From November 1, 1997 story

Hope and glory

by David Johnston, The Gazette

What a name!

Constance Middleton-Hope.

Middleton-Hope, brings to the job a forceful and at times uncompromising personality that mirrors the current mood of Quebec's English-speaking community.

"The best compliment I can give her is that she's a no-nonsense woman," said Maria Peluso, a professor of political science at Concordia University.

"Nobody is going to take advantage of Alliance Quebec as long as she's there," said Phyllis Mosher, a former president of the Business and Professional Women's Club of Montreal.

Middleton-Hope, who has held a number of senior administrative positions in Quebec education, describes herself as a "moderate radical." It wasn't that long ago that moderate was a noun, not an adjective, in English-Quebec politics. Now radicals are everywhere. Radical is in. Radical is cool. Radical is even politically correct.

"In those days, the way you got a raise was you left for another job," she said during an interview at her Hudson home, where she lives with her husband, Clark. The couple raised three children, two of whom now work in Western Canada. One son works as a contractor in Vancouver. Her other son is a police officer in Calgary. She has a daughter in Pincourt, and five grandchildren in all.

In 1962, at the age of 35, Middleton-Hope returned to the work force as a teacher. In the three decades since, she has become one of the most accomplished English-speaking career women in Quebec of her generation. You get tired just reading her resumé:

Teacher, school vice-principal, Lakeshore School Board, 1962-74. First female vice-chairman of the Superior Council of Education, which advises the government on education policy, 1974-78. Assistant director-general of the Montreal Island School Council, 1979-88. President of the Féderation des Femmes du Québec, 1988. Director of development and social action, Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal, 1988-1991. Director of social action and community concerns, the Synod of the Anglican Diocese of Montreal, 1991-96. President of her own consulting firm, Link-Ages, which among other things mediates disputes in the non-profit sector. A founder of Chez Doris, a west-end drop-in shelter. A fundraiser for Auberge Madeleine, an east-end shelter for homeless women. Past president of a long list of community groups and campaigns; co-ordinator of a long list of conferences and seminars. And on and on.

"If anything, you recognize immediately that she is someone of strong moral character and solid values," said Vera Danyluk, chairman of the Montreal Urban Community. "The French have a wonderful expression, and I always say it's too bad we don't have the same expression in English: Etre bien dans sa peau. Constance is very comfortable in her persona."

And that name, that name, that rock-solid Anglo-Saxon name.

Truth is, she's neither a Middleton nor a Hope by birth. Her maiden name is Mackay, the surname of her father, a Scot. Her mother, Alice Cloutier, was a French-speaking Quebecer descended from the original Cloutier settlers who came to New France from France in the 1600s.

In 1953, she married Clark Middleton-Hope of Westmount, whose own father immigrated to Montreal from England in 1904 and started an accounting business that prospered. Clark's father left England a Hope; Middleton was one of his middle names. He arrived here a Middleton-Hope, and found his newly hyphenated name and English accent to be definite assets in the Montreal of the turn of the century.

Since becoming chairman of the Alliance last May, Middleton-Hope has impressed her colleagues.

"She's a very capable individual," said Gary Shapiro, an Alliance board member and also the founding president of the Quebec Committee for Canada, the lobby group behind the municipal unity-resolution initiative that promotes partition as a price of Quebec independence. "She gets things done and understands the issues and knows how to delegate."

Shapiro and David Black, also of the QCC's inner circle, were the most conspicuous of the 11 additions to the Alliance's board at the organization's annual meeting last May.

"What we're trying to do is get the Alliance to become a little more aggressive, for lack of a better term," Shapiro said. "The problem was they weren't doing a lot of things they should have been doing, and they weren't getting credit for a lot of things they were doing."

