“Tout cela est…”

In response to the introduction of Quebec’s Charter of Quebec Values in 2013, I teamed up with my colleagues in the doctoral program, Mariam Esseghaier and Marie-Eve Lefebvre, to produce and develop a 50-minute web-based documentary called,  “Tout Cela Est… : Communicating the Charter of Quebec Values / Communiquer la Charte des valeurs québécoises.”

Here is the first of the five sections:

You’ll find the rest of the documentary and details about the people who participated in it and helped us make it happen by clicking through to our website, Charter Flight Productions. As well, we will be screening the whole documentary at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont. this May during the Canadian Communication Association’s annual conference.

Since our documentary was first released there has been a provincial election that ushered in a different government than the one that introduced Bill 60, which was never passed. Local media, including the CBC, maintain ongoing coverage of the Charter as people in Quebec continue to grapple with its ramifications. As I say in the documentary, we didn’t know precisely how the issue would unfold, however:

“We really focused on a cross-section of members of the Communication Studies Department; we looked to professors, we looked to students, and so what you will see is people who come at this from a range of different research perspectives, asking questions about the Charter and more importantly asking questions about the discourses around the Charter. … [At] this exact time we can say that it is creating discourses across the province and across the country that have consequences, and it’s these consequences that we have tried to unpack and we have tried to contribute questions to.”