Full Comment: Barbara Kay: Stephen Harper and Margaret Atwood learn a hard lesson in Quebec (National Post October 14, 2008)

Full Comment

Barbara Kay: Stephen Harper and Margaret Atwood learn a hard lesson in Quebec

Montreal • Normally you’d have to seek far and wide to find a point of commonground between Stephen Harper and Margaret Atwood, the north and south poles of the Canadian national character. But we saw it in what was for me the campaign’s most interesting low moment, and as well the clumsily overturned hurdle that dashed Harper's hopes for a majority.

The arts cut decision wasn’t tied to any pressing need, but to that curious streakof personal vindictiveness Stephen Harper can’t control, this time aimed at all those snooty, Atwoody gala-trotting Liberals who enjoy belittling conservatives as the great culturally unwashed.

It was a because-I-can-that’s-why gesture, issued without forethought:  Five minutes’ prudent review of the potential fallout would have reminded Harper that any threat to cultural subsidies in Quebec, where the very air one breathes is expected to be subsidized by government, was the kiss of death.

But Stephen Harper’s petty-mindedness wasn’t a patch for poor judgment on Margaret Atwood’s breathtaking infantilism. What? Take away One’s subsidies and make One take day jobs, will you, you swamp-dwelling cretin? Quebec villagers, take up your cudgels and your torches. Run, run to the town hall and set it alight. Let blood flow in the streets!

Well, that was at any rate the metaphorical gist of Atwood’s call to Quebecers to vote for the Bloc to thwart a Conservative majority. Any vote for the Bloc is by definition a blow to Canadian unity.

But that’s artists for you. Red in tooth and claw only when their oxen are gored. Lest we forget, Atwood’s honour-thin, ego-rich conditional patriotism is old news. When the 1980 referendum on Quebec sovereignty ended in a decisive 60-40 defeat for René Lévêsque, Atwood confessed to a Quebec journalist that the separatists’ failure to split up Canada had dashed her hopes: “Many of us,” she said, “were in favour of Quebec’s right to self-determination. And you voted no.”

Poor Margaret, doomed to be disappointed yet again in 1995, although  to be sure by a much slimmer margin. Third time lucky with arts cuts?

Many anglophones were put off by Atwood’s reflexive amorality. Her diatribe probably had the effect in English Canada of convincing most Canadians that Harper’s view of artists as spoiled rotten parasites  was pretty accurate.

In Quebec, all it took was a wickedly satirical video of Harper by popular chansonnier Michel Rivard to overturn all the actual gains based on the delivery of real goods to Quebec in the past three years.

Quebecers stand by their artistic man. As Harper should know, in Quebec, culture is not event-focused -- a concert or a book-signing --  as it is in the rest of the country, but an organic phenomenon, a synonym for existential identity.

For irony, consider that if Harper had announced a cut to zero for English culture and a raise of fifty million dollars for Quebec  artists (i.e. French; anglophones don’t count as Quebec artists),  Gilles Duceppe would have said, Yeah, that sounds about right.

That’s to say, Atwood’s “solidarity” with Quebec artists is neither welcome nor returned. There will never be a “We-are-all-Margaret-Atwood-now” moment in Quebec.

Neither Stephen Harper nor Margaret Atwood would be pleased to know they have anything in common, but their mutual failure to understand that crucial Quebec axiom makes them partners in the political crime of wilful ignorance. Our national icons didn’t need puffins, they discredited themselves.

bkay@videotron.ca