2. by colin j. fleming
LUCIEN BOUCHARD’S WORDS SEEMED TO MARK THE DEATH OF A DREAM.
He was the father of the Bloc Québécois, once premier of the province under the sovereigntist
banner, who for years played elder statesman to a surging independence movement. But this winter
it was not “les maudits Anglos” he was denouncing—it was one-time compatriots. The Parti
Québécois leader, Pauline Marois, was spearheading a charge against a law that permitted Orthodox
Jewish schools to hold classes on Sunday. Bouchard saw it as a sign of deep disrespect, another
milepost marking the party’s wild swerve away from its origins. “I think of [Parti Qubecois] founder
Rene Levesque,” Bouchard said. “René Lévesque was a man of generosity. He didn’t ask questions like
that. He didn’t think our identity was threatened.” Yet it wasn’t Bouchard’s attack on Marois that
made headlines the next morning. It was something far more unexpected.
“SOVEREIGNTY IS NOT FEASIBLE, BOUCHARD SAYS.” The headline in Le Devoir
stunned the nation. The legendary Lucien Bouchard had finally given up. Fifteen years ago,
Québecers came within a few thousand votes of independence. The “no” camp won the
referendum by only a single percentage point. Now, separatism is anemic and limping,
abandoned by some of its most fervent supporters. So what happened to the nationalist fervour
that almost ripped a hole in Canada?
№62
SEPARATION
ANXIETY
Fifteen years ago, Québec came within a hair of secession.
Now the separatist movement seems to have all but disappeared.
When did Québec become part of Canada again?
3.
4. ERIC DUHAIME’S APARTMENT IS
only seconds away from Boulevard Saint-Lau-
rent, the street that divides Montréal between
East and West, and which historically divided
the francophones from the anglophones. It’s a
division, he said, which is no longer relevant.
Which is true at least for Duhaime, who lives on
the west—the historically anglophone side.
Duhaime is one of six founders of Liberté-
Québec, a right-wing network that has been lik-
ened to the American Tea Party, but without its
radical views on social issues. He has also acted
as a political advisor for many politicians, includ-
ing Stockwell Day and Mario Dumont.
The historic linguistic, social and economic
tensions that separated francophones from an-
glophones have largely disintegrated, says Du-
haime. Moreover, Québecers are sick of the way
sovereignty has hijacked political discourse. If
there were a solution, he says, they probably
would have found one after 50 years. “If we ever
want to separate, the option is always going to be
there,” Duhaime says. “But in the meantime, for
the next century, can we talk about something
else? When there is an appetite, we won’t need
politicians to tell us. People will be in the streets.
We need to debate the real issues. It’s not about
the colour of our flag, it’s about the tax dollars
we’re sending to our government and the ser-
vices we’re getting in return.”
When it comes to independence, Liberté-
Québec doesn’t really have a policy. To them, the
debate is simply a distraction from more press-
ing political issues.
Yet, while intellectuals like Duhaime are ready
to leave the independence question behind in
favour of economic issues, the sovereignty
movement isn’t quite dead. For those within the
Parti Québécois, the official opposition to the
Liberals in Québec’s National Assembly, the is-
sue is as alive as ever.
LONGEUIL, A BIG AND SLEEPY
Montréal suburb, is a separatist stronghold. All
three of its MPs are Bloc Québécois and three of
its four MNAs are Parti Québécois, including
Bernard Drainville.
Drainville’s office building is on a quiet street
in a largely residential neighborhood. Inside the
office, he sits in a conference room adorned with
small Québec flags and a mounted poster of PQ
founder René Lévesque. To understand nation-
alism today, he says, you have to understand
what happened on October 30, 1995: the date of
Québec’s second referendum. “On that night,
anything was possible if we won,” Drainville says.
And winning seemed like a genuine possibility.
In 1995, the nationalists were riding a wave of
anger that began with the failure of the Meech
Lake Accord in 1990, where Québec’s proposed
modifications to the Canadian constitution were
rejected. Their ire grew in 1992 with the failure
of the Charlottetown Accord, yet another at-
tempt to amend the constitution, this time with
a greater emphasis on reconciliation. Québec’s
collective humiliation propelled its leaders to
sign “Bill 1: An Act Respecting the Future of
Québec,” an agreement which committed the
Bloc Québécois, Parti Québécois and Action
Démocratique du Québec to a referendum. The
searing anger even made an appearance in what
could easily have been a dry legal text—Bill 1
claimed that Québec was “hoodwinked”
by the English-speaking provinces that sur-
rounded it—ending with the provocation:
“We, the people of Québec, through our Na-
tional Assembly, proclaim: Québec is a sovereign
country.”
Six months later, Québec held its first referen-
dum on sovereignty in 15 years. 93.5% of eligible
voters turned out. 49.4% voted yes and 50.6%
voted no. Québec was still Canadian. The sover-
eigntists were devastated. “We spent a lot of time
wondering about the circumstances of the loss,”
Drainville said. “A lot of people thought we had
been robbed of a victory and there were many
indications that this was the case.”
