The recent brouhaha centered around Quebec Community Groups Network (QCGN) president Marlene Jennings is symptomatic of a much larger issue. Founded some 25-years ago in a different political era devoid of the Internet and less provincial centralization, the QCGN attempts to bring widely scattered and disparate community groups together under a single lobbying/pressure-point umbrella so as to promote the vitality of Quebec s English-speaking communities.
The 50 or so groups (there are no individual members but organizations only) that claim membership have vastly competing interests and goals; for example, what can be offered to Catholic Action Montreal, Parkinson Quebec, Loyola High School, Saint Columba House, and/or the Gaspesian British Heritage Village? As can be appreciated, each separate group has its own administration and via its separate internal governance will make its wishes/demands/interests known to the QCGN.
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In 2015, Catholic Community Services, the social services agency for Montreal’s English-speaking Catholic community, excised “Catholic” from its name and identity, rebranding itself Collective Community Services.
Catholicism can be a tough sell in Quebec, a province that rapidly secularized in the 1960s. People in Quebec, especially those under 35, are the least likely to believe in God among Canadians, according to a 2019 poll from the Association for Canadian Studies. Only 10 percent of respondents said they attend religious services.
The increasing secularization of Canadian society played a role when rebranding Catholic community services. “One of the issues for that agency was that it received funding from a nonprofit foundation that itself was very ambiguous regarding its openness to religion and funding religious organizations,” said Bishop Thomas Dowd, an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Montreal at the time of the agency’s rebranding. “The que