《Queacute;becs Global Ambitions》.pdfVIP

Québec’s Global Ambitions Address by the Minister of International Relations, La Francophonie and External Trade, Jean-François Lisée, to the Montreal Council on Foreign Relations (CORIM) February 11, 2013 Imagine a researcher who had to describe Québec without ever setting foot here or knowing anything about Québec’s economy or demographics. He would have to describe Québec based on its international presence—in short, by relying solely on his powers of deduction. If he followed movie news, he would note that a Québec film had been nominated for an Oscar as best foreign film for the past three years running. Pursuing his cultural research, he would discover that Quebecers had mounted ground-breaking productions at New York’s temple of opera and were a force to be reckoned with in Las Vegas, that certain Québec singers dominated the francophone and anglophone charts, and that Québec dance troupes were acclaimed from Philadelphia to Berlin. He would also discover that the best jazz artists, comedians and contortionists converged every year on Montreal to share their art in a least four languages: music, laughter, English and, above all else, French. Our researcher would know, because comparisons can be made, that Québec was not a cultural superpower, because it was not Hollywood, Bollywood or Paris. But he would conclude that Québec was a cultural power. Filling his notepad with economic statistics, he would learn that no fewer than 100,000 cars bearing the logo of the Québec company Bombardier ran on the subway tracks of 40 cities and the rail lines in 21 countries, from Chile to Uzbekistan. He would learn that Montréal was one of the three largest aerospace centres in the world and that Québec aircraft criss-crossed the skies of 100 countries and landed at American, Russian a