Jean Lapierre wanted to talk about halal chicken, Îles-de-la-Madeleine style.
He had just announced his arrival at the makeup room at CTV Montreal for our weekly political panel with his usual “salut, salut.” He didn’t need makeup, since he had come straight from a studio at TVA. He came to the makeup room because he would find an appreciative audience there.
I always looked forward to hearing “salut, salut,” and the political gossip and funny stories and sayings (“He looked as happy as a dog in the back of a pickup truck”) Jean brought us in the makeup room, most of which couldn’t be repeated on the air.
That day, he knew he had an especially good story for us, because he had tried it out on Paul Arcand’s popular morning program on Montreal radio station fm98,5, the first of his many media appearances during the day.
The Parti Québécois, at the height of its identity-politics phase, was trying to exploit fears that Quebecers were unsuspectingly eating halal chicken, from chickens inhumanely slaughtered according to traditional Islamic ritual. This, the PQ said, was contrary to “Quebec values.”
In the CTV makeup room, Jean began by telling us he had decided to check with Olymel, the Quebec-based meat-processing company that produced the chicken.
He said the company had assured him that its halal chickens were slaughtered the same way as their other chickens. The only difference was that at the start of each work shift at the plant that produced the halal chicken, a Muslim imam blessed the live chickens, the workers and the equipment they would use.
“So, it turns out,” Jean said, “that I grew up in the Îles-de-la-Madeleine eating halal chicken without knowing it. My grandfather would take an axe, put the chicken’s neck on a stump and whack! Halal chicken, Îles-de-la-Madeleine style.”
(Here’s Jean repeating the story in French that afternoon to Paul Houde of 98,5fm.)
This, however, was more than a funny story about chickens. It was also about Jean.
There was his pride in his origins in the Magdalen Islands, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. He had become a lawyer, a successful federal politician and finally a well-paid media commentator and consultant (but not a journalist, he insisted) living in Outremont, the bastion of Quebec’s French-speaking establishment.
But while he went away, he never left “les Îles.” He still had family there (he was on his way with other family members to the islands for his father’s funeral when the small plane carrying them crashed), and he returned often for holidays and summer vacations.
And when he was away, his fellow Madelinots knew they could count on him to promote them and their islands. I once teased him by asking him whether the lobsters from les Îles were as good as those from the Gaspé, knowing he’d explain to me why they were the best in the world.
There was also, in his story, his abhorrence of the divisive, fear-mongering identity politics he was ridiculing.
He was enough of a nationalist to have briefly left the Liberal party for the pro-independence Bloc Québécois. But as far as cultural differences were concerned, he believed in “live and let live.”
He was the most influential commentator on Quebec politics because he was the best-connected. Everybody listened to him, because everybody talked to him, and vice versa.
And he talked, and listened, in English as well as French, to people in all communities. He was a regular at Moishes, the traditionally Jewish steakhouse on “the Main,” where English Montreal to the west meets French Montreal to the east.
He liked to eat well, to share a good bottle of wine, to laugh and to talk politics, about which he was as passionate as others are about hockey. He was literally a bon vivant: somebody who lives well.
He was a kind and generous friend, and I’ll miss his “salut, salut.” And I’ll only eat lobster from les Îles.
Twitter: DMacpGaz
