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Robert Guy Scully

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On Sunday, April 17, 1977, five months after the fist time the Parti Québécois took power under René Lévesque, journalist Robert Guy Scully was published in the "Outlook" section of The Washington Post. The piece was called "What It Means To Be French In Canada". Two columns of front page of the section and an entire inside page were devoted to the article. He called the French Quebecois nation incurably "sick". "No one would want to live there who doesn't have to," he wrote. "There isn't a single material or spiritual advantage to it which can't be had, in an even better form, on the English side of Montreal."

He claimed that in Montreal's Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district, what he called one of the "Harlems" of French Montreal, "[...] the people are afraid to see a doctor, or to even call one. They might try the left-over pills from the neighbor's old prescription. But they would be terrified of stepping out of their dark, greasy kitchens into bright, clean hospitals. [...] Some of the mothers will even keep their youngest at home, afraid of losing the last one to the world outside. So this child will grow illiterate, and the grown-ups will be afraid to answer the phone, in case the school board calls."

The article said that "the Quebec civil service, in many instances, [is] a corrupt banana-republic bureaucracy" and that the people of Quebec were urged "never to buy Heinz ketchup or other such 'foreign' products." Scully deems the vitality of 1970s Quebec society to be the fruit of an "extrordinary neurotic creativity" but, also, that it "means nothing." He summarizes his opinion in these few words: "Quebec is small and isolated. That will never change: a cripple could no more grow his legs back."

This article was featured in Jean-François Lisée's In the Eye of the Eagle, an extensive study of American attention over Quebec and its independence movement. In the chapter "A Voiceless Quebec", Lisée advances if such prominence was given to such a "singular and unrepresentative a view of Quebec society" was partly caused by "the perfect absence of a Quebec voice in North America's news services, and the frightening degree of ignorance in the American press on the subject of Quebec." Lisée points out that these ideas were also presented by the Editor-in-Chief of the section, Al Horne, in a speech at a Washington symposium.

Chronology

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See also: Timeline of Quebec history