What We Choose to Forget (2026) documents the third leg of a personal journey of discovery by Guy Rodgers, a longtime Montreal arts promoter, writer, musician and multimedia creator. The first leg began as a series of filmed interviews he organized during the pandemic with members of Quebec’s diverse English-speaking community, or rather, communities. These were first identified as emerging from waves of immigrants arriving from England, Ireland and Scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries, and concluding with those from continental Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America in the recent past and present.
What We Choose to Forget is an impressive piece of work. Rodgers has a narrative skill that makes for a read that flows like water, at one level offering fly-on-the-wall descriptions of friendly encounters with a wide range of Quebecers, at another an eye-opening discovery of hidden truths they reveal about our history, or histories. Its great strength, like that of the film, What We Choose to Remember, is that the characters deliver the messages by relating their own stories, without artifice and without grating arguments or divisive polemics.
Guy Rodgers’s journey, as documented in the film and the book, explodes myths about Quebec’s roughly one million English-speakers. By tracing their origins and extracting individual stories, he unveils a remarkable variety within this linguistic minority. It embraces the so-called historic Anglos, of course, but also deeply-rooted immigrants, many of whom became anglos here, such as the Italians in east-end Montreal Island – he describes the St-Léonard episode – as well as Eastern European Jews who found refuge in Quebec from pogroms and the Shoah.
Among these last, Rodgers has stumbled upon a phenomenon. In showing the film, he kept hearing from people who came to Quebec in the 1950s and 60s who said they wanted to attend then-Roman-Catholic French-language schools, but were turned away. This has been denied by at least one francophone historian, but Rodgers heard personal accounts of such experiences too numerous to ignore or deny. Now he is working on documenting an inconvenient truth: that before Bill 101, many immigrant children learned English in English schools not because they chose this path, but rather because Quebec’s French schools would not accept them.
Guy Rodgers is telling English Quebecers our history in a novel way. Multimedia artist that he is, he has offered up a film, a series of live encounters, and a book, all of which convey experiences and insights that will change the way you understand Quebec’s biggest minority. If you are part of it, the stories will make you proud and remind you that this is your home. If you are not part of it, they will show you that Quebec’s English-speaking communities are a valuable part of the province’s social, cultural, economic and political fabric.
Photo montage of book cover by Guy Rodgers
For more information, go to www.whatwechoose.ca
Christopher Neal is a Montreal-based writer, retired journalist and communications manager.
