I am a close as I can be to the stereotypical “crazy” French Canadian: My paternal ancester, Michel Fernet, arrived from Ste-Margerite-De-l’autel in Normandie, France in 1673.
At 17, in 1993, I was not only a full member of the Parti Québecois or PQ (yes, the one that wants to separate Québec from Canada), I was in the Bureau National which is the highest organization in the Parti Quebecois (officially even above the party executive).
Off the 400 or so member, I was the only one who was overtly not a separatist, causing some friction with some members of the party. I also wasn’t a hardcore nationalist, which felt odd since the PQ is perceived as an ultra-nationalist party.
Still in the 1994 election, after I had left the PQ, I personally knew 17 of the 77 elected MPs for the PQ, including 13 of the Ministers!
For a short period, I had a personal desk in the PQ permanent office in Montreal when I was helping the party with some administrative tasks.
I participated in two major PQ congress and kept in touch with several MPs and 2 ministers for a few years.
Once, the ADQ of Mario Dumont even contacted me to join their organization and I had 2 short but interesting conversations with Mario Dumont himself.
I may have left politics, but I kept being interested and later when I became a web developer and a businessman, I started to get questions from my customers from outside Québec about what is really going on, with the biggest of all being:
“What does Québec want?”
I am a fan of history, and would explain a few facts that would astonish my clients: They were often born in Canada and had no idea about what I was talking about even it was often in Québec newspapers.
This site was born to help Canadians from outside of Québec understand what the hell is going on in “La Belle Province”