They protest too much too often

As a nation of immigrants from every background, on top of two official languages and hundreds of different native groups, it was inevitable that Canada would be unusually concerned with the status of minorities. And so although this country has perhaps the most comprehensive system of guarantees and protections for minorities in the world, it is perhaps the most acutely attuned to its failings in this regard. Rare is the week that passes without an official apology to this or that minority group for some historic wrong, or an accusation of "systemic racism" in this or that institution, or a study documenting the inequities racial or ethnic minorities suffer in hiring or in the media. Some of these have merit, some are overstated, some are completely without foundation. But while not everyone would agree on how serious the problem of "social exclusion" remains, it is everywhere permissible to raise such concerns. Everywhere, that is, except Quebec. After the arrest of 17 suspected terrorists in Toronto last spring, a great many silly statements were made to the effect that their alleged desire to commit mass murder was the consequence of racial prejudice, or the alienation of Muslim youth -- or for that matter, multiculturalism. Much rousing debate ensued, but nobody took the suggestion that society at large was somehow to blame as a personal affront, or demanded apologies from those responsible for printing such outrageous calumnies. A great many more, and sillier, statements were made in the wake of the shooting at Dawson College last month, attributing the homicidal urges of the murderer to, variously, video games, or Goth Web sites, or the war in Afghanistan, or Reaganomics. So let us have done with the notion that the reason Jan Wong's contribution to this lexicon excited such fury amongst Quebec's political class had anything to do with the peculiar idiocy of her analysis: namely, that the province's repeated experience of such incidents in recent years, in each case at the hands of members of racial minorities, might have something to do with the marginalization of these groups in Quebec society. Had the same atrocity occurred in Manitoba, and the same explanation been advanced, it would have been discussed, and dismissed, as the baseless theorizing that it is. It would not have been denounced as an "insult to Manitobans," complete with unanimous resolutions of the House of Commons and letters from the premier and the prime minister. Or to make a more immediate comparison: when Francine Pelletier, the Quebecois journalist and filmmaker, theorized that the spate of shootings might have something to do with the Conquest ("I think it's an existential thing -- I think it has to do with the unfinished state of business of Quebec"), or when an article in Le Devoir, noting that two of the shootings occurred in English-language institutions, suggested the common link might have been their greater exposure to American culture, no one was inspired to similar heights of lividity. In fact, no one even noticed. No, what the province's political class found so intolerable was not the suggestion that the marginalization of ethnic minorities in Quebec might have contributed to the murders, but the idea that ethnic minorities were marginalized at all. Ms. Wong is not, after all, the first to feel the wrath of Quebec's media and political elites. Before l'affaire Wong there had been our own Barbara Kay, and before her Mordecai Richler, and Esther Delisle, and Bill Johnson: each subjected to the most extraordinary campaigns of vilification, as uniform as it was unsparing, for having suggested, in one way or another, that the province's overwhelmingly white, French-speaking majority might have a problem with minorities. I will leave to one side whether their critiques are well-founded. I might simply note in passing that, had a former premier of Ontario complained that "the white race" was not having enough babies, or had another former premier of Ontario accosted a hotel worker of Mexican origin, accusing "you immigrants" of having voted the wrong way, or had yet another former premier of Ontario fulminated that "we" had been defeated by "money and the ethnic vote" -- and not a century ago, but all within the last decade or so -- they would not today be revered as icons and statesmen, even within their own party. And certainly it is a strange rebuttal to Ms. Wong's accusation of intolerance to portray her, as Le Devoir did in a cartoon -- buck-toothed, wearing thick glasses and eating a fortune cookie! Why was it that the first thing about Ms. Wong that occurred to the cartoonist, the quality he assumed was most germane to the debate, was her Chineseness? Why did he assume his readers would see this as funny? Why didn't that stir any outrage? Or more to the point: Why did Ms. Wong's article? Why rage, specifically? OK, so you're insulted. Why does it follow that your response should be a hair-pulling tantrum? Why not puzzlement, or laughter, or ennui? Or rather, why should rage be the approved response? Anyone can get a little hot under the collar. But most of us soon sheepishly recognize it as a childish emotion: futile, self-pitying, and, since it is instantly overtaken by self-consciousness, largely false. This is hardly unique to Quebec. All over the world, people are perpetually boiling with rage at this or that insult, real or imagined: Muslim radicals, Harvard feminists, on and on. But I can think of few places on Earth where the entire political class erupts in such fury, with such unanimity, at such regular intervals, over the comments of a single individual.