Double Lafond (in French, it's a really bad pun)

ik - From Paul Wells:

What's odd about this Michaëlle Jean business is that all of these people who claim to be her husband's close separatist buddies are having such a hard time coming up with any proof.

Look: If tomorrow I announced my candidacy for the leadership of the Parti Québécois — and frankly, as of right now, they look like they could use the help — it would take an intern with an Infomart account about six minutes to compile 30 or 40 statements I've made on the public record to suggest I'm not exactly on board with the whole projet.

And yet here's Jean-Daniel Lafond, who looks a fair bit older than I feel and who's made his life as a communicator. And the people who claim to be his closest buddies can't come up with an unambiguously sovereignist statement from a gentleman who is reputed to be a bit verbose.
I find this odd.

René Boulanger, the author whose web musings are causing all the fuss, keeps saying everyone knew Lafond was a separatist pur et dur. In fact, apparently the guy couldn't shut up about it.

"Jean-Daniel Lafond kept up an abundant correspondence with many standard-bearers of Quebec independance: Gaston Miron, Michèle Lalonde, Gérald Godin and Jacques Ferron.

These exchanges of missives must certainly not have been about the weather, but rather to envisage the political changes that would be appropriate for Quebec. It's so obvious!"

Great. Where are the letters?

I don't know. We may see them. But for a guy who was supposed to be chanting his hatred of the anglo oppressor from every rooftop, Lafond has so far left a pretty scrawny paper trail.

Boulanger and his associates did dig up this excerpt from a preface Lafond wrote to his 1994 documentary about the FLQ terrorists, La Liberté en colère (Liberty Enraged): "Perhaps it is time to understand the root causes of the political cloud that has covered Quebec for almost a decade now, during which politicians of every stripe have all but obliterated the old dreams of liberty, confirming the triumph of technocrats over thinkers, of accountants over poets."

The worst that can be said for this is that it's pretty gassy: it says so little in so many syllables.

You don't wave stuff like this around as your smoking gun unless you're seriously short on smoking guns.

Elsewhere in the same preface (I'm getting all of this from the copious archives at the always-useful www.vigile.net site, incidentally), Lafond comes closer to outright support for the FLQ creeps. He says, of FLQ alumnus Francis Simard, "Our complicity was immediate, as though we had shared for a long time the secret reason for his exile, the profound injury that history had left in him and the great silence surrounding this moment of interior collision between the political and the intimate, which led one day to decide that a man should die." Again, I'm inclined to say that a guy who'll talk like this will say just about anything. But I'm not sure Truman Capote never said anything comparable about the two-bit thugs he got to know while researching In Cold Blood. A documentarian gets to know his subjects.

Now, it is true that that one of the old FLQ gang, Jacques Rose, did carpentry work in Lafond's library. It's not at all clear what Lafond was talking about when he told Boulanger that Rose had built a false bottom in the bookshelves to hide weapons. It may have been a really tasteless joke. It doesn't appear to have been the literal truth. But it's no surprise that an Outremont intellectual would make use of Jacques Rose's handiman services. Another FLQ ex-terrorist runs one of Quebec's most prominent publishing houses. I've always found this super-creepy, but as a vestige of the Quebec intelligentsia's sometimes-tiresome fondness for radical chic, it's essentially harmless.

Then there's an article Lafond wrote in Voir after Pierre Vallières died. Vallières had cooked up a theory that the federal government, not the FLQ gang, had executed Pierre Laporte in 1970. Lafond wrote that Vallières clung to this theory "as solid as a rock" and that it was "not the fruit of delirium" but of extensive research. But again, nothing in the Voir article amounts to an endorsement of Vallières' theory. And indeed, in other contexts Lafond has stuck to the more orthodox (read: less nutty-nutty-nutbar) assumption that it was indeed the FLQ gang who killed Laporte (see Lafond's comments about Simard, above).

Perhaps the most telling sentence in Boulanger's now-abundant oeuvre on the presumed allegiances of Jean-Daniel Lafond is this one, from the first of several screeds Boulanger published last week. On meeting Lafond, Boulanger writes, "I did not doubt he was an independantist; all Quebec intellectuals are, to varying degrees."

So there you have the articles of indictment against Lafond from the man who is working hardest to discredit him — with the avowed purpose, as Boulanger wrote several times in so many words last week, of provoking a backlash in English Canada to boost the fortunes of the Quebec independance movement. I read this record and I say, Lafond is probably a sovereignist. Probably. But I still see room for doubt.

Meanwhile, the fact remains that he's not the nominee, his wife is. That should also count for something in this debate. Should she be made to say how she voted in the 1995 referendum? I don't think so, even though I've met very few Quebecers who are ashamed to tell you how they voted. I'll certainly tell you how I voted: I voted No. But we have the secret ballot in this country for a reason.

Boulanger or some other Péquiste may find something more damning from Lafond in the days ahead. But as of tonight, Sunday night, I've found a lot to suggest Lafond is a bit of a windbag and nothing that, in my personal opinion, invalidates his wife as a very good candidate for the post of Governor General.

There's only one thing I find galling about this debate, and it is the squalid bully tactics which the Prime Minister's Office has so far favoured in a bid to avoid any debate.

Paul Martin's communications director Scott Reid has favoured a shut-up-and-eat-your-spinach line at every point over the past week. How was the Jean selection vetted? "Understand this:
The governor-general is not selected from a scratch-and-win ticket," Scott said.

To the Globe and Mail, he said: "There is a rigorous process and when the Prime Minister says that he is satisfied and that we can all be satisfied that Madame Jean and Mr. Lafond are committed Canadians, we have good reasons to believe the Prime Minister." But how rigorous was this process? What are our good reasons? Hmm: To CanWest, Reid said, "We have no intention about asking the future governor-general, or her husband, about their former acquaintances or who they might have had dinner with 15 or 20 years ago."

So the GG-designate was selected by a process that, while rigorous, did not involve asking her about her acquaintances or scratching lottery cards. Beyond that, apparently you and I simply don't deserve to know any more. "People are just going to have to take that to the bank. We are not going to disgrace either of these people or their office by asking them to turn out their underwear drawer and justify their allegiance to Queen and country."

Memo to PMO: As of today, "these people" hold no office. They are ordinary Canadians who have been selected as prospective tenants in some pretty extravagant public housing. Their political beliefs are an object of legitimate debate, not least because if they get the job, they will be asked, several times a year, to officiate at cermonies in which new Canadians stand proudly to justify, if I may coin a phrase, their allegiance to Queen and country.

This corner has already dealt with Reid's contemptible comparison of Canadians who are worried about their next head of state's political allegiances with Stalinists. There are a number of good books about Stalinism, and if anyone in the PMO is confused I can pass along some suggestions. But one of its hallmarks was the violent suppression of political dissent.

Of course, this prime minister's suppression of dissent is never violent. So it is not Stalinist, merely pathetic. We are adults out here. Stop calling Ralph Klein and Stephen Harper and talk to us. We can have a conversation about the relationship between two Quebec intellectuals and the central Quebec political debate of the last 40 years.

Two obvious participants in this... conversation... would be Michaëlle Jean, who talks for a living, and Jean-Daniel Lafond, who talks for a living. To hide them away while the prime minister's lead talking-point craftsman tells "people" they are "just going to have to take" his talking points "to the bank" shows contempt for Michaëlle Jean, for Jean-Daniel Lafond, for the sophistication of the Canadian electorate, and for the high office which some of us still hope Michaëlle Jean will grace.

>> Send your comments to Paul Wells. Posted by Paul Wells at 10:28 PM 08/14/2005