Franco-Ontarians Lose Beloved Festival

Just like that. Gone.

No more money. No more shows.

For the past five years in a farmer’s field near Casselman, Ontario about 40 minutes drive east of Ottawa, hundreds of volunteers in period costumes have staged a grandiose historical pageant of Hollywood proportions depicting the life and times of Canada’s Franco-Ontarian minority, all four centuries of it.

It had floats and fireworks, mock battles with Indians, even a replica of Samuel de Champlain’s ship carrying 19 actors powered along on a man-made canal.

There were 350 amateur actors wearing more than 1,200 costumes. Everybody was hired from surrounding farms and villages.

The two-hour spectacle included a re-enactment of two wars, great constitutional victories and court battles to save French-language schools, and the iconic Montfort hospital.

It was expensive -- $1.2 million a year – but it was worth it, they felt, to tell their moving story to the rest of Canada.

It was one way of proving wrong René Lévesque for calling them dead ducks.

The show drew up to 1,500 people a night and still struggled financially from year to year. This summer the audiences were down to 500 a night. It couldn’t last.

First there was competition from the big 400th anniversary show in Quebec City. How are you going to compete against that? And then the weather. It rained all summer. Who wants a wet night in the open air?

Then there was the price of gasoline. Who travels unless they have to? Half as many tourists came to the area this summer.

And then the script hasn’t changed in five years. How many times can you see Champlain strut his stuff. Youngsters loved the fighting and the fireworks and the adventure segments, and all the lights and the loud music.

But some people felt the script should have been changed. The organizers, all of them purists, said history was history. No tampering. You can’t replace Champlain with Paris Hilton just to bring in a crowd. Somebody should have told them ‘’Why don’t you try Paul McCartney?’’

Nor did they want to stage an English-language version. There are a million Anglophones in the Ottawa area. They might have learned something about their neighbors.

No, it had to be in French. Only in French!

The governments could have stepped in to save the show, but the sponsorship scandal did something to Stephen Harper’s generosity towards summer megashows. And don’t even mention the word sponsorship to Stéphane Dion.

The Ontario government had already tossed in $225,000 this year. You can’t ask for more.

So the show sank like a rock in the little creek. Champlain’s replica ship is still afloat, though. Plenty of schoolyards and playgrounds would love it.

As for Franco-Ontarians, they can always tell their grandchildren that for five summers they saw the greatest show that ever was in Eastern Ontario.