Author / William Brooks

by William Brooks

Examining the PQ

By Yarema Kelebay and William Brooks

On Thursday, May 15, 1980, days before the first Quebec referendum on “sovereignty-association” (separation from Canada) this article was published in the News and Chronicle, Montreal.

Before going to the polls on Tuesday let’s reflect awhile on the nature of the Quebec independence movement.

In March of 1975, Senator Patrick Moynihan former American Ambassador to the United Nations wrote an article for Commentary entitled “The United States in Opposition.” He pointed out that the modern world has witnessed three major ideological revolutions.

The American Revolution gave us the “minimal state” based on republican democracy and private enterprise. The Russian Revolution gave us the “total state” based on communism and a state controlled economy. The British Revolution gave us the “welfare state” based on the redistribution of wealth through parliamentary legislation.

The British Revolution, he said, began in 1947 when socialist Britain granted independence to socialist India. This act began the process of decolonization and the liquidation of the old European empires. Between 1947 and 1975 eighty-seven new nations joined the UN. More than half of these new nations were former British colonies.

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by William Brooks

“The English fact in Quebec” examined

By Yarema Kelebay & William Brooks

The following article review was published in the News and Chronicle, Montreal, Thursday, April 24, 1980.

An English edition of “le Fait Anglais au Quebec” by Sheila McLeod Arnopoulos and Dominic Clift was published by McGill-Queens University Press. On the eve of the Parti Quebecois independence referendum the book set out to define the Quebec Anglophone community in terms of its past, present and future perspectives.

According to reports Arnopoulos and Clift were to share the 1979 Governor Generals award for non-fiction in French. In the following review Kelebay and Brooks offer readers a second opinion on the book’s merits.

Under a timely title: “The English Fact in Quebec” Arnopoulos and Clift offer a rather tired thesis to Canadian readers.

Relying on highly tendentious sources, such as Canada’s senior Marxist historian, Stanley Ryerson and Montreal’s clever young iconoclast, Tom Naylor, they direct a steady stream of criticism at what they call “English economic behaviour.” For this read Canadian capitalism. Given sources of this tenor their version of history and economics is somewhat predictable.

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by William Brooks

History experts make case against the new “Histoire Nationale”

By Yarema Kelebay and William Brooks

Following the publication of a green paper on education, the Quebec Ministry of Education decided to revise much of the province’s public school curriculum. One of the most controversial programs then under revision was the compulsory Canadian history course given at the Secondary IV level. The following case against that program was first published in the West Island News and Chronicle on Tuesday, November 15, 1979. It was later published as a cover story in Teaching History by the (British) Historical Society, London, UK, October 1980.

The Case: `Where is freedom when you cannot protect your children against Marxist and separatist teachings by some professor and your children are told you are a foul bourgeois and an exploiter?” – Roger Lemelin, President and Publisher of La Press, Montreal.

Recently the Quebec Ministry of Education has produced a combination of documents which amount to a detailed outline for a new history course. Since the new “Histoire Nationale” will be compulsory for all Quebec students wishing to obtain a high school leaving certificate, it would be valuable for all citizens and parents to know what it proposes to teach.

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