Many provocative questions are raised in the documentary Quebec My Country Mon Pays, which will have its world premiere at Hot Docs on Saturday.

But it was an unasked question that kept me wondering: Why hasn’t there been a movie chronicling the mass exodus of English-speaking Canadians from Quebec made before now?

The exodus started four decades ago and eventually close to 500,000 people who had considered Quebec their home for generations left the province. Many of them took Highway 401 to Toronto.

John Walker, a veteran National Film Board of Canada director and writer, was among them and so were his parents.

But in 2008, when Walker’s father died, there was suddenly an urgent question: Where was the family going to bury him?

“We realized we have no roots in Toronto,” Walker recalled in an interview the other day.

His parents had been in exile for almost 30 years. Montreal was their real home. And that was the place the filmmaker’s father was returned for burial.

That decision marked a turning point for the family.

“It brought all of this back,” Walker explains. “To me, the exodus was a story I wanted to tell. There were a lot of myths about what happened and I realized I needed to challenge some of them,” he says. For instance, there was a belief that only rich people from Westmount left and the total numbers were underestimated.

“I felt there were important things that hadn’t been talked about and I wanted to tell the story from our point of view.”

That’s exactly what he does in this feature-length doc, with the help of many people who lived through it, including poets, politicians and filmmakers on both sides of the linguistic and cultural divide.

The future film director grew up in the Town of Mount Royal, where most of the neighbours were Jewish.

I happened to watch this fascinating and sad film during Passover, so it struck me as a contemporary postscript to the flight of the Israelites from Egypt thousands of years ago. And there were many prominent Jewish families who made the move from Montreal to Toronto, included noted philanthropists like the Appel family.

Looking at old family pictures now, Walker sees an innocence in his own boyhood face.

“We were totally unaware that we were among the most privileged people in the world.”

But everything was about to change, starting when he was an adolescent in the mid-1960s.

That’s when the first bombs went off in Westmount mailboxes near the school where John Walker’s grandmother taught.

It was then that he started to feel the uncomfortable sense of being part of a minority group.

“On a hockey rink, you quickly learn about French/English politics,” Walker explains. “I had no idea why the French didn’t like us.”

Still, this was a quiet revolution. The only violence in the early days was over hockey: the 1955 riot at the Forum in response to the suspension of Maurice “Rocket” Richard.

During the postwar period of the late 1940s and ’50s, the fundamental change of attitude for most French-speaking Quebec was not antagonism to English-speaking neighbours, at least not initially. Instead the negative reaction was directed at the church and the provincial government.

Thousands of people stopped going to church and felt liberated from the iron rule of Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis. They were ready to embrace a new cause.

Thanks to the federal Massey Report in 1951, there was a push to create a Canadian culture so we could tell the difference between ourselves and citizens of the United States.

A key role was played by the National Film Board, and the NFB’s move from Ottawa to Montreal in 1956 resulted in the birth of Quebec cinema.

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“It was a place where intellectuals and artists could get work,” says Walker. It was a haven for freedom of expression, where it was safe to defy Duplessis.

Ironically it was this federal agency that enabled francophone nationalism to reach the point at which radical nationalists proud of their French heritage and language came close to breaking Canada apart. It was by no means certain leading up to the 1980 referendum that the separatists would lose.

Movies, especially Le chat dans le sac, a 1964 feature made at the NFB by Gilles Groulx, helped create a mythology, an identity and a back story for those who grew up in the province speaking and living entirely in French, while feeling surrounded by millions of others in North America who spoke only English.

The radical movement stopped seeming hip and relatively harmless in 1970 when British diplomat James Cross was kidnapped and Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte was killed by the terrorist Front de libération du Québec (FLQ). Pierre Trudeau, then prime minister, imposed the War Measures Act.

In 1976, nationalists danced in the streets of Montreal when René Lévesque and the Parti Quebecois came to power. Before long, the PQ government introduced Bill 101, making French the only official language of the province. The bill was notorious to English-speaking Quebecers. It was clear the party was over for people like the Walkers.

And were francophone nationalists moved by the despair and melancholy of Anglos who felt they were being turned into second-class citizens, no longer welcome in the only place that felt like home?

As Denys Arcand, the elder statesman of Quebec cinema, tells Walker on camera: “They couldn’t care less.”

The major change, he explains, was there were more jobs open to French workers and more houses available in Westmount at lower prices.

John Walker’s ancestors had come from Scotland and Ireland, and had considered Quebec home for 150 years on one side and 250 years on the other.

“My parents moved just before the 1980 referendum. It felt like the breakup of our family.”

It was a very emotional time for his father, a graphic artist who at age 52 found he could no longer get work.

Walker’s older sister, Joanne, returned to Montreal after a short stay in Toronto and is fiercely committed to staying put where she feels she belongs.

Walker’s parents and his younger sister stayed in Toronto. For years so did so did the director. But in recent times Walker has been living and working in Halifax, and spends time in Montreal.

In the unforgettable finale of Walker’s doc, he and his sisters have brought their mother back from Toronto to live in Montreal. She pays a visit to her husband’s grave. Instead of being a gloomy scene, joy and relief balance the sadness.

“I don’t remember seeing it before,” says Mrs. Walker. “I should be crying,” she tells her children. Instead, she’s laughing. The sense we are left with is that she feels overwhelmingly comforted by the awareness of being home at last.

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