Battery Chicken Improv

A key activity in the final 8 weeks of my french course is improv. The Quebecois fucking love improv and, admittedly, it's a pretty good way to move from "think something, translate it in your head, and then speak" to "just say what you are thinking".

We had an event scheduled for a couple of weeks where a pair of professional actors were going to come in and demonstrate some improv when it was announced the Quebec Minister for Immigration and Francisation was going to join us.

Apparently the first time a minister has made such a visit. Was it related to the ministry being battered in the press [[1]] for some other francisation classes being hard-cancelled 3/4ths of the year through? Who can say? [[2]]

Despite being a member of a party that seems increasingly hostile to immigration, he gave a nice little speech as he was leaving about the importance of the program and thanking us for the opportunity to join us. [[3]]

There was a quick raffle after the class for some spare tickets to the performer's actual show. Some friends won and were nice enough to invite me.

We also had our final history lesson for the course - all about a period in the 1960s they call The Quiet Revolution (La Revolution Tranquille).

While it's genuinely interesting to history nerds I won't bore everyone with a play-by-play and just hit the highlights:

• Nationalization of power [[4]]
• Instituted universal healthcare [[5]]
• Secularization of healthcare and education - formerly under the control of the Catholic church
• Making it easier to join a union and the right for public workers to join unions (syndicats) and strike [[6]]
• Public pensions
• A lot of rights for women - divorce, have a fucking bank account in their name, etc.
• Oh yeah they banned political contributions. You can just do that.

It's not for nothing that the time proceeding the Quiet Revolution is called The Long Night (la Grande Noirceur). Prior to the start, which began with the death of a conservative prime minister followed almost instantly by his successor's heart exploding, none of the above was a thing and most of the industries of the province were run by an oligarchy of wealthy foreign investors. [[7]]

There has been some revisionism about just how long or dark said night was - I will note this is considerably more prominent in the much shorter English Wikipedia article than in the French Wikipedia one. [[8]]

[[1]]: It's worth noting that they have since found some money to keep the doors open, since the stories were run

[[2]]: I've gotten the impression that the press here is actually relatively powerful (they literally call it "the fourth power"), in the sense if they report on something the government actually seems to respond pretty quick - for better or worse. This is an example

[[3]]: I listened to a Huffington Post Canada series where each episode had each major Quebec political party participate in a debate and two things were unreservedly supported by each of them: francisation classes and regionalization (e.g. trying to coax immigrants not to all just settle in Montréal)

[[4]]: Quebec has a truly massive amount of hydropower

[[5]]: Credit where credit is due - this was part of a national project that involved individual provinces setting up their own (starting with Saskatchewan in 1947!) with the feds eventually doing some cost sharing under terms that required certain commitments by the provinces in terms of care

[[6]]: Though the last several have been basically broken by the federal government (rail and, just yesterday, Canadian Post) by the use of an office that doesn't appear to be dissimilar to the US National Labor Relations Board - an entity a lot of conservatives want to kill as soon as possible, seemingly unaware that it is a moderating force put in place after basically open class warfare and possibly headed off a literal revolution during the Great Depression

[[7]]: Mostly US, turns out.

[[8]]: Okay sure, it is kinda a contradiction in terms and some cool stuff proceeded it but you do have to name things and a lot of stuff happened with surprisingly little violence so take the win. In my more stary-eyed moments I like to imagine other revolutions that do not require a whole lot of death