Canadian writer Kim Thuy, left, is invested as a member of the Order of Canada by Governor-General Mary Simon during Canada Day celebrations at LeBreton Flats in Ottawa.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
Quebec audiences answered “present” when Ru was released in movie theatres in late 2023, enabling the screen adaptation of author Kim Thuy’s Governor-General Award-winning novel to best major Hollywood films at the province’s box office for several weeks running.
Francophone Quebeckers have long been known to be big consumers of local television and film productions, putting English-speaking Canadians to shame in that category. But what set Ru apart from the typical Québécois hit was its plot line recounting the 1979 arrival of a Vietnamese refugee family in small-town Quebec, using harrowing flashbacks to juxtapose the clan’s flight from horror with the warm embrace it received in Granby.
Ms. Thuy, whose 2009 novel was largely autobiographical, had already become one of Quebec’s most successful authors when Ru hit theatres. But the film propelled her to an entirely new level of celebrity in a province that carefully cultivates its own star system. Ms. Thuy became a staple on the province’s red carpets and talk-show circuit.
She also became a symbol of how much the very definition of the word Québécois had expanded since French-Canadians in the province began using that term to describe themselves more than six decades ago. She was proof that one no longer needed to be able to trace one’s roots back to French settlers who arrived in New France before the British conquest. Though she was neither born in Quebec nor spoke French before arriving in the province, most Québécois considered Ms. Thuy to be one of them. Or so she thought.
Quebec’s hit immigration drama Ru is ‘the story of Canada’
In a recent Radio-Canada interview to promote her new play Am, Ms. Thuy confided that she experienced “real heartbreak” while writing the piece, which, in contrast to Ru, depicts the underbelly of the immigrant experience in early-21st-century Quebec. Ms. Thuy said she had told her partner that she wanted to leave Quebec as the debate over immigration takes an increasingly ugly turn in the province.
“We hear the politicians, we hear their discourse, and it enters our bodies without us realizing it. … They keep repeating that [immigrants] are the problem, that they’re the cause of all your problems, and we end up believing it,” Ms. Thuy told Radio-Canada. “Suddenly, I become the adopted child and not a child of the family.”
Or more like a black sheep. The pile-on was swift and furious, as Ms. Thuy was roundly attacked on social media – mostly, it seems, for sounding ungrateful toward the province that has enabled her to thrive personally and professionally. Nationalist and conservative columnists insisted she would have a hard time finding a warmer welcome elsewhere amid the populist backlash against immigrants sweeping the United States and Europe.
“If we’re talking a lot about mass immigration in the West, it’s because mass immigration causes a lot of problems with respect to identity, social spending, insecurity, housing and border control,” Journal de Montréal columnist Mathieu Bock-Côté wrote, directly addressing Ms. Thuy. “Quebec does not deserve your spittle.”
Immigration has become a hot-button issue across Canada since former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s government raised the number of newcomers the country accepts to boost economic growth and fill (mostly low-wage) gaps in the labour market. Quebec also saw a spike in the number of asylum seekers that was proportionally higher than in other provinces. Instead of shrinking, as most pre-2020 projections predicted it would, Quebec’s population has grown by more than 500,000 since 2021.
Vast swaths of the Quebec economy now rely on temporary workers to function. The province’s language police have been inundated with complaints from francophone Quebeckers about not being able to order a coffee in French at Tim Hortons.
It might be asking too much of the current crop of Quebec politicians lacking inspiration or credible solutions to the province’s economic and social challenges to resist the temptation to exploit the cultural insecurity of Québécois who have fought to preserve their language and traditions. Already, in 2022, Coalition Avenir Québec Premier François Legault warned that it would be “suicidal” for the province to accept more than 50,000 new permanent residents annually. His government is now considering cutting that modest target in half and ending social assistance payments to asylum seekers.
Not to be outdone, Parti Québécois Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon recently warned that criminal organizations were increasingly targeting immigrant communities to recruit gang members. “Before the demographic changes created by immigration, we never would have thought that criminal groups could be so aggressive in identifying young people, at the age of 12 or 13, to turn them into active criminals capable of murder at 16,” he said in July.
Ms. Thuy’s comments did not emerge out of the blue. Sadly, she had an abundance of material to draw on. All Quebeckers need to reflect on that before it’s too late.