Independence of Québec:About: Difference between revisions

The ''Report on the Affairs of British North America'', a seriously flawed document which we suspect is in fact a collection of various butched drafts originating from different people for its severe inconsistency in logic and language, nevertheless highlights a certain reality of the press which still exists today. Durham is wrong in that he underestimates the number of bilingual people among the litterate francophone class. The leader of the Parti patriotes, Pierre-Stanislas Bédard, James Stuart and later Louis-Joseph Papineau were well versed in the French and English language. Any person wanting to be of any real use in the parliament had to know English to read the English laws and French to read the French laws. Any person who wanted to be a lawyer had to be bilingual, unless they wanted to limit their practice to certain cases. Moreoever, the patriotism of the ''Canadiens'' commanded them to learn the English to the level of fluency. We are very much convince that those who "live[d] in a world of misconceptions" were monolingual anglophones who refused to pay any attention to the ''Montreal Vindicator'' run by Irishmen sympathetic to the patriotic cause of Lower Canada, their adoptive country.

The steady flow of calumny against the majority of Lower Canada, their representatives, their laws and institutions, in the tory press of the province is reported by Louis-Joseph Papineau in 1839 in those terms:

On May 15, 1848, Papineau writes ''L'Avenir'', he write:

Nothing would be more compromising for an honest man than to be often and highly praised by rascals. Nothing would tend to ruin the reputation of political integrity, of devotion to the cause of justice, of liberty and the rights of peoples of a man faster than the receiving of a word of praise, of a good compliment from the Transcript, or any other section of the tory press of Lower Canada as it has been since its first page in the ''Mercury'' to the last elucubration of the ''Courier''.

About the partisan lies that were daily featured in an important part of the English language press, it is interesting to know that they resemble those that today are part of the phenomenon known as ''Quebec bashing''.