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Patrice Roy on a Writer Thinking Serge Chapleau’s Recent Cartoon Was Anti-Semitic
posted June 27, 2007
 

Hello there!

If I was in your place, I wouldn't trust my gut reaction on Chapleau's caricature of Mario Dumont. Chapleau (who is an absolutely stupendous caricaturiste, to be honest) is as bad (!) on everybody (including his employers!) and everyone here in Quebec. He makes just about no friends whatsoever, except those who don't mind his «loose cannon» style... which, happily, is just about everyone here in Quebec 😊 He also runs a very popular cartoony show with computer animated versions of some of his politicians and is very direct on most topics (he once went on what's propably the most popular TV show here, «Tout le monde en parle» [ meaning in english: Everybody's talking about it ] and had a run-in with Rael, a weird sect leader with a thing about extraterrestrial aliens, that people still talk about years after the fact).

Put in context, the attack on this picture was on Mario Dumont, a was elected recently (in fact, his party, the Action Democratique du Quebec, finished second here after having been a minor party for about 10 years or so) by taking mostly populist stances, taking the «sujet du jour» and being very efficient by having the day's best punchline almost every time. He's a very efficient (and relatively young) public figure, but the substance of his party is often put into question by most observers since his party and himself tend to «go with the flow» on many subjects and target what seems to be popular with voters instead of what seems to be at the heart of the party's program (of course, as you can guess, opinions vary on this, but this is probably what you would see in most newspapers here regardless of the allegiance).

The day before this caricature, Mario Dumont had made a 180° turn on some topics when he had dealt with a local Jewish community. The caricature shows him as putting on a costume to blend in. It does not attack the community (who wears that dress in public anyway) but laughs at the politician whose personal positions tend to fluctuate.

In case you're interested: I once had a girlfriend from Vancouver and that made me realize that the views on religion change a lot depending on the location (it tends to have more importance in Canada and in the U.S. in general than in does here where most people just don't care -- here, though, people react more strongly to questions of language and integration of immigrants to local communities, which is probably less of an issue where people speak english since there are so many of these). Here, in Quebec (in 2007), most people used to be from catholic upbringing, but almost nobody practices anymore. The majority of devoutly religious people come from english-speaking or other non-french language background. The caricature you reacted to made almost nobody react in Quebec (Chapleau's done a lot worse!) but did make people react elsewhere in Canada. Two countries existing side by side, really, regardless of political affiliations.

There. Have a nice evening!