Fat English Lady

A while back I reposted a story "You know you're a Montrealer when..." and this was one of them:

"You know the apocryphal story of the fat lady at Eaton's"

a·poc·ry·phal

1. of doubtful authorship or authenticity.
2. false: spurious

I've also read online that it is "legendary".

It is not a myth, doubtful or false though, it happened, it is fact.

It's just a small part of the delightfully civil discourse that is Quebec politics. The wider world never gets to see and hear the zany utterances of those in, um, charge. Must be the Anglos and ethnics fault...

This one comes from a particularly nasty period in Quebec's language war c. 1988-9 when zealots were measuring the size of English signs and lunatics were climbing the Mt Royal cross planting banners.

Suppressing the rights of a minority so the majority can feel comfortable is a thankless job but somebody has to do it.

In defense of the other side, there are reports that Eaton's (a now defunked department store, known in Quebec as Eaton as English names were banned...well, actually that depended who you were of course. McDonald's maintained its apostrophe [because of a suspiciously arbitrary loophole in Bill 101, allowing corporations to maintain their names, just not Canadian ones it seems]. The Quebec government may not have liked English, but they never crossed the Americans for long...) were attempting at persuade the government to maintain unilingual English signs, an equally stupid move.

So...

In 1985, LIB PIERRE MACDONALD defeated PQ MICHELLE DOZOIS by 22,368 votes. Appointed Minister of External Trade and Minister of Technological Development, Dec. 1985. Minister of Industry, Commerce and Technological Development, July 6, 1988. MacDonald remembered for "damned fat English lady" quote.

The irony of Mr. MacDonald's last name was not lost on observers of the time...

Mr. MacDonald gave this now famous quote to the newpaper la Presse during an interview sometime around January 17, 1989. He was referring to a time in Montreal when a French speaker couldn't be served in French at Eaton's (oh excuse me, Eaton), but would be met by "la maudite grosse anglaise" (a damned fat English lady). This delightfully candid quote summed up much of what drove the Quebec government's language policy.

Well! Hell hath no fury..

As a member of The Psychotic Hour said: "Fat English Lady to cosmetics, fat English lady to cosmetics...it would be like the dance of the hippos from Fantasia..."

You can hear that audio file here (featuring John Moore and Carmen Bouchard).

Ah Québec. Je me souviens, and you're damn well not going to forget either.

Btw, I am a proud owner of a P.Q. lapel pin, given to a journalist friend (who gave it to me) in this period by none other that Jacques Parizeau, the Sidney Greenstreet of Quebec..