http://www.montrealgazette.com/business/caring+voice+stilled/6311004/story.h
tml




A caring voice is stilled
 
 
 

Madeleine parent, whose sense of justice knew no bounds, stood up to
Duplessis and fought for a fairer division of wealth
 
 
 
By JANET BAGNALL, The GazetteMarch 16, 2012
 
 
 










 
 





With the death Sunday of Madeleine Parent at age 93, one of the most
important threads that connect Quebecers to their history was cut. As long
as she was alive, there was a voice of conscience who could talk about what
it felt like to be a child of privilege waited on by girls her own age,
girls from poor farm families forced into service to survive.
 
She could remind us that in her lifetime, children of 10 worked 12-hour
night shifts in Montreal's factories and that women were paid a small
fraction of what men earned for doing the same job.
 
She had stories to tell about standing up to Quebec premier Maurice
Duplessis and his private goon squad, the Sûreté du Québec, on behalf of the
ordinary working men and women of the province. She led one of the
province's most bitter strikes, against Dominion Textile in Valleyfield,
earning the undying enmity of Duplessis. It was a strike that lasted for 100
days, but ended in victory for the 6,000 workers with a first collective
agreement.
 
I spent a wonderful afternoon interviewing Parent 15 years ago. She was a
small, delicate-looking woman, in the same elegant mould as the Quebec
suffragette leader and politician Thérèse Casgrain. They were both tough as
nails in their determination to improve the legal and social rights of
ordinary people in Quebec, particularly for women who for many years
struggled under the yoke of the state, the church and the patriarchy.
 
When I met her, Parent was 78, still fighting for workers' rights, her views
still delivered with the same trenchant force she wielded against Duplessis.
Duplessis may have been a particular affliction, but in 1997 she had little
good to say about most politicians. Former premier Jacques Parizeau's speech
on the night of the 1995 referendum in which he blamed money and ethnic
votes for his party's loss "shows there is still a problem of racism within
the Parti Québécois," she said. Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau was
"arrogant" and "never really accepted women as his equals." Former premier
Lucien Bouchard was "not grounded in ideas." Adélard Godbout, the Quebec
premier who brought in the vote for women in 1940, won mitigated praise:
"Within the limitations of his time, he was a good premier."
 
But still they paled by comparison with Duplessis, who hounded her for
years, charging her and her husband-to-be Kent Rowley with seditious treason
for their role in organizing workers. In an indication of how tightly
Duplessis controlled the province, Parent was tried and sentenced to two
years in jail, though did not serve any time. She was acquitted eight years
later.
 
Parent's calling as a rights activist was born of her experiences in
boarding school, at what is now Villa Maria High School. In a 1980 interview
with the CBC, she talked about the girls who worked at the school. "They had
a horrible life," she said. "They got up at 5 in the morning. They served us
after mass, served us all day long, scrubbed the floors, waxed the floors,
scrubbed the stairs. They were on their knees a good part of the day. We
were not supposed to fraternize with them in any way. They were just
non-persons in the convent."
 

At McGill University, the only university in Quebec that offered co-ed
courses in the 1930s, Parent lobbied for scholarships for the children of
poor farmers. She also criticized McGill for not having French-Canadians as
head of the French department, nearly getting expelled for her efforts. She
graduated in 1940 and within two years was working as a full-time labour
organizer.
 
Her activism over a more than 40-year career was extraordinary: she helped
extricate Canadian workers from U.S.led labour unions in Canada, helping to
found the Confederation of Canadian Unions. She fought for equal pay for
work of equal value for women; she battled for the rights of aboriginal and
immigrant women. In later years, she marched against the North American Free
Trade Agreement and, a lifelong pacifist, spoke out against Western military
involvement in Iraq and against other armed conflicts.
 
She is often called a woman ahead of her time. But really, she was someone
who belonged to all time. She believed in the inherent worth and dignity of
the individual, whatever that person's background or circumstances.
 
In November, Parent was honoured at a conference held by a Quebec
association of 65 groups working toward international co-operation. Her
words were highlighted, a kind of inspirational guide for the groups to set
their compass by. And maybe us, too:
 
"The fight for a fairer division of wealth between workers and bosses
remains a necessary battle. In Canada and the United States, the number of
billionaires keeps growing, even as poverty spreads at a dizzying rate!
Today's global issues, whether political, environmental or humanitarian, all
flow from this inequitable distribution of wealth."
 
[log in to unmask]
 
© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette


Read more:
http://www.montrealgazette.com/business/caring+voice+stilled/6311004/story.h
tml#ixzz1pHeIsUF8

-----------------------

To change your mail settings or leave the C-PALSY list, go here:

http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?SUBED1=c-palsy