ORIGINS OF QUEBEC SEPARATISM

French Canadian nationalism took the form of a movement for enhanced status for Quebec: special status within confederation, a new form of association on the basis of equality with English Canada, or complete independence as a sovereign nation. During the late 1960s, the movement was motivated primarily by the belief, shared by many Quebec intellectuals and labour leaders, that the economic difficulties of Quebec were caused by confederation and could only be ended by altering--or ending--the ties with other provinces and the central government. By the late 20th century economic conditions had begun to improve, and cultural and linguistic differences became the primary motivation for the resurgence of Quebec separatist sentiment in the 1990s. Quebec separatism was deeply rooted in Canadian history: some Québécois maintained a perennial desire to have their own state, which in a sense they had possessed from 1791 to 1841, and many French Canadians had long felt a sense of minority grievance, stimulated by the execution of Louis Riel in the west, given substance by the Manitoba Schools Question, and given voice in the nationalism of journalists such as Jules-Paul Tardivel and Henri Bourassa.

French Canadian nationalism was also the outcome of profound economic and social changes that had taken place in Quebec since about 1890. Until that time French Canadians had lived by agriculture and seasonal work in the timber trade. The middle-class French of Quebec and Montreal acted as intermediaries between their humbler countrymen and the English masters of commerce and industry. The coming of hydroelectric power and the wood-pulp industry as a result of the successful national policy of protection in creating Canadian manufacturing plants in Quebec and Ontario created a labour force that brought French Canadians as workers into the cities, particularly Montreal. The rate of growth of the French Canadian population and the lack of good workable land outside the narrow St. Lawrence and Richelieu valleys contributed to the rush to low-paying jobs in urban industries and to the growth of slums, particularly in Montreal. By 1921 Quebec was the most urbanized and industrialized of all Canadian provinces, including Ontario, which remained, however, the most populous and the wealthiest. The Quebec government, devoted to the 19th-century policy of laissez-faire, recklessly encouraged industry and did little to check its worst excesses. With few exceptions the new enterprises were owned and directed, in the English language, by English Canadians or by U.S. businesses.

At the same time industrialization destroyed the myths by which French Canada had survived: that of the Roman Catholic mission to the New World and the cult of agriculture as the basis of virtuous life. Ever more Québécois had to make their way as best they could in quite a different world, in which the old values were mockeries and the obstacles not to be overturned by the old powers of endurance.

This clash of old and new came to a head in the last years of the regime of Premier Maurice Duplessis, an economic conservative and Quebec nationalist who led Quebec from 1936 to 1939 and from 1944 to 1959. As leader of the Union Nationale party--which he had helped create--Duplessis's first term in office ended when he lost the 1939 election after challenging Ottawa's right to intervene in provincial jurisdictions during wartime. Reelected in 1944, Duplessis refused to cooperate with most of the new social and educational initiatives launched by the King and Saint Laurent governments. He favoured foreign investment, supported the Roman Catholic church as Quebec's chief agency of social welfare and education, and strongly opposed trade unionism.

Quebec society was changing dramatically in the late 1940s and '50s. Montreal and other urban centres grew rapidly after the war. A burgeoning French-speaking urban middle class was entering business and the professions. Increasing numbers of students completed high school and entered Canadian colleges and universities. A prolonged and bitter strike by asbestos workers began a period of labour conflict and gave young idealists (one of them Pierre Elliott Trudeau) a chance to combine with labour in a struggle for a free society of balanced interests. A new Quebec was emerging, despite Duplessis's best efforts to keep it Catholic, agrarian, and conservative. At the time of his death in 1959, the province was ready for a change in politics as well.

In June 1960 the Quebec Liberal Party, under Jean Lesage, took power at Quebec. The new government launched a number of new legislative initiatives aimed at reforming the corruption that had become widespread during the Duplessis years, transforming and improving the social and educational infrastructure, removing the Roman Catholic church from most secular activities, and involving the provincial government directly in economic development. The Quebec government nationalized the province's private power companies and consolidated them into one government-owned company. It launched a new provincial pension plan, creating a large pool of investment capital. Much was done quickly; the period of Liberal activism became known as the "Quiet Revolution."

After the Liberals were defeated by the Union Nationale in 1966, the extremes widened in Quebec, and the elements of opinion began to crystallize. The Liberal Party was federalist; it held that the reforms needed in Quebec could be obtained within the federal system. The Union Nationale also remained fundamentally federalist, but it stressed the importance of remaining Québécois and of obtaining greater provincial power. To the left of the traditional parties, however, opinion ranged from a demand for a special status for Quebec to the demand for separation and independence. An active minority of leftist Montrealers broke with the Liberals and began advocating independence as a first step to social change. From their efforts came the Parti Québécois with a platform of secession from confederation. Under René Lévesque, a former Liberal, the Parti Québécois won 24 percent of the popular vote in the election of 1970, but the Liberals, because of an antiquated distribution of electoral districts, won 72 seats out of a total of 95. Constitutional reform was to be tried once more.

Other social revolutionaries, inspired by refugees from Algeria and by the Cuban example, began to practice terrorism. Bombings began in 1963 and continued sporadically. This mode of action most French and English Canadians felt was "un-Canadian," but it illustrated both the social ills of Quebec and the ties of the French intellectuals with the world outside Canada. In October 1970 a terrorist group kidnapped the British trade commissioner, James Cross, and Quebec's labour minister, Pierre Laporte, who was subsequently murdered. The government of Quebec called in the federal government for help, and the War Measures Act was proclaimed. The usual civil liberties were suspended, some 500 people were arrested, and troops were moved into Quebec. The Canadian public generally approved of the invocation of the act, but few convictions followed, except of those accused of the murder of Laporte.