Howard Galganov
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Howard Galganov (born February 12, 1950 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada) is a businessman, a journalist, radio personality and civil rights activist.
Galganov's political ideas were shaped in part during his teenage years when some members of the militant Front de libération du Québec committed assassinations and robberies in their armed struggle to liberate Quebec from Canadian rule. After completing high school, Galganov attended Sir George Williams University in Montreal during which time he was witness to the October Crisis of 1970 when members of the Front de libération du Québec kidnapped and killed politician Pierre Laporte, the Minister of Labour and Vice-Premier of Quebec.
By the 1990s, Howard Galganov had become an outspoken critic of the Quebec sovereignty movement and of the Federal government for not defending the rights of English-speaking citizens living in the Canadian province of Quebec. After a 1995 Quebec referendum on sovereignty for the Province of Quebec, Galganov helped found the Quebec Political Action Committee (QPAC), serving as its president until 2000. According to Galganov, QPAC "was the most prolific and successful of all the groups formed to take on the Québécois ethnocentric nationalists." He has protested the actions of the Office québécois de la langue française on numerous issues including when language inspectors ordered stores to remove kosher products from their shelves just before Passover because they weren't labelled in the French language. As a member of the Jewish community, Galganov voiced his outrage when Raymond Villeneuve, a convicted murderer and a founder of the Front de libération du Québec terrorist group, denounced Jews in a newsletter La Tempête (The Storm) for their persistent opposition to the Quebec separation from Canada and threatened the Jewish community that "If there is trouble after Quebec becomes independent, nationalists will remember who was against them."
Howard Galganov's forthright, no-backing-down style made him a champion to some and an antagonist to others. He hosted a talk show called "Galganov in the Morning" on Montreal radio station CIQC-AM from 7:00 a.m. to 10 a.m. The sometimes controversial program resulted in an August 14, 1998 finding by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council that the radio station breached provisions of the Canadian Association of Broadcaster's Code of Ethics in its December 9, 1997 broadcast of "Galganov in the Morning." As well, Galganov wrote articles for various newspapers and authored a 1998 book titled "Bastards" (ISBN 0-9684177-0-1) that was on the Montreal Best Sellers List for thirteen straight weeks. The book is a record of his civil rights work which opens with a warning that the book will be offensive to Separatists, elitists and some members of the political class.
The zenith of Galganov's success as an activist was his lead in organizing a protest march (c1995) at the Fairview Shopping Centre in the Montreal suburb of Pointe-Claire. Pointe-Claire is located on the western part of the Island of Montreal (in an area commonly referred to as the 'West Island'). This part of the Island of Montreal is where most Quebecers whose mother tongue is English live. At the time of the protest march, businesses in Quebec were allowed to post bilingual signs, as long as French was predominant (the English wording could not exceed 50% of the size of the French wording). However, many of the stores in the Fairview Shopping Centre only posted unilingual French signs, despite the fact that a large part of the Centre's customers were native English speakers. The point of the march was to ask the merchants in the shopping centre to respect their customers and post bilingual signs.
Galganov was never able to trump the success of the march. This was due to two factors. First, the language issue subsided in the years following the second Quebec referendum in October 1995. Many English-speaking Quebecers considered language to be less important than other issues. Second, Galganov's tactless, abrasive style cost him many allies. Without the support of other language activists, there was little Galganov was able to accomplish on his own.
Galganov's activism led to harsh attacks from some of the media in Quebec and he was the victim of a number of death threats. A resident of Saint-Lazare, Quebec, Gaglanov and his wife operated Promar Media Group Inc. Quebec is the only province of Canada that operates it own additional corporate and personal income tax system and Galganov and his business reportedly became the target of a tax audit. In the earlier part of the 2000s, he and his family chose to move across the Quebec border to nearby Alexandria in the province of Ontario.
