When Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier resigned last May after leaving classified documents at the home of his former girlfriend Julie Couillard, CTV News needed to gauge the political fallout. They immediately knew who to call. McGill’s Antonia Maioni was ready with a quick, cogent explanation of Bernier’s very public rise and fall.

Maioni, Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, is best known in policy circles for her
thorough and insightful reports on Canada’s health care system. But you probably recognize Antonia from her regular moonlighting gig on the evening news. She’s the hardcore political junkie who’s always able to explain Quebec to Canada, or Canada to Quebec, or even Canada to the U.S., as a visiting scholar at Duke and Harvard.

How did an anglo-Montrealer, educated at a Westmount convent before going on to a Ph.D. at Northwestern, become such an expert on the mysterious world of Quebec politics? It all started back in the ’80s, on a quest to improve her French.

“I’d won a scholarship to study a second official language. I just decided to take the plunge, and enrolled in some political science courses at the Université Laval.”

What she found there was an excellent department of political science. “I met my husband in Léon Dion’s class [Stéphane Dion’s father]. And it’s hard not to fall in love with Québec City. I was only supposed to stay for a year, but I decided to stay and finish my degree at Laval. I ended up not just learning French, but learning from the inside out what makes Quebec tick, especially francophone Quebec because I was living entirely in French.”

Maioni’s husband, Professor Pierre Martin, is Chair of American Political and Economic Studies at the
Université de Montréal and a specialist in international relations and public opinion analysis. The couple provides job security for the Outremont recycling crew, ploughing daily through local, national, and international print media in two languages. They’re also something of a Rubik’s cube for Statistics Canada. She’s an Anglo Italian who speaks French at home but mostly works in English. He’s a francophone who teaches American politics in French. And then there are the couple’s three sons, bilingual triplets.

If there’s one thing Maioni thinks Canadians could understand better about Quebec, it’s that “It’s not a question of Quebeckers wanting more, or wanting this or that. It’s really that they have different needs than other Canadians in many aspects of their lives, being a francophone society in North America…The other thing people don’t get is that you can be a nationalist in Quebec and a federalist. Nationalism and federalism are not binary opposites. And that’s something that the Conservative party got [with their Québécois nation motion].”

As for whether she’ll be reading Julie Couillard’s newly released memoir, she chuckles, admitting, “only the racy bits.” Hey, even being an expert has its fluffy assignments.