketch before the Saturday night hockey game on the French service of CBC five years ago. Meunier, who was already a popular comedian -- and instantly recognizable in the province because of the successful soft drink commercials -- insisted that a full situation comedy based on homespun Quebec characters could succeed, just as the soft drink commercials worked because Quebecers recognized themselves in the spots.

His oddball comedy is a cross between All in the Family and The Simpsons, with him as the father of a strange family and his longtime comedic partner Serge Theriault as the mother. It is impenetrable to viewers outside of Quebec even if they can understand the heavily accented French.

"It's about life, about Quebecois life," he says, but it also stresses universal characteristics like jealousy, immodesty, vanity and arrogance. It also tends to poke fun at the personality faults that Quebecers know well, he said.

In the most recent episode, which aired just a week before the Nov. 30 elections for control of the provincial government, the characters addressed the serious question of independence in a way that Canadians elsewhere in the nation would have trouble understanding.

"Quebec would become a country like Sweden," boasts one character, repeating a promise separatist leaders have used to justify their attempts to create a country with only 7 million people.

"Then I wouldn't vote for independence," says the family's daft daughter, "because it would be full of Ikea things." She was referring to the Swedish company that sells furniture that has to be assembled.

"That would mean," she says, pursuing logic that makes Quebecers howl, but leaves other Canadians shaking their heads, "I might not be able to put together my own country."