The Mouvement laïque québécois (Quebec Secular Movement) pays hommage to the exceptional contribution of Janette Bertrand to the education of free, responsible citizens
Janette Bertrand is known throughout Quebec as a TV host, playwright, actress, public speaker, educator, and committed activist. This multi-faceted woman has influenced several generations and succeeded in kindling their social conscience. Many other groups before the Mouvement laïque québecois (MLQ) have celebrated Ms. Bertrand's talents and commitment and underlined her legendary qualities of empathy and openness.
We are happy to be associated with those who have paid tribute to Janette Bertrand in the past. However, the MLQ is particularly interested in highlighting her efforts to eliminate prejudice, to include the excluded and to foster a climate of tolerance and respect by encouraging open public debate of various moral issues. In word and deed, Ms. Bertrand has promoted freedom of conscience and the right to behave in ways considered to lie outside the norms of society, provided that the rights of other citizens are respected.
When Janette Bertrand came on the scene, public discussion of many questions was taboo because of the generally accepted moral standards that were proclaimed by major religious institutions, in particular Christian Churches. For example, one could not discuss homosexuality on television or radio unless one took the precaution of qualifying such behaviour as deviant. How was it possible to address the topic of transsexuality in a manner sympathetic to those concerned, at a time when most public figures were reluctant to discuss even the sexuality of divorced persons, or extra-marital sex, or contraception among high school students?
From our perspective, her merit lies in her having helped sweep aside these taboos without evading the important moral issues associated with them. She did this by bringing everything out in public. She offered a different point of view, an alternative to a morality founded on simplistic strictures handed down from on high. She put forward a moral viewpoint founded on respect for the individual human being with emphasis on fundamental rights and freedoms. Ms. Bertrand's approach promotes the life, security and dignity of human beings, affirming these values against the threats posed by genocide, racism, sexism, homophobia, sexual aggression, torture, and social exclusion, against exploitation and slavery, against the ideologies that advocate holy wars. In her teleplays and televised discussion forums, she has put forth a new hierarchy of values.
Janette Bertrand has also been very conscious of her role as a woman in society and has never neglected to promote the feminist cause.
As an educator, Ms. Bertrand took an abiding interest in adolescents and attempted to help them to take charge of their lives and find solutions to such daily problems as boy-girl relations, physical appearance, or loneliness and social exclusion. In giving them an opportunity to express themselves and to discuss their problems with a sympathetic adult, she found a way of making them responsible and aware while enhancing their self-esteem.
Janette Bertrand's work is in the same spirit as that of the Marquis de Condorcet, a mathematician, man of science, philosopher and statesman who promoted universal access to free, compulsory public education for both boys and girls on an equal footing. He fought for the abolition of slavery and was a great theorist of democracy and secularism. The Mouvement laïque québecois has the privilege of attributing the Condorcet Prize to Ms. Janette Bertrand, a free and liberated woman, for her exceptional contribution to the education of free and responsible citizens in a democratic and secular society.
HENRI LABERGE
President, Mouvement laïque québécois
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