In the class debate, the sovereigntists argued that independence was necessary for Quebec to reach its potential and achieve the status and dignity to which it was entitled. As the son of a proud Québécois francophone who had served as Canada’s PM for more than fifteen years, and considering that another Quebecer, Brian Mulroney, was our current PM, I was at a loss to see how the province was being shortchanged. I saw no conflict between being a proud Canadian and a proud Quebecer. In fact, all I could see were the things that Quebec would give up by going it alone, everything from the Rockies to the Cabot Trail. Not to mention cutting loose the more than a million francophones living in New Brunswick, Northern Ontario, southern Manitoba, and hundreds of communities elsewhere across Canada. The compelling economic arguments against breaking up Canada at a time when the world was moving toward freer trade and more open borders clinched the deal for me. Where were the benefits? What would be the rewards? Seeing none, the whole sovereignty argument seemed extremely weak to me.
And fundamentally, even from the perspective of protecting the French language and culture, I always understood that rather than build walls to keep everything else out, it would be much better to open up, share, and radiate outwards to strengthen our identity.
But logic didn’t apply. This was the 1980s, after all, and it was fashionable for young Quebecers to strike militant separatist poses, although those sympathies were not limited to students. Indépendantistes probably accounted for the majority of the faculty at Brébeuf. To their credit these professors avoided using their position to indoctrinate us into any particular ideology, with the exception of a history teacher named André Champagne, who did his best to convince us he was a Communist. He even kept a bust of Lenin in the corner and extolled the virtues of the USSR. But the more you probed his views, the more it became clear that much of it was an act. M. Champagne wasn’t some dreamer out of the 1930s promoting a worker’s paradise. He was a contrarian, challenging the settled views held by the bourgeois students passing through his classroom. His goal was to stimulate us, to get us to examine and justify what we were taking for granted in our capitalist world.
Like the other teachers at Brébeuf, M. Champagne generally hewed to the formal teaching style favoured by the school, but there were times when he liked to get into spirited verbal sparring matches with his students. He also had a habit of flinging erasers at us in a friendly way if we were nodding off, a trick I would borrow years later when I became a teacher myself. André Champagne never persuaded me to become a socialist, but he did manage to open my mind to effective strategies for challenging my own students about what they thought they believed in.
During my years at Brébeuf I began to think about language in a different manner. To sovereigntists, language was a major political issue as much as a medium of communication. You were either an anglophone or a francophone, and each label aligned you with different cultural values and perhaps different goals for Quebec. Until then I hadn’t thought of myself as either a francophone or an anglophone; in my bilingual milieu in Ottawa, it simply hadn’t seemed necessary to define myself one way or the other.
At Brébeuf, and in Quebec generally, the climate made me mindful of the language I chose to speak, depending on whom I was speaking to and what the subject might be. With this new awareness I began to monitor the words that popped up in my thoughts and my dreams, at times second-guessing myself as I spoke. Were the words French? Should they be in English? Decisions I had once made without thinking were becoming deliberately conscious.
I was placed in the top category in our daily English instruction classes, along with just about every other student who came from a family with at least one parent who was a native English speaker. In the eyes of some, this made us Anglos. It didn’t matter if we were equally fluent in French or came from an at least partly francophone family; if you spoke unaccented English well, many kids at Brébeuf considered you an Anglo.
I felt a natural kinship with these bilingual students, so it’s no coincidence that I made a lot of my best friends among this group. To these guys, the cachet of my last name rapidly wore off. Soon I was just Justin, a friend from class. Decades later, these same friends are the ones who tell me the straight, unvarnished truth. They are the people I can count on one hundred percent to tell me when I am full of it. We all need friends like that.
When I was about seventeen, we went out together for one of our first fancy meals at an upscale restaurant in downtown Montreal. Like most things seventeen-year-old boys do, this outing was organized to impress girls. I ordered canard au vinaigre de framboise and made a show of inhaling deeply as I emitted the words to the waiter. To this day, those friends still talk of “kicking the canard out of Justin” if I appear to be letting things go to my head. It’s a great reality check. Over the years that followed, whether I was a student or teacher, camp counsellor or party leader, these good friends have always treated me the same. To them I am, and always will be, “just Justin.”
I have always loved both languages, but I came to realize how very different they are, not just in the way they permit a person to express thoughts but also in the way they guide the creation of those thoughts. For example, French grammar requires you to know how your sentence is going to end before you start to speak or write, which imposes a certain rigour on your expression. If your sentence begins this way, it must end that way. This is why so many French intellectuals seem to be channelling their inner Proust even when they are speaking casually to a mass audience on television.
In English, I always felt that the grammar allows you to get to almost any conclusion, regardless of how you start your sentence. Halfway through your sentence, you can change the direction of your thought without breaking too many rules. There can be a certain sloppiness in English that is almost non-existent in proper French, where the complexity of concordance between words and within clauses requires sustained attention. Perhaps this explains why my father, who was never one to mince words on such matters, told me that he found me less persuasive in English compared to in French. Many years later I thought about his comment when I took part in a debate that the McGill Debating Union conducted in French. Afterwards, my teammates told me I was a more formidable debater in French than in English, which, coming from anglophones, I took as a backhanded compliment.
