In the 2009 Quentin Tarantino film “Inglourious Basterds,” a British Nazi hunter on an undercover mission as a German soldier gives himself away by ordering three scotches from the bartender by holding up the index, middle and ring finger.
This mundane gesture reveals to the SS officer sitting opposite that he is in the company of an impostor. Germans count to three with the thumb, index and middle finger.
Carnage ensues.
The lesson is that it’s difficult to pass yourself off as someone you are not and easy to get found out. The littlest thing can give you away. This is doubly true — and doubly dangerous — when you’re in the crucible of a federal election campaign and courting voters in Quebec.
Canada’s fabled two solitudes are not impossible to pierce. And once you’re welcomed in, it is with open arms.
But before breaking through, it can seem as though English Canada and French Canada are separated by a Berlin Wall of language, history and culture.
Liberal leader Mark Carney may be rudely learning this in the opening days of the election.
There have been several telling incidents, but none so painful as his mistaken reference on Tuesday to the Dec. 6, 1989, mass shooting at Montreal’s École Polytechnique.
The massacre is a scar on Quebec’s collective consciousness. The targeted killing of 14 women is commemorated each year to this day and attendance is obligatory among Quebec’s political class.
Getting it wrong suggests something deeper than just a lapsus.
In this election, Carney’s pitch to Canadian voters is that he is just the person who is required to lead the country through this particularly fragile moment in its history.
By many estimations, he is a brilliant banker with the economic chops to steer Canada clear of deficits and through the minefield of an American trade war.
He was born in the Canadian north, raised in the west, formed by the elite and employed to watch over the economies of both Canada and Great Britain.
He knows government. He knows dollars and cents. He’s learning the tough trade of politics. But he’s far from mastering Quebec.
The punishment for failing to crack the province’s code is steep. Quebec is home to 78 seats in the House of Commons — the second greatest number of seats after Ontario.
Carney’s Quebec ailments are accumulating.
First, there is the quality of his French. It’s good enough for conversation. He could get a job as a public servant. But his mispronunciations, his mumbled phrases and his occasional misunderstandings will make it difficult to pierce the hearts of the province’s voters.
Getting one’s tongue around the language of Molière — France’s answer to William Shakespeare — is far from deadly, in a political sense.
The late NDP leader Jack Layton was known as a Toronto guy even though he was born in Hudson, Que.
He had that tough-to-listen-to anglophone accent when he spoke French. His r’s rolled like a roulette wheel.
But his last campaign as leader, shortly before his death in 2011, saw Layton’s party win its largest-ever seat-count in Quebec, largely thanks to the personal connection he forged with voters, which famously won him the endorsement as “un bon Jack” (in Québécois slang, “A good guy”).
Former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper’s French was strained and expressionless — the kind you get by mastering a textbook — when he was elected to run the country in 2006.
But through sheer force of habit — opening each of his public utterings in French first, English second — he earned a passing grade and the grudging respect of Quebecers.
He also came in for some good-natured ribbing for repeatedly pronouncing “election” in a way that sounded strangely like “erection.”
The second knock on Carney is related to the first.
His team this week declined to take part in a French-language debate hosted by the country’s most popular network, TVA.
The Face-à-Face debate is an election mainstay in Quebec. It is the one event that allows party leaders to reach voters in the deepest and most francophone regions of Quebec, where TVA is the default setting when someone suggests putting on the television or wants to find out what’s going on in the world.
There were problems with the debate format this time around. Namely, the demand that parties pay $75,000 for a spot on the stage. But Carney’s decision to decline the invitation was the one that ultimately killed plans for the show.
His opponents smelled fear, and called him on it.
Journal de Montréal columnist Josée Legault (the JdeM, like TVA, is owned and operated by Québecor Inc.) defended Carney, saying that his refusal to debate was probably more a strategic play than a strike against democracy.
Carney will still take part in the traditional French-language debate hosted on April 16 (one day before the English-language debate) by Radio-Canada’s Patrice Roy, a former Ottawa bureau chief.
But Legault suggested that Carney needed to publicly address why — after serving as a senior Finance Department official, then Governor of the Bank of Canada — “his French is still so halting” and what he intends to do about it if the Liberals win the election.
The third knock on Carney may be the political equivalent of the Tarantino Nazi hunter ordering three scotches with the wrong fingers.
On Tuesday, at a rally in Halifax, Carney was talking up Liberal candidates on his team who had a deep commitment to social justice.
He mentioned “Nathalie Pronovost, who, out of the tragedy of the shootings at Concordia, became a social justice activist, and she’s put her hand up and she’s running with us.”
The Liberal candidate in the riding of Châteauguay–Les Jardins-de-Napierville, south of Montreal, is in fact Nathalie Provost, not Pronovost. She is an engineer and a high-ranking bureaucrat in the Quebec government.
But she is best known as one of the victims of the aforementioned 1989 mass shooting, having suffered four bullet wounds to the head and leg. She had the presence of mind that day to counsel the other victims to play dead so that they might ultimately get out alive.
She later founded the gun-control advocacy group PolySeSouvient (in French, PolyRemembers) and she is a key voice in Canada’s ongoing debate over gun control.
She is also, apparently, quick to forgive.
“For someone to butcher my name by adding two letters does not offend me because it’s something I could have done,” she told the CBC. “It’s just a typo.”
More troubling in the larger political calculation is that Carney placed the massacre at Montreal’s Concordia University, not at École Polytechnique — whose campus atop Mount Royal makes up part of the iconic Montreal skyline, as residents and regular visitors well know.
The shooting occurred the year after Carney graduated from Harvard, in 1988, with a degree in economics. He went on to study at Oxford University, where he earned a master’s degree, followed by a doctorate.
It’s here that Carney did the academic training that turned him into the economics superstar. Liberals are now pitching him as the best option to lead Canada through the coming economic storm.
But Carney’s strength may also be his weakness (to cite from another film, 2017’s “Jumanji”) if his international experience has had the effect of severing some of his ties to the country and, perhaps, clouding a key moment in Canadian history in his memory.
A recent Angus Reid poll suggests the Liberal pitch that Carney is the best pick for prime minister is registering not only across the country, but in Quebec. The Liberal party has increased its support to 49 per cent while the sovereigntist Bloc Québécois has dropped to 27 per cent, followed by the Conservatives, with 16 per cent.
But leads were made to evaporate. It’s a lesson that gamblers and front-runners know all too well.
With Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre offering to pay Carney’s $75,000 entry fee for the TVA debate and Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet warning that the Liberal leader “knows nothing about Quebec,” Carney may be learning a tough political lesson.
It’s fine to have managed billions, stickhandled financial crises and count the world’s richest and most powerful as friends. But the trick to politics is remembering names.