As soon as they were elected to the board, Shapiro and Black lobbied for the creation of a Canadian-unity committee within the Alliance. The committee met three times this year to hammer out a mandate, but Shapiro and Black were unable to get the majority of committee members to support the notion of partition in the event of Quebec separation. On the other hand, the final draft of the mandate statement, which is to be presented soon for board approval, calls upon the Alliance to ask the federal government to state flatly that Quebec has absolutely no right to become an independent nation on the basis of a unilateral declaration of independence that would follow any narrow Yes victory in a referendum on an unclear question.

Middleton-Hope said the mandate statement, which is silent on partition, "meets the thinking and dialogue and conversation and debate that the membership has had on this issue."

As for Quebec supposedly having no right to separate under terms proposed by the sovereignist movement, she said, "That is something that has to be repeated over and over and over again. I remember teaching a Grade 9 class about the causes of the French Revolution. Two years later, I had the same class in Grade 11. And I said, `I don't think we have to spend too much time on this. What were the causes of the French Revolution?' And the class just looked at me like: `Huh?'
"You have to say things over and over again.''
As a former history teacher, Middleton-Hope knows that history is product of both fact and myth. But in Quebec, she says, myths loom uncommonly large, the product of four decades of revisionist history.

"Quebec has been very successful with revisionist history. They say, "Well, there was this guy Champlain, and this place Montreal, but Quebec really didn't begin until 1960. Before that, the English oppressed the French, and that's the way it was, going back 200 years to the Conquest. There's no mention that most of the soldiers were mercenaries who didn't speak English or French. That's never taught.

"And we keep seeing this. You hear people say, `Oh, if you walked into Eaton's, you couldn't find anyone who could speak French.' Even though if you walk into Eaton's today, you can't find anybody who can speak English. I've been in Eaton's recently, and the "fat old English lady" has been replaced by the "fat old French lady."

Middleton-Hope talks at a fast clip and is quick with a witty retort, just like all those perpetually sassy characters in Hollywood movies from the '40s and '50s. In the past, many people have used the word gruff to describe her, but then again, if she were a man, maybe they'd they just say she was commanding, decisive.

"It's not that she's gruff or self-confident, though she is self-confident," Danyluk said. "It's that she's very confident in the conviction of her own beliefs."

In other words, she's the boss, and what she says goes.

"But my aggression is tempered now by the fact that I'm more sensitive to how people feel," Middleton-Hope said. Did she used to hurt people? "Oh, I think so," she replied quickly. "You know, when you're powerful and pushy, you do that, inevitably. I think I'm more conscious now of how people react, and more respectful of their needs."

Said Mosher: "Connie knows when to put her foot down, and when not to put her foot down."

Of all of Middleton-Hope's past administrative jobs, only one ended on a sour note: her brief tenure as president of the Féderation des Femmes du Québec. The federation won't talk about Middleton-Hope, while Middleton-Hope says the federation came to regard the promotion of sovereignty as its primary concern.

"When you run into one focus, you lose sight of all the other variables that make up life," she said.

"Constance had a rough time with the women in the francophone feminist movement," said Peluso, also active in the women's movement. A lot of these movements and groups in Quebec are plagued with sovereignty as their priority. The federation actually believes that the nationalist movement in Quebec is good for women. When you show them how nationalist movements everywhere else in the world have turned against women, they say, `Oh yes, but that would never happen here.' And I say, `Oh really? Do you mean your men are better than other men? Is that what you're saying?''
It was while she was working at the Superior Council of Education that the fluently bilingual Middleton-Hope discovered that debating issues in a francophone arena is different from debating them in an anglophone environment.

"You learn to moderate your speech, you learn to use sequential arguments, you learn to present a recommendation that has had some detail brought to it, and then reinforce that recommendation," she said. "It's a different arena to work in. You have to know your players in Quebec. I've noticed in Ottawa, it's more of a scrum, rather than that poised approach, the re-thinking and coming to conclusions. In Quebec, you have to present your arguments in a way that they will be received, or else you're just going to be disregarded."

So says this moderate radical.

PS The job pays a stipend of $25,000 a year.

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