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Hell hath no fury like Quebecers scorned — especially if that criticism is unfair, exaggerated or being levelled by someone perceived as an outsider.

Andrew Potter, the recently appointed director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, learned this lesson the hard way after Maclean’s magazine published his piece “How a snowstorm exposed Quebec’s real problem: social malaise.”

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In it, Potter, the former editor of the Ottawa Citizen, surmised that the debacle that stranded more than 300 motorists on Montreal’s Highway 13 overnight during last week’s snowstorm was in large part due to “a mass breakdown of the social order” and “an absence of solidarity.”

If this weren’t already asking for trouble, he suggested this transportation blunder occurred because Quebec is the kind of place where restaurants offer two bills, depending on whether a diner is paying with cash or by “a more traceable mechanism”; where garages, contractors, family doctors and ultrasound clinics all “insist on cash”; and where “bank machines routinely dispense fifties by default.” But it got worse: Potter then went on to lament Quebecers’ lack of friendship, civic engagement, volunteerism and general sense of trust. Ouch.