Long before Minister Geneviève Guilbault invited public transport companies and municipal elected officials to “manage their fern”, the expression was current in the schools attended by Claudia Turmel, who made it the title of one of her youth albums.
“At the time when I was teaching, it was an expression that we used a lot in schools,” says the author of Manage your fern!published in 2021, who was surprised to see the formula reach the upper echelons of Quebec politics.
Last Wednesday, the Minister of Transport and Sustainable Mobility, Geneviève Guilbault, considered that it was not the responsibility of the Quebec state to compensate for the operating deficit of public transport companies. Instead, she argued that “collective transportation in a given territory is first and foremost the responsibility of elected officials and managers of the given territory.”
This is where she used the image of the fern, widely used in the media since: “Everyone, as I like to say, must manage their fern and find their own solutions because it is not realistic to think that we can systematically transfer deficits to the government. » The minister reacted in this way in a context where the financing of public transport periodically makes the headlines, while companies’ deficits number in the hundreds of millions.
Elected officials from the Montreal Metropolitan Community recently informed Quebec that they could impose up to $228 in tax per car to bail out public transportation.
Read “The mayors threatened Quebec with a steep increase in the registration tax”
“I laughed so much”
It is through readers – and her illustrator Karina Dupuis – that Mme Turmel got wind of this turn of phrase, which recurs in the work a bit like a leitmotif. “I laughed so hard when I found out,” she laughs. Even if she did not “invent” the expression, she recalls, she used it extensively, with her own children and when she was teaching.
PHOTO ALEXANDRA QUINN, PROVIDED BY CLAUDIA TURMEL
The author Claudia Turmel
“When we said that to the children, sometimes it didn’t mean much to them. But we tried to remind them that they had to take care of themselves (first and foremost),” says M.me Turmel. From there was born the idea of a work intended for them, with the objective of bringing to life a sometimes abstract concept.
To do this, Claudia Turmel and Karina Dupuis take little readers on a journey – in words and illustrations – through different eras of History. Each time a character encounters a “problem”, he is asked three questions which should lead him to develop his autonomy. In the event of negative answers, the character is ordered to “manage his fern”, therefore to resolve his problems by himself.
“When we write books for children, we want to touch their hearts, we want to amaze them and we want to pass on little messages,” says M.me Turmel. That this speech can also reach adults is even better. »
The sudden craze around the expression did not translate into an explosion in sales, according to the author, even if Manage your fern! shown in 5e rank in the ADP distributor’s weekly charts. But she does not take offense, and above all rejoices in any visibility that children’s literature can enjoy.
And basically, Claudia Turmel will leave it to experts and elected officials to assess who is responsible for public transport.
Read “The Quebec state does not have to manage public transportation, pleads Minister Guilbault”
reference: www.lapresse.ca