Like many bilingual people, I sometimes flip an internal switch from one language to the other in a seemingly arbitrary way. For example, I do math only in French, because all my life, that was the language of my math classes. When I was teaching French out west, and confronted the challenges associated with getting Vancouver teenagers interested in studying a language that seemed so far from their daily lives, I used to point out the more romantic aspects of the French language. When telling someone that you miss them, you say “Tu me manques.” So you is the subject of the sentence—as opposed to the English equivalent, “I miss you,” in which it’s all about me. It may seem a subtle difference, but hormonally charged teenagers sure got it.
My theorizing on the language of love did little to land me a girlfriend during my early years at Brébeuf. In this department, I was very much a late bloomer.
I moved to Montreal just as adolescence started to kick in, and suddenly there I was, in a city where I knew no girls, attending an all-boys school. When we finally were introduced to girls in the upper grades, it was obvious that the social habits that had made me popular with ten-year-old girls back in Ottawa were considered spectacularly uncool by girls of sixteen.
Brébeuf was an all-male school until 5e secondaire, or Grade 11, when girls were admitted. Practically overnight, 60 girls were tossed into a class of 140 boys. At the time the policy was introduced, this must have seemed like a fine, progressive idea. But on the inside, it felt more like a sociological experiment performed by researchers intent on studying the habits and peer-group advancement strategies of teenagers.
I remember a girl named Gen
eviève, whom I had first met during my time at Lycée Claudel, the French school I briefly attended in Ottawa. We had been pals back then—she was not a girlfriend but certainly a girl who was a friend. Although only four years had passed since we last met, those years from twelve to sixteen marked what was probably the most significant period in our young lives of maturity and personality development. As I walked toward her, I realized that I had lost all capacity to interact with girls. The very prospect of opening my mouth suddenly seemed terrifying. I had no “game.” I also made no impression on her, or at least not one that might be considered positive.
What I needed, I decided, was some unique way of establishing a social identity in this new and uncertain environment. Something that would make me stand out and show that I refused to follow the crowd. Any crowd. This led to my wearing bright green suspenders with jeans and pink flamingo ties. It was not the best decision I have ever made. My intent was to strike an ironic posture, but I never quite pulled it off. I also had a passion for nerdy showmanship, sometimes bringing in juggling balls, a magic kit, or even my unicycle to put on shows for my friends. (Yes, I owned a unicycle.) At the time, I thought this was all pretty cool. In retrospect, not so much.
It hardly helped when I developed terrible acne, something my dad had similarly endured during his own awkward teenage years. Within a few short months I went from being—or attempting to be—uninhibited to being morbidly self-conscious. The skin condition became so severe that I was prescribed Accutane, a fairly serious acne medication. My father, whose stoic nature prevented him from taking even an Aspirin in those days, was opposed to my taking the drug. This led to yet another argument between my parents. My mother eventually won this one, and I’m glad she did. It took a double course of treatments, but eventually the medication did the trick.
If I get compliments on my looks these days, I appreciate the kind words, but I always have a vague sense that people are just being polite. It’s a holdover from those adolescent years at Brébeuf, and I suspect it’s pretty common among folks who had a difficult time with their appearance in their teenage years.
Until the day girls were introduced into the mix, the boys at Brébeuf who earned the most respect from their peers were exceptional at either sports or academics. This made the captain of the hockey team more or less on a par with the smartest kid in the class. It was a whole new ball game with girls around. Forget your academic achievements. Now there was a high premium on athletic prowess, social graces, and comedic ability. The boys who had scored points with their brains were left on the sidelines.
Along with this change in status came a move by the boys at Brébeuf to merge into different cliques. Some boys identified with the chess club, others saw themselves as jocks, some were cool jet-set kids, and so on. My own group was composed of the bilingual kids I had bonded with in my first years at the school. My other qualities gave me limited entry into some groups. I was athletic enough to connect off the field with the jocks, and I had a big enough brain to qualify as an occasional bollé. I had also travelled enough to hang out with the types who skied in Europe. But my core group of friends—Marc Miller, Ian Rae, Mathieu Walker, Greg Ohayon, Allen Steverman, Navid Legendre—remained from my first years at Brébeuf.
We had no real group leader—we were just a collection of complementary personalities—but I often had a plan for some project or other. I organized us into a singing group to compete in a Brébeuf talent competition. I led us on adventures into abandoned buildings, and once even took the group on an expedition down into Ottawa’s storm-drain system. From that group of strong individuals, I learned that even moments of leadership are earned through ability and ideas, and that authority is seldom conferred.
