My answer to Jack Jedwab’s Saturday Open letter. Published this Tuesday in The Gazette.

Dear Jack,

Thanks for your open letter to me published in Saturday’s Gazette (Opinion, “Lisée will need to empathize,” by Jack Jedwab). In your letter, you urge me to try to put myself in the place of an anglophone in Quebec. It’s a message in keeping with the one that I personally have been trying to convey to both anglophone and francophone audiences: to try to put yourself in the other’s shoes. Let’s all try to think outside the box.

Photograph by: Phil Carpenter , Montreal Gazette

In your letter, you state: “It would have been helpful had you shared your winning conditions with us much earlier.” Let’s see. I started on this line of thinking back in 1996, while writing former premier Lucien Bouchard’s Centaur speech. That’s when I introduced the notion of the “double insecurity” of anglos and francos. I then fleshed it out and described it in full in my 2000 book Sortie de secours(1), and restated these views in 2001 in my brief and testimony to the Larose commission on the future of the French language.

I came back to them in the second chapter of my 2007 book Nous(2), and touched on the issue a few times on my blog between 2009 and 2012 (and got real heat for it in some nationalist circles). I  explained it again in a text  in The Gazette last March (answering your op-ed), repeated it in an interview with Bernie Saint-Laurent at the CBC in May, then just after announcing my candidacy in Rosemont in a Homerun Interview,  and again late in the campaign at CJAD.

So, Jack, when you surmise that I “didn’t want to share the secret” of my views before the recent election campaign, you make the case that I am very bad at keeping secrets.

I see my primary task in the new Marois government as one of changing the tone of the debate and opening minds. This past Thursday on the much-watched TVA noon telecast, I  Lire plus...