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Jennifer Drouin: An anglo rebel running for PQ tries to break the mould

Anglophones active in the Parti Québécois and the sovereignty movement are a rare breed but Nova-Scotia born Jennifer Drouin has fallen in love with the cause. She follows in the footsteps of others including Henry Milner and David Payne and hopes to one day sit in the National Assembly.

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QUEBEC — Jennifer Drouin is the first to admit she has not chosen an easy path.

After all, English-speaking Quebecers who believe in sovereignty and want to become Parti Québécois MNAs don’t come along every day.

Yet there she is. The Nova Scotia-born law student who has adopted Quebec as home is now vying for the PQ nomination in the Montreal riding of Sainte-Marie-Saint-Jacques. The riding is currently held by popular Québec solidaire MNA Manon Massé.

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“I know what I’m in for,” Drouin said in a recent interview with the Montreal Gazette. “You would have to be naive not to know. Like I said, I believe in what I’m doing and I believe in the cause.”

And the nasty messages have come, particularly in the free-for-all that is social media.

“It goes with the territory,” says Drouin, adding she has a strong character. “It’s something called having the strength of one’s convictions.”

The reaction inside the party is quite the opposite. For some péquistes, Drouin represents a breakthrough at a time when the party’s fortunes are almost at rock bottom, with the real risk it will end up in third-party standing after the 2018 election.

At the PQ policy convention in September, where she was elected to the party’s executive with a 92.7 per cent score, Drouin brought the house down with a crack about her origins.

“I am an immigrant from the neighbouring country — Canada,” Drouin said, adding she is the perfect person to go out and talk to anglophones and tell them the PQ is not xenophobic and somehow out to get them.

Drouin’s story is all the more remarkable given her background and what she does. She is a former assistant professor of English at the University of Alabama.

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After arriving in Quebec full time in 2001, Drouin launched into a doctorate at McGill in Québécois adaptations of the works of William Shakespeare.

She is also a visiting scholar at McGill’s Institute for Gender Sexuality and Feminist studies.

In fact, she has no qualms about wearing both hats — being an English Canadian and a Quebecer at the same time.

“I’m an English Canadian from English Canada and I love English Canada,” says Drouin, 40. “I watch the CBC. I watch Rick Mercer and, of course, Coronation Street.”

History buffs will recall that Drouin is not the first English-speaking Quebecer to get involved in the PQ.

She is following in the footsteps of such names as Henry Milner, the former Vanier CEGEP professor who set up the Committee of Anglophones for Sovereignty-Association in the lead-up to the 1980 sovereignty-association referendum.

Like Milner, Drouin founded, with the encouragement of PQ Leader Jean-François Lisée, a group called Anglophones for Quebec Independence, which now claims about 100 members.

Drouin and Milner recently met. In an interview, he confirmed he has more or less passed the torch in the form of his old files and list of members from those days. Milner has been invited to go to one of Drouin’s group events to, as he says, “talk about the good old days.”

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He recalls he, too, was treated as a traitor, except in those days the hate messages were left on his telephone answering machine.

But Milner says times have changed. Drouin arrives in the party at a low ebb while it was riding high when he was there.

“My days were the best days for the PQ in terms of mobilization and credibility,” said Milner, now a political science professor at the Université de Montréal. “The PQ is not what it used to be. I told her don’t have too high expectations.”

On the other hand, he said Drouin can do like him and play an important role acting as a bridge between the party and anglophones, he said.

As for an election win, Milner says Drouin picked a better riding than he did in 1981 when he tried to run in staunchly federalist Westmount. He finished second, about 18,000 votes behind the Liberal winner.

(Westmount was indeed represented by the PQ later. The late Richard Holden, who won the riding in 1989 for the Equality Party, crossed the floor to the PQ in the dying days of Jacques Parizeau’s old government.)

One anglophone who did get elected under the PQ banner was David Payne, the Yorkshire-born former professor who won the South Shore riding of Vachon three times, in 1981, 1994 and 1998.

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“She’ll get plenty of ‘not a true anglo’ taunts,” Payne said in an email to the Montreal Gazette from China, where he now lives. “Go down that road and you’re boxed in forever.”

He offered a bit of advice, too.

“Jennifer is a Quebecer, that’s enough,” Payne said. “I’m sure she will be wise enough not to speak for English Quebecers, who are well represented by another party.”

Drouin agrees on that point and does not see herself as an anglophone lobbying inside the PQ. In fact, on some language issues her group is more hawkish than the PQ.

She, for example, does not see the necessity for politicians to express themselves in English in the National Assembly. Lisée has been known to speak English. The rules allow any MNA to speak English. Drouin also fills out her federal tax forms in French and orders in restaurants in French.

When the PQ adopted its new language policy, tagged Bill 202, Drouin said she would defend it “202 per cent.”

She says she has combed through the Charter of the French Language and identified 17 different articles protecting English rights, such as the right to English schools and hospitals and the right to use English before the courts.

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That’s the kind of thing she wants to explain.

“Sovereignty is seen as this scary thing, but all the benefits that would come to francophones would come to anglos, too,” Drouin said.

And she responded to English-speaking Quebecers who say the PQ wants to take away their country.

“I think Canada will still be there (in the event of separation),” Drouin said. “There’s never been a plan to put up a Berlin Wall after separation.”

As for her chances of getting elected, Drouin thinks they are pretty good in Saint-Marie-Saint-Jacques, a riding that includes the Gay Village and a good chunk of working-class Montrealers.

For one thing, Massé only won the riding in 2014 by 91 votes. Before that it was held by the PQ from 1970 onward. And as a member of the LGBT community herself, Drouin says she identifies with many of the issues in the riding.

There are plenty of other issues, too, including the chronic lack of social housing, which she says Massé has failed to solve.

“She (Massé) is in the media a lot, but what has she actually done locally for the riding?” Douin asked.

So far, nobody in the PQ is challenging Drouin for the nomination in the riding. The next general election is in October 2018.

pauthier@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/philipauthier

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