QUEBEC CITY — As part of a five-year, seven million dollar campaign, the Quebec government has launched a series of ads to find out just how tolerant its citizens are, reports the Montreal Gazette. The ads, which begin by asking, “How open are you?” and show a series of gender neutral situations, before displaying varying degrees of affection between same-sex couples.
In one scene, innocuous by all measures, two men are sitting on a bench outside. The narration states that, “These two guys even share a common life. Does this bother you?” In the next clip, however, the two men are seen unapologetically kissing each other as the narration then reads, “The two guys even share a common life. What if one of them was your brother?”
The narrator concludes, after each brief vignette, by asking “does this change what you were thinking 20 seconds ago?”
The campaign, which was developed by Cossette Communications in Quebec City over the past year, may seem like an odd investment in a liberal bastion like Quebec. But according to the report, Martine Delgrave, who oversaw the project for the provincial government, stated “We learned in our research that Quebec is viewed as open to sexual diversity — but homophobia still exists and it still exists in Quebec. Our idea for a first campaign was to shed some light, to have some awareness about how open we really are.”
And the responses haven’t been without controversy. While a recent survey of 800 Quebecers demonstrated that a whopping 90 percent say they are open to sexual diversity, that number dropped by half – to 45 percent – when asked if they were comfortable with transgenders. More dispiriting, only 40 percent of those surveyed said they were comfortable watching two men kiss in public.
Surprisingly, there have been relatively few complaints since the ads went public on March 3. A total of nine complaints have reached the government, observed Paul-Jean Charest, a government spokesman, and they mostly revolved around two men or two women kissing as part of a government ad.
Still, the Gazette went on to observe that some complained, in a rather disjointed critique of the ad campaign, that, “Some Anglo commentators also linked the issue to language, fuming that the government is running a campaign about tolerance while spending public funds on the Office Quebecois de la langue francaise to crack down on English.”
Delgrave cautioned, however, “”We don’t think that a four-week campaign will change everything, but we believe it’ll take Quebec society farther down the path of openness.” The government, therefore, plans to conduct a follow-up survey to measure how perceptions have changed. A second series of ads, revolving around issues like same-sex parenting, is planned for 2014 or 2015.
