Roger-Luc Chayer
When it slips to TVA News, it goes awfully hard! This is what Gay Globe Media was able to see, unfortunately, on January 31st, when journalist François Cormier, formerly of Radio-Canada and recently posted on the roof of Quebec Parliament Hill for TVA, shared a message. / article by his colleague Marc-André Gagnon of the Journal de Québec, who treated the former financier of the Liberal Party Marc Bibeau of PD! You read that, PD!
First of all, let’s talk about the definition of « PD » in Quebec. According to Wikipedia, « homo » is a colloquial term for a homosexual male. The term can be considered as an insult, even a homophobic insult punished by the law (France). When used as an insult, publicly or not, the term exposes, as any other discriminatory insult, to criminal sanctions. The word is also used in the expression « break of the fag » to describe homophobic violence, usually committed in groups.
More specifically, in Quebec, the term « PD » is associated more with pederasty or outright pedophilia, according to SOS-Homophobie.org and may be subject to civil damages. When Gay Globe contacted François Cormier via his Facebook page (Messenger), he first spoke of a simple mistake, only to mention that he was going to report it and did not care about the consequences of such an attack on the reputation of a person. Whether one adheres to the values of certain political parties or not, nothing allows journalists to slander public figures and especially to treat them as « PD ».
By checking François Cormier’s « error » later, we were able to find the original article published in the Journal de Québec on January 28 and, to our surprise, the word « PD » does not exist. had not been used. The article had been revised around noon the same day, except that the version used by Cormier and posted on his Facebook page dated the same day, but at 13:32. We can therefore conclude that Marc-André Gagnon published a news on Facebook nearly two hours after the newspaper’s website and he added the word « PD ».
As for François Cormier, who presents himself as a parliamentary courierist and professional journalist, he shared the message without even reading the text of his colleague and allowed to propagate an allegation very damaging to anyone’s reputation.
The worst thing about this story is that journalist François Cormier revealed his homosexuality on RDI during an interview with Jasmin Roy during Pride Week in 2015. Can we imagine for a moment that following this revelation, he would have found acceptable to be treated pedophile, pederast or simply « PD », in association with his homosexuality? Of course not.
When Gay Globe confronted François Cormier on January 31, 3 days after the publication of the abusive term, Cormier was content to diminish the scope of the statement, asking « you do it on purpose or you pretend to say silliness? », and concluded that we were « cons ». We are waiting for comments from Mr. Bibeau …