Competing for Canada
Published by Cynthia Turpin on 2010-03-08
by RANDY BOSWELL
Nearly one-third of Quebec residents say the province should have its own Olympic team separate from Canada's, according to a survey conducted in the days following the Vancouver Games.
But that's good news for Canadian unity, says Jack Jedwab of the Montreal-based Association for Canadian Studies, which commissioned the poll probing Canadians' feelings in the wake of the host country's record-setting success at the 2010 Winter Olympics - highlighted by dazzling individual performances from several Quebec athletes.
Jedwab says the poll results suggest that only Quebec's unwaveringly "committed sovereigntists" - and almost no one else in the province - feel strongly that Quebec athletes should be competing under the blue-and-white fleur-de-lys rather than the maple leaf.
"I think that's a good outcome," he says, adding that, beyond the hardcore backers of Quebec independence, "There doesn't seem to be a lot of support for the idea" of a Team Quebec competing at the Olympics.
The national survey of 1,500 Canadians was conducted last week by the firm Léger Marketing, following Team Canada's climactic gold-medal victory in last Sunday's Olympic hockey final and the Games' closing ceremonies.
The results, which included responses from about 400 Quebec residents, are considered accurate to within 3.9 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
While 29 per cent of Quebec residents expressed support for a separate Olympic team, the idea was rejected by 65 per cent of the province's population.
Predictably, the Team Quebec concept received negligible support in other parts of the country, ranging from six per cent of respondents in Atlantic Canada to about one per cent in Manitoba/
Saskatchewan.
In general, the survey found that Canada's huge haul of medals - more than half of them gold - overwhelmingly stoked respondents' pride in Canada.
Eighty-six per cent of the country's overall population - including 79 per cent of those polled in Quebec - said the sight of Canadian athletes on the Olympic medal podium left them feeling "a stronger sense of pride in Canada."
Among the most memorable achievements was Canada's first home-soil gold medal, won by moguls competitor Alexandre Bilodeau of Rosemère.
Perhaps the Games' most inspiring performance was the bronze medal won by figure skater Joannie Rochette of Île Dupas, who suffered the sudden loss of her mother days before the event.
And Charles Hamelin of Ste. Julie was Canada's top podium finisher with two golds in short-track speedskating.
Jedwab says such triumphs by Quebec athletes don't generally help the cause of Quebec separatists, who early in the Games criticized the lack of French-language content in the opening ceremonies.
But Jedwab says those critics from Quebec "became very quiet" during the last few days of Vancouver 2010 as a series of medal-winning athletes from the province were literally or figuratively wrapped in the Canadian flag, and watched by millions as they stepped to the podium amid the strains of O Canada!
Those athletes "became poster people for Canada," says Jedwab. "It's an ideal vision of the best of the country, and it's very unifying."
