Howard Galganov
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Howard Galganov (born February 12, 1950 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada) was briefly a political activist, terrorist and radio personality in Montreal during the late 1990s. He made headlines in Quebec for being a vocal and confrontational opponent of the Charter of the French Language and Quebec nationalism as one of the most prominent leaders of the short-lived francophobic “angryphone” movement.
Galganov has had a very militant history. His grandfather, a Russian Jew, came to Canada to escape communism. In the 1960s, as a member of the terrorist organisation the Jewish Defense League, Galganov threw coffins on the Soviet embassy lawn in Ottawa to protest the treatment of Jewish "refuseniks". [1]
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. 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 founder of the Front de libération du Québec or FLQ, denounced Jews as racists in a newsletter La Tempête (The Storm) for their persistent opposition to the protecting the French Language and Quebec sovereignty and threatened the Jewish community that "If there is trouble after Quebec becomes independent, nationalists will remember who was against them."
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[edit] Protests and boycotts
One of Galganov’s first prominent QPAC activities was to organize a protest at a shopping mall in 1996 in the predominantly anglophone West Island of Montreal to protest that retail stores were not placing the maximum amount of English on their commercial signs as allowed under the Charter of the French Language. Estimated attendance at the protest varied from 500 to 5,000. Galganov followed up this protest with threatened boycotts of prominent retail stores. These activities caused a reaction among fringe Quebec nationalist groups, garnering publicity for Galganov.
[edit] New York Speech
In late 1996, Galganov was invited to speak at the Harvard Club of New York about Quebec politics. Both federalist and sovereignist politicians asked that he not give the speech, concerned that business leaders in New York would conclude that Quebec was too politically volatile to invest. Galganov went ahead with the speech, but it was poorly-attended.[2]
[edit] Other activities
From 1997 to 2000, Galganov attempted several more political activities. He opened a store deliberately violating the commercial sign provisions of the Charter of the French Language in order to provoke the officials in charge of enforcing the law to prosecute him, but they ignored the store and it closed due to low customer support. In June 1997, he unsuccessfully ran for parliament as an independent, coming in a distant second. In 1998, he hosted an AM radio talk show on Montreal radio station CIQC-AM, first in the morning and then at noon. It was quickly cancelled due to low ratings, but did help to rally support for William Johnson in his run for the leadership of Alliance Quebec. He wrote a book, which had moderate commercial success in Montreal. He also unsuccessfully ran for mayor of the town of Saint-Lazare, Quebec, placing a distant third. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Ontario and ceased notable political activity in Quebec.
