|
Confirmed User
Industry Role:
Join Date: Apr 2003
Location: Quebec Calisse
Posts: 4,716
|
As home to the only French-speaking society in North America, Québec is totally distinct from the rest of the continent - so distinct, in fact, that its political elite have been obsessed with the politics of secession for the last forty years. The genesis of Québec's potential political separation from its English-speaking neighbours tracks back to France's ceding of the colony to Britain after the Conquest of 1759. At first this transfer saw little change in the life of most Québécois. Permitted to maintain their language and religion, they stayed under the control of the Catholic Church, whose domination of rural society - evident in the huge churches of Québec's tiny villages - resulted in an economically and educationally deprived subclass whose main contribution was huge families. It was these huge families, though, that ensured French-speakers would continue to dominate the province demographically - a political move termed the revanche du berceau (revenge of the cradle).
The creation of Lower and Upper Canada in 1791 emphasized the inequalities between anglophones and francophones, as the French-speaking majority in Lower Canada were ruled by the so-called Château Clique - an assembly of francophone priests and seigneurs who had to answer to a British governor and council appointed in London. Rebellions against this hierarchy by the French Patriotes in 1837 led to an investigation by Lord Durham who concluded that English and French relations were akin to "two nations warring within the bosom of a single state". His prescription for peace was immersing French-Canadians in the English culture of North America, and the subsequent establishment of the Province of Canada in 1840 can be seen as a deliberate attempt to marginalize francophone opinion within an English-speaking state.
French-Canadians remained insulated from the economic mainstream until twentieth-century industrialization , financed and run by the better-educated anglophones, led to a mass francophone migration to the cities. Here, a French-speaking middle class soon began to articulate the grievances of the workforce and to criticize the suffocating effect the Church was having on francophone opportunity. The shake-up of Québec society finally came about with the so-called Quiet Revolution in the 1960s, spurred by the provincial government under the leadership of Jean Lesage and his Liberal Party of Québec. The provincial government took control of welfare, health and education away from the Church and, under the slogan " Maîtres chez-nous " (Masters of our own house), established state-owned industries that reversed anglophone financial domination by encouraging the development of a francophone entrepreneurial and business class.
In order to implement these fiscal policies, Québec needed to administer its own taxes, and the provincial Liberals, despite being staunchly federalist, were constantly at loggerheads with Ottawa. Encouraged and influenced by other nationalist struggles, Québécois' desire for cultural recognition and political power intensified and reached a violent peak in 1970 with the terrorist actions of the largely unpopular Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) in Montréal. The kidnapping of Cabinet Minster Pierre Laporte and British diplomat James Cross, with Laporte winding up dead in the trunk of a car, led then-Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau to enact the War Measures Act and send Canadian troops into the streets of Montréal. Six years later a massive reaction against the ruling provincial Liberals brought the separatist Parti Québécois (PQ) to power in Montréal. Led by René Lévesque, the Parti Québécois accelerated the process of social change with the Charte de la langue française , better known as Bill 101 , which established French as the province's official language. With French dominant in the workplace and the classroom, Québécois thought they had got as close as possible to cultural and social independence. Still reeling from the terrorist activities of the FLQ and scared that Lévesque's ultimate objective of separatism would leave Québec economically adrift, the 6.5-million population voted 60:40 against sovereignty in a 1980 referendum.
Having made the promise that voting against separation meant voting for a "new Canada", Trudeau set about repatriating the country's Constitution in the autumn of 1981. Québec was prepared to contest the agreement with the support of other provincial leaders, but was spectacularly denied the opportunity to do so when Trudeau called a late-night meeting on the issue and did not invite Lévesque to the table. "The night of the long knives", as the event became known, wound up imposing a Constitution on the province that placed its language rights in jeopardy and removed its veto power over constitutional amendments. Accordingly, the provincial government refused to sign it - and hasn't to this day.
The Constitution's failure to include Québec became a lingering source of ire, which the beau risque (beautiful risk) equally failed to extinguish. A good-faith alliance between Québécois, the Liberal Party of Québec under Robert Bourassa, and the federal Progressive-Conservatives under Brian Mulroney, the beau risque produced the Meech Lake Accord in 1990. Inspired by Mulroney's talk of bringing Québec back into the Canadian fold with "honour and enthusiasm", the accord sought to recognize Québec's status as a "distinct society" and give it the power to opt out of federal legislation it didn't like - including the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Canadian equivalent of the American Bill of Rights. The talks collapsed on Québec's national holiday, la Fête St-Jean-Baptiste, and tens of thousands of Québécois took to the streets to demonstrate their frustration. The failure also prompted Lucien Bouchard, one of Mulroney's cabinet ministers and primary promoter of the agreement to English Canada, to resign from the Progressive-Conservative Party and form a new sovereignist federal party, the Bloc Québécois . In desperation, the Liberal leader Robert Bourassa hastily threw together a constitutional agreement, the Charlottetown Accord , that attempted not only to satisfy Québec, but the rest of Canada, and the aboriginal peoples as well. The accord's scope was so enormous that it failed on all points and was rejected by Québec and several other provinces in a Canada-wide referendum in 1992.
In October 1993, Québec's displeasure with federalism was evident in the election of Lucien Bouchard's Bloc Québécois to the ironic status of Her Majesty's Official Opposition in Ottawa. The cause received added support in 1994 when the Parti Québécois was returned to provincial power after vowing to hold a province-wide referendum on separation from Canada. The referendum was held a year later and the vote was so close - the province opted to remain a part of Canada by a margin of under one percent (50.6:49.4) - that calls immediately arose for a third referendum (prompting pundits to refer to the process as the "neverendum").
In 1996, Bouchard left federal politics to take the leadership of the PQ, determined to become the leader of a new country and promising to proceed with the separation process and work on the economy. Another step towards constitutional reform was taken in September 1997, when nine of Canada's ten provincial premiers endorsed the Calgary Declaration stating that Québec's unique character should be recognized - a shift from the "distinct society" recognition proposal in the failed Meech Lake and Charlottetown constitutional reform packages. Bouchard, the only premier not in attendance at the meeting, took the new term as "an insult", and the declaration's intentions never really got off the ground. Instead, the federal Liberals enacted the Clarity Act in 1999 - a sharp departure from their previous kowtowing tactics, as the act laid out the requirements Québec needed to meet to secede from Canada. While it infuriated leaders of the sovereignist movement, it also met with sharp criticism from members of the federalist camp who were convinced it would ignite sovereignist fire and result in a definitive Yes vote. Their fears didn't come to pass, however; in a surprising turn of the popular vote, the 2000 federal elections saw the federal Liberals win more in Québec than the Bloc Québécois.
An even greater shock was Bouchard's sudden resignation as Premier of Québec in January 2001, leaving the PQ with no obvious successor that matched his powers of oratory or charisma. Without Bouchard, there is little hope of achieving the dream of a sovereign Québec in the near future - if ever. Whoever the party chooses as his replacement will have to contend with the current political climate that suggests Québécois are tired of the political wrangling and would rather see a new deal that keeps them in Canada. After suffering through the long recession due, in large part, to the political battles that have dominated Québec for the last two decades, Québécois have a vested interest in maintaining the momentum of economic growth the province is currently experiencing. And, for the time being, they appear more interested in maintaining political peace than encouraging old fights
But thank to the liberals and those crooks, they just give to the Quebec 200 millions of good reasons to quit this (i cant even call this a country)...
|