Un pays sans bon sens!

an unbelievable country!

or wake up, my good friends!!!

belonging to the album

You made it!

You made it, kid! Congratulations! We're here!

There they are!

Yup, there they are.

It's unreal!

You did it. -Let's go over.

They'll kill us.

I went, they didn't kill me.

Well, I respect authority.

Over there, they're property of the seminary.

Let's chase them off. -Poor things!

They'll settle down.

You can't go in, it's hunting season.

We can't, a guard will show up.

I have affiliations.

They don't know you.

Everyone knows Didier.

I'm dying to see the geese and you won't... Doctor of Science.

Let's go see.

Poor things.

Let's rouse them, make a blizzard of birds.

You'll hurt them. -Come off it!

You'll disrupt the biological equilibrium.

You can see them!

Forget biology. We'll watch here, it's all we can afford.

We're not allowed in there.

Look how far away we have to stand. It's not fair to them.

All we can do is stand on the railway track.

We're not allowed on the field.

It's club property from the point

to Cap Tourmente.

I'll go ask that guy.

We're not hunters with guns. -Doesn't matter, I can't let you.

Not even look at the geese?

Look from the track.

The track? That's crazy!

The clubs decide, not me. I'm just the guard.

You're doing a great job.

Even I can't go there, sir.

Congratulations, you're the man for the job.

There was a multitude of birds

so great as to be incredible to behold

whereof said island was as full as a field with grass.

And all the ships of France might fill their holds

without their absence being noticed.

You wanted to know why, this is why.

Hands off, this country's ours!

Near the aforesaid place

lives a race whereof the chief is Donnacona,

and he himself lives there.

Said place is named Stadaconé,

and is land as fine as is possible to see,

being exceedingly bounteous,

and therein are cedars and spruces

enough to mast and outfit ships of 300 tonnes and more.

There are people on said land,

which people might be called savages.

I don't like it one bit.

It hurts me in my heart

when I'm called a savage. I don't like it one bit.

I'm an Indian, I'm a...

Call me an Indian, Indian man or woman...

Men, women and children are as hardened to cold as beasts,

for in the greatest cold, which was extraordinary harsh,

they came to our ships every day across the ice and snow,

the majority almost wholly naked,

which seems incredible unless seen.

You can't read it.

From the middle of November,

till the 18th day of April,

we continually lay frozen in the ice,

which was full two fathoms deep.

Lord, the snow back then!

My dad told me the same thing.

In spring we walked on the roofs of the logging shanties.

Shanties 7, 7 1/2 feet high.

You'd snowshoe over them.

Whereas on shore

there was show four feet deep and more,

higher still than the bulwarks of our ships,

with the result that our beverages froze in their casks.

In the morning you needed an axe

to hack through the ice in the water bucket.

Wasn't hone too warm back then.

The moon shone through the cracks.

And the whole of said river

as far as the water ran fresh

was frozen up to beyond Hochelaga.

Then there broke out a sickness among us

accompanied by symptoms most marvellous and extraordinary,

for some could not stand,

their legs became swollen and inflamed,

and their sinews contracted and turned black as coal.

The disease spread among the three ships so entirely,

that in mid-February, of the 110 men in our company,

there were not 10 in good health,

so that not one could aid the other,

which was a grievous sight,

considering the place where we were.

this country of birds and bitter cold, this land of discoveries...

When we say we colonized

this goddamn country...

We colonized this country,

and don't you forget it!

"the goddamn country we colonized"

of poet Alfred Desrochers...

how shall we name it?

I'm just a Canayen, that's all,

a good Canayen,

who deeply loves

the country where he was born,

which is an awful poor country. Let's drink to that!

For me, my country is all of Canada.

I mean, if I think about it...

First, when I was a kid,

we'd sing, My Country, My Love, you know...

It wasn't just the province of Québec.

We bragged about it, it's a huge country.

We're proud of our country.

Canada?

That has absolutely no meaning for me,

in my sense of a country where I want to live.

But by Canada we're talking about...

I mean from British Columbia to Nova Scotia...

St-Pierre and Miquelon?

Say something to me in French. -How are you?

Again, please repeat it.

How are you?

I'm very well, and you?

Fine, thanks.

Do you speak English?

Don't you learn English in school?

Yes.

But you don't have a chance to speak English?

Like me in Toronto. It's the same in Ontario.

He speaks much too fast for me.

But I try to understand him.

What struck me at the end of the evening,

was that Mr Carrick, who's English,

came to the same conclusion as Marc Briére and René Lévesque.

He said that if we want to survive,

we have to separate, it's the only way.

They've lied to us for 100 years, goddammit!

Aren't you tired of being lied to?

That surprised me from Mr Carrick

because you and me, Benny,

we feel we should stay in Confederation.

We don't really know what it can still do for us,

Confederation.

Even if the government signs treaties

with their bilingualism and biculturalism,

where will they get us?

They're nice tunes, but nothing tangible.

There's no other way.

I see the problem of Québec's independence or evolution

in my own terms of reference.

I do know one thing.

I breed mice,

while strictly controlling heredity

to be able to obtain a given degree of genetic purity.

At one point, based on very precise criteria,

you might one morning discover you can confer

on a specific mouse,

given certain criteria for a mouse's growth and potential,

enthusiasm and maturity...

You can decide that one mouse deserves its autonomy.

If we extrapolate

from our terms of reference as researchers

to our society and its claim to maturity,

I come back to our conditional starting point:

it's absolutely urgent now

that we evaluate the degree of maturity of our mice,

our Catholic, French-Canadian mice,

to see what percentage of emancipation

we can allow ourselves tomorrow.

A Catholic, French-Canadian mouse and another.

You see, you turned them into little humans.

attempt to evaluate the degree of maturation

achieved by our catholic, french-canadian mice.

What was your house like?

It was painted gray,

everything was covered in gray paint.

And the roof?

The roof was cherry red.

It had an overhang, like Jean-René's house.

A pointed roof with an overhang.

We were poor, we all slept in the same 202 feet,

in three beds, not big ones.

They weren't like today's beds, they were rough hewn.

They were just wide enough to sleep two, just barely.

Nobody puts up with 4 feet anymore,

they need 4 1/2 feet, there are some even 7 feet.

You need a lot of room.

You never had that, three beds in the corners,

wood stove in the middle,

in the other corner, the stairs to the attic.

When Mom left, I babysat. I was 11.