Becoming Quebeckers

I am still looking at the time period between 1976 and the first ‘sovereignty-association’ referendum in 1980. The academics I’ve been reading all agree that Québec’s English-speaking communities were too scattered and too diverse to consider themselves a group before they felt threatened by the PQ’s agenda and the looming referendum. After the PQ election there was a lot of work done to form a united front in order to contest the new language laws, especially as they related to schools and signs. A sociologist named Gary Caldwell argued that while organizations like Alliance Quebec offered the obvious advantage of strength in numbers, a more effective response to Québec’s growing nationalism might have been to concentrate on distinguishing Québec’s English-speaking communities from the continent-wide culture of English-speaking North America. He was convinced that without a clear claim to a particular identity in Québec, English-speaking Quebeckers would continue to be seen as outsiders in Québec, by the rest of English Canada and by the Québécois. It seems obvious that Shawville (and the ‘Old’ Pontiac) have a very strong claim to a particular identity with deep roots on the north shore of the Ottawa River. What is less clear studying Shawville’s history is whether you (The Equity’s readers) would say those roots were in Québec, or the Ottawa Valley, or somewhere else. Do you think of yourselves as Anglo-Quebeckers? Does being an Anglo-Quebecker connect you with other English-speaking communities in Québec? Or does it reflect your connection with this piece of geography?