Victoria Sullivan Should Apologize for Insulting French Canadians
Contempt for Quebecois an Attack on Rich Girard & Norm Gamache — OPINION
My maternal grandmother’s parents were born in Quebec. My maternal great-grandfather was French Canadian (and didn’t speak a “lick of American” as one of my aunts told me), and my maternal great-grandmother — “Grammy” — was Scotch-Irish, her father being the captain of a sea-going tugboat that plied the St. Lawrence Seaway.
I grew up in a West Side neighborhood where French spoken by many people, including many of my neighbors.
I am part French Canadian.
To listen to Tammy Simmons and Victoria Sullivan make the torturous argument that “French Canadian Catholics” somehow are reactionary throwbacks to another time and are in need of being replaced on the West Side — all the while insisting they have nothing against them — really beggars belief.
I could not believe I was hearing such a thing in Manchester, New Hampshire — a place that, unlike Simmons and Sullivan, is MY HOMETOWN, the HOMETOWN of my parents and paternal grandmother.
(Please, Victoria Sullivan, don’t go on with your ridiculous argument that Goffstown, a town I was born in, is Manchester, as it is NOT and anyone who is native to Manchester knows that.)
This unbelievably insulting take-down of the French Canadian community (despite all the protestations that “There’s nothing wrong with French Canadian Catholics” — the standard language of many a bigot) opens old wounds. I see this as hamfisted, wrong-headed political attack not just on Richard Henri Girard, but on Alderman Norm Gamache of Ward 11.
Tammy Simmons — no fan of the part-French Canadian Joseph Laurence Levasseur (his given name), who was her husband’s attorney during their divorce— has been a “Friend of the Free Staters.” (This is a term the late Susan Bruce told me she had to use to describe Simmons’ relationship with that movement after being threatened with a libel lawsuit).
Simmons’ Free State allies reportedly are targeting Ward 11 for political takeover. Simmons herself monumentally failed to take over Ward 10, which also has a large French Canadian population. (Is that why she has such contempt for the dominant ethnic group of the West Side?)
The subtext of this insultingly surreal conversation is that Simmons and Sullivan apparently are promoting some political group (I Heart West) of “recent” arrivals on the West Side who are “better” than the “Frogs” of le petit Canada.
Yes, Frogs.
Because that was the word that French Canadians were called when I was a kid.
I am part French Canadian which means I am part Frog. People from the other side of the River called the West Side “Frog Town” and joked you needed a passport to cross over, even into this new millennium.
The contempt that Tammy Simmons feels for the locals of the West Side, who rejected her attempts to become a political big wheel in Ward 10, is shameful. I feel that Victoria Sullivan going along with this…contempt for French Canadians disqualifies her from holding citywide office.
Tammy Simmons, the former chair of the Queen City GOP, says that the French Canadians who came to Manchester weren’t fleeing anything. “French Canadian Catholics are not fleeing to Manchester to settle,” she said, and Victoria Sullivan said “Right!”
How ignorant she is. How ignorant they both are.
Tammy Simmons and Victoria Sullivan need to know that the people of Quebec came to this country seeking economic opportunity and an escape from the suzerain-like control of French Canadians by the Anglophone (English) Canadians. The French Canadians of Quebec were POOR and they were exploited and for them, the United States was the promised land and they walked or drove or took the train across that border that wasn’t much of a border at all until 9/11 and they became Americans.
Tammy Simmons and VIctoria Sullivan need to know that the credit union was an invention of the French Canadians, born in Ward 11 of the West Side — an institution created by French Canadians as they were denied credit back in Quebec by the English.
They were innovators. And very hard-working people who helped build the city that Simmons and Sullivan covet as their political domain.
I am startled by this expression of bigotry. It is an insult to a great significant ethnic-linguistic group that helped build this city and helped make it into one of the Top 10 Cities in the United States to live in, not so long ago. Some people, including Mayor Joyce Craig, believes that we can reclaim that heritage.
French Canadians like Norm Gamache, who is one of four generations of the Gamache family who have served Manchester as fire fighters, have done far more to make Queen City the place many Manchesterites love than tammy Simmons or Victoria Sullivan can ever dream of.
Simmons and Sullivan’s dream is one of cutting taxes for police, fire fighers, and public schools. That’s a real prescription for the very kind of decay that they truck in and wallow in when attacking Manchester.
If they feel such contempt for this city, why not do us all a favor and move out?
This is shameful bigotry, in my opinion. I can’t believe that any politician from Manchester, New Hampshire could say something like this publicly.
Simmons and Sullivan need to apologize to Rich Girard, Norm Gamache, Joe Levasseur and others of French Canadian heritage. They need to apologize to the entire French Canadian/Franco-American community.
Then they need to learn the reality about this great ethnic-linguistic group of people that not only played a large, outsized role in Manchester, but in the history of North America.
Notes
The Girard for Mayor website contains a transcript of the discussion and link to the video
