When I was a little kid, the only other French-Canadians I ever met in Vancouver were teachers, like my father.  Pierre Trudeau’s French Immersion had created a pedagogical gold rush wherever there wasn’t a ready supply of Francophones, and British Columbia – having less ‘Franco’ to it than a retrospective on Spanish anarchist heroes – was the lodestar for any Québecois with a bachelor’s degree who wanted to upgrade with a little teacher training.  Some of them, like my dad (who had until then been a suit salesman and RCMP dispatch operator) found that all along they’d carried with them an incredible, hidden aptitude for education, and flourished; others, like my dad’s friend Christian (who had been a butcher) were miserable.  Going to school in the lower mainland over the course of the 1980s and 90s, I had my fair share of the latter, and a tiny handful of the former.  Still, from childhood, a lesson was driven home:

Vancouver + French-Canadian = Teacher.

Years later, the equation had changed drastically:

Vancouver + French-Canadian = Squeegee Kid.

By the early years of the new century, whenever I heard the mother tongue of my paternal family being spoken near where I grew up, it wasn’t in staff rooms or from in front of chalkboards but from down, on the sidewalk, firing upwards, peppered amongst English-language requests for change.

In October of 2002, the Vancouver Courier ran a cover feature on the issue of homelessness and drug use among Québecois youth in Vancouver.  As with any exposé of racialized hardship, the publication strove for sensitivity, opting for the subtle headline ‘Coureurs de Squeegee.’  The protagonist of the story was Eric (pronounced ‘Eh-reek,’ presumably), an unsympathetic French staple-face who enjoyed trips out to Vancouver for heroin and crack in between bouts of sleeping at his mom’s in Québec city.  At the kernel of the piece was the estimation “by local Francophone organizations that one in every four homeless people in Vancouver under 25 is French-Canadian, the majority hailing from Quebec.”

Many had arrived, according to the story – and corroborating what was at the time conventional wisdom – after working as fruit-pickers in the Okanagan.  When I first read that, my mind went back to a French girl I once knew named Julie who, after arriving in Vancouver, had found work selling falafels downtown, but who, as a picker, had had her menstrual cycle thrown out of whack from the pesticides.  Francophones used to do a lot of fruit-picking in BC; so much so, in fact, that the Canadian Farmworkers Union – the Punjabi founded and led labour and anti-racist organization – used to produce some of its literature in the 1980s in French as well as English and Punjabi.  These days, it’s no longer a popular option for young Québecois, and the work is primarily done by Sikhs, as well as Spanish-speaking migrants from Mexico and South America.  But in the days when it was done by youngsters from La Belle Province, the combination of fickle, low-paid seasonal employment, plus the well-documented hostility to young Francophones in the interior, meant that a lot of poor French kids were landing helplessly in the city.  The changeover from Québecois migrants to other workers has made the once-ubiquitous French squeegee kid an endangered species today.

The Courier article also confirmed what I’d already picked up from conversations with my father, and cousins, and friends: that Vancouver holds a special place in the Québecois imagination.  The first French-Canadians to settle in the Lower Mainland were the mill-workers brought out to Mallairdville, which sits between today’s Coquitlam and New Westminster – but there was a darker side to Francophone migration even then.  The labourers were brought out in the midst of racist hysteria to replace cheap Sikh labour; the French-Canadians were just white enough to placate the racists, just cheap enough to be worth hiring.[1] Several decades later, some critics in Québec argued that in British Columbia, French-Canadians were just like any other immigrant group, and assimilated to the point of invisibility.[2]

Despite all that, it’s not unreasonable for Vancouver to have such a poetic, liberating place in the Québecois Imaginary – we’re the only big city completely outside of Canada’s history of French-English conflict; we’re the major town in the only province without a significant, pre-Confederation francophone population, and thus the only one without a painful, persecutory history of Orange language laws and cultural bullying (against the French, at least).  Just recently, my teenaged cousin in Laval expressed to me his suspicion that everyone in Toronto hates Québec; conversely, a young Québecois can pick up for an adventure in Vancouver and not feel like he’s surrendering to the bulldogs of chauvinistic federalism or even the anti-French cowboys of the Albertan West (I once met a French-Canadian in Edmonton who asked me, in muted French, if we were safe speaking Canada’s other official language). When he arrived in the mid-1970s, in the aftermath of the FLQ crisis, my dad was able to get a job as a waiter in the Stanley Park Dining Hall despite his lack of English, and in fact, he still brags about how much the English people loved his accent, rewarding his missing S’s and H’s with tips.  There’s far less cultural baggage for Vancouverites in this respect; the city just doesn’t think about Québec all that much at all, and that can be liberating.

In fact, Québec is so far off the Vancouver map, that when, in 2009, VANOC announced that they were bringing in high-priced Francophones to ensure the bilingualism of the 2010 winter games, they also announced that they were coming from France.  Though the Olympics gig is just about the definition of seasonal, I doubt the frogs will stick around after the games.  Too bad, really, because I love the idea of a squeegee kid speaking Parisian French.  That I’d pay to see, hostie.

[1] Normand Lester, Le Livre Noir Du Canada Anglais

[2] An Option for Quebec, essay