Quebec singer blames attack on language
A Juno Award-winning singer from Quebec says he suffered a concussion after an unprovoked attack by a group of anglophones in Quebec City in early February.
Kevin Parent doesn't know how many people attacked him, just that it hurt, he told reporters Tuesday. (CBC)
Kevin Parent told reporters that he was at an outdoor mulled-wine stand on Quebec's Grand Alle on the night of Feb. 12, during Carnaval de Qubec, when he nodded to a group of men. They jumped him, he said, because of long-standing tensions between anglophones and francophones.
"There's a certain tendance that happens year after year the Carnaval de Qubec," Parent, who is bilingual, told reporters Tuesday in his first appearance since the alleged attack.
"I now understand the anger of oppressed francophone Quebecers who get pissed on in their own capital city during their own carnival," he said.
No complaints for years: police
Quebec police say they were patrolling the Grande Alle area the night of the incident but saw nothing.
They also haven't received a single report of anglophone-francophone tension during the carnival for several years, according to police spokesman Francois Bouchard.
Parent has not filed an official police complaint, saying he would be unable to identify his attackers. Parent, 37, whose first language is English, grew up on the predominantly francophone Gasp Peninsula.
He told reporters he is a pacifist and claimed never to have been in a fight in his life.
His 2002 album, Les vents ont chang, won him a Juno Award for Best Selling Francophone Album. He released a new album, in French, in the fall of 2009, his first since releasing an English album in spring 2007.