frandroid

So reader, I have to make a confession. Even though I have lived in this city for 25 years, I had never until now visited the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. I have known for a long time that it is one of this city's premier alt-culture and print festivals, and it's been held within 30 minutes walk from my place as far as I can remember.

"Over the years, TCAF has drawn prominent names such as Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Daniel Clowes, Junji Ito, Chris Ware, Jillian and Mariko Tamaki, Chester Brown, Seth, Kate Beaton, Adrian Tomine, Kamome Shirahama, and Bryan Lee O'Malley, and we seek to serve as a platform for international artists to showcase their work."
( Rambling on about TCAF, zines, comics, local architecture )

I always find infuriating the way in which the English Canadian media depict separatists (when not depicting Québécois in general) as racists. What I hate is the implication that the separatists are racists and that the rest of people in Québec and Canada aren't. Today the noon news bulletin on the CBC was highlighting André Boisclair's "slanted eyes" faux-pas. Boisclair was commenting on how there were a lot of students from Asia at Harvard, that developing countries sent a lot of students to industrialized countries for their education, that China wasn't just sweatshops. So you could call it an unfortunate formulation, but the intent was not racist.

On the other hand, you have the leader of a party, Mario Dumont of the ADQ, who has spent most of the pre-campaign and a fair chunk of this campaign complaining about "reasonable accomodations" and "setting limits" to what the (other) cultural communities should be subjected to, playing the "foreign invasion" card in the most disgusting way. The debate in Québec has been whether it was fair to compare Dumont to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the Front National party in France, whose slogan is "La France aux Français". Does the CBC report on this barely closeted racist populist's campaign? Do the National Post, the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star have headlines about whether Dumont should present excuses? They don't, because the ADQ is not a separatist party, and it's not quite newsworthy when (quasi-)federalist leaders make racist statements. Québec is about to elect what's the equivalent of the Reform Party (and I said that instead of saying the Conservative Party, because the ADQ is at the stage Reform was at back in the 90s) and somehow, that's not news.

Vincent Marissal wrote about the same thing on his blog on cyberpresse.