A lot of our socializing took place at Mathieu Walker’s house, on Avenue Marlowe in Montreal’s Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood. Matt’s parents never seemed to mind having a bunch of teenagers in the house. Also, their kitchen tended to be well stocked with junk food, which made it even more attractive. (Ironically, Mathieu is now a cardiologist.) In later years Mathieu’s home became our staging area for our forays into Montreal’s nightlife.
Inviting the gang over to my house was always an option, although my father didn’t usually encourage it. It wasn’t all that appealing, either. Our house on Avenue des Pins was a huge, austere art deco creation that dropped down the side of the mountain from the entrance on the top floor. Directly below that was Dad’s floor—off-limits to all but him—which featured his bedroom, his study, the library, and a long hallway lined with photographs and other mementoes from world leaders. Below that was our floor, and then a basement with a subterranean passage that led to the swimming pool in an annex. Adding to the somewhat less than kid-friendly atmosphere, my father imposed rules about the language to be spoken on each floor. The very top floor, for instance, was exclusively French. So if he heard my friends and me there speaking English in the kitchen or living room, we could expect a reprimand. Having lived with that somewhat arbitrary discipline all my life, I found nothing especially strange about it. But to my friends, it was truly odd.
On our floor, Sacha, Michel, and I had our separate bedrooms and a family room. This floor of the house was always loud with banter, horseplay, sibling disagreements, and a lot of laughs—basically boys being boys. As much as we were developing into different people, the bond between us was solid, and we supported each other through those teenage years. But it didn’t stop my friends from being surprised by what went down in the family room. Our family room featured overstuffed low couches and tumbling mats that Dad had bought to encourage our regular pastime: play-fighting. We were raised in judo, and so did a lot of grappling. But then we’d grab sticks and wooden swords and just go at each other in a more or less controlled fashion. There were few rules, other than no punches in the face and no biting, and if someone got hurt, we stopped. The first time my friends saw us wrestle, they were shocked by the intensity of our bouts. As I said, by this time in life, it was clear that Sacha, Michel, and I had very different, and sometimes conflicting, personalities. Throwing down with each other had always been our way of working through the rough justice of the nursery.
There were times when our arguments really did get out of control. I remember one time we drove our father’s Volvo down to our mother’s cottage at Newboro Lake, with me at the wheel. I was about eighteen, Sacha sixteen, and Michel fourteen. For some bizarre reason, we got into a raging argument about who would control the car windows. It was the kind of thing that only teenagers could get riled up about, but it got so heated that I pulled over to the side of the road and we all piled out of the car to have a real, not play, fight. Michel and Sacha teamed up to pin me to the ground, there was much grumbling and many insults, and eventually we cooled off enough to get back in the car and tolerate each other for the rest of the trip.
When we returned to Montreal and our father heard about the incident, he read us the riot act. “No matter what happens, the three of you need to stick together,” he told us, adding that he would not tolerate hearing anything like it again in the future. For his sake, we did our best to avoid another roadside fight.
Only now that I have children of my own do I realize how painful it is for a parent to see his children fight with one another, and why our skirmish upset him so much.
I brought my lifelong love of athletics to sport at Brébeuf, playing lacrosse and regular pickup games of full-contact football. I even had a brief stint on the gymnastics squad. Still, at Brébeuf, as in Canada generally, hockey was king. You might think that my father, the archetypal Canadian outdoorsman, would have encouraged us to throw on some pads and grab a stick while we were still in kindergarten. But that wasn’t the case. From the beginning, he had emphasized the importance of testing yourself individually, seeing how much you could do and how far you could go on your own, not counting on others to bail you out. He had also decided that he would not spend his early-morning h
ours shivering at a rink watching a bunch of peewee players ankle-skate up and down the ice. Many of my friends’ families chose hockey, but we chose cross-country and downhill skiing according to my father’s wishes, and because it was something we could do as a family in the outdoors.
I also suspect that the somewhat arbitrary rules of hockey and other sports grated against his universalist sensibilities. It was more important to him, as an outdoorsman, to follow the immutable rules of nature rather than those imposed by a man with a whistle and wearing a striped shirt. When we learned to skate it was on the Rideau Canal, with nary a puck or hockey stick in sight.
Things grew worse when I showed up at school with my hockey equipment. Having the correct—or fashionable—brand of stick is a very important mark of being cool among Canadian high-school students. I had hoped my father would take me to a sporting goods store where I could buy the brand that would assure my admission into my peer group, even if my hockey skills wouldn’t. Instead, he took me to the storage room and pulled out a strange blue piece of wood that he had received on a state visit to Czechoslovakia several years earlier. He assured me it was a hockey stick, and a good one too. I had my doubts. I don’t recall the brand, only that the name was unpronounceable and included a variety of obscure accents above the letters. This would definitely not make me cool.
In the school rink I felt like the kid from Roch Carrier’s story “The Hockey Sweater.” Instead of wearing the wrong jersey, I was wielding the wrong stick. My friends took one look at that stick and instantly knew I wasn’t going to make the school team.
Common Ground Page 6