But the investigations and commissions that
followed did nothing to reverse the decision. So
the devotees of the nationalist cause wanted to
try again.
“After the loss of 1995, we focused upon the
process, the idea that there has to be another
rendezvous with history and the need to hold
another referendum as soon as possible,” Drain-
ville says.
But this obsession came at a cost.
“Because we were so focused on mechanics,
we kind of forgot to talk about the reasons we
wanted to achieve independence,” Drainville
says. “We sort of assumed that the reason why
independence was a good thing was a given for
most Québecers.”
“I think we’ve rediscovered over the last few
years that we need to go back to the ‘why,’” Dra-
inville says, adding: “We need to get back to the
very existentialist argument why Québec should
be independent and this [is] what we’re on now.”
Meanwhile, the old stock Québecers now
share their province with a burgeoning immi-
grant population removed from the old humilia-
tions that animate the sovereignty movement.
The nationalist movement will need to court
that demographic if it wants to survive. But in
order to do that, it must reject one of Canada’s
most treasured philosophies: multiculturalism.
“Multiculturalism is based on the idea that
you do not have to integrate into the culture of
the majority,” Drainville says. “If they decide to
stay within their community of origin, and they
keep replicating their cultural patterns in Qué-
bec, it creates the conditions by which the rela-
tive weight of the French-speaking culture di-
minishes. Obviously the fear we have, after one
or two generations, not only will they remain
Italians, Greeks, or Arabs, eventually they will
assimilate into the English language.”
But while the nationalist strategy is now based
more on what you think than where your father
was born, this wasn’t always the case, and that’s
not something that the immigrant community
will easily forget.
After the nationalists lost the referendum in
1995, Québec Premier Jacques Parizeau told his
supporters, “We were beaten by money and the
ethnic vote.”
Québec’s minorities were appalled.
The Montréal Gazette reported that the presi-
dent of the Rabbinical Council of Montréal
called it a “speech replete with racism and crass
demagoguery”; it also noted the reaction of Lib-
eral MNAs, who “accused Parizeau of creating
two classes of citizens and pitting old-stock fran-
cophone Québecers against those who weren’t
born here.”
Since then, the separatist movement has
changed its strategy with the hope that immi-
grants will embrace Québécois culture and
francophone identity. However, progress on this
front appears to be minimal at best.
For one, Haitians and Jamaicans aren’t buying
the PQ line. In 2004, Micheline Labelle, an an-
thropology professor at Université du Québec à
Montréal, published an essay based on a 15-year
study in which she followed the attitudes of Hai-
tian and Jamaican immigrants in Québec. She
found that most of those studied felt that “the
treatment of minorities would be worse in a sov-
ereign Québec.” Labelle added that many of her
subjects told her that they had “feelings of inse-
curity, fear, and reticence towards Québec na-
tionalism.”
The immigrant question presents a major co-
nundrum for the separatist political class, and
one which Québec solidaire, the province’s ma-
jor leftist party, has taken quite seriously.
Speaking about the remnants of xenophobia
within the separatist movement, Françoise Da-
vid, the current president and spokesperson of
Québec solidaire, puts it as diplomatically as
possible: “There is a minority, unfortunately, who
are folded onto themselves and who can in cer-
tain cases be xenophobic.” The majority, she
stresses, “are very open and very welcoming to
foreigners.”
Then again, when David herself speaks of
Québec solidaire’s position on immigrants and
immigration, it sounds almost like an ultimatum:
“Being a sovereign country sends a clear message
to immigrants and new arrivals: that when you
immigrate to Québec, you’re immigrating to a
country where we speak French,” she says.
“Right now, immigrants immigrate to Cana-
da. When they immigrate to Québec, it’s not
clear sometimes to them—is this Canada? Is this
Québec?—and finally here we ask them to speak
French. It’s much simpler to say, for instance, that
№64
5. I’m moving to Germany, I’m going to learn Ger-
man. I’m moving to Italy, I’ll learn Italian. I’m
moving to Québec, a sovereign country, well, I’m
going to learn French.”
Even so, it can seem a bit farfetched to imag-
ine new transplants to Québec taking up the ba-
ton of separatism.
AN HOUR’S DRIVE NORTH OF
Montréal is Prévost, a small town with large, roll-
ing hills, which bursts with colour in the late au-
tumn. Rural towns like Prévost used to be hubs
of nationalism, but the views of the young gen-
eration are starting to change this.
“I don’t think it’s a great idea,” says 18-year-old
Catherine Goupil. “We need the resources that
Canada can offer us.”
She sees the movement as a relic from her
parents’ generation, but not something with
which her friends are particularly concerned.
“I think we’re more preoccupied by interna-
tional things, the poor in Africa, and undeveloped
countries,” Goupil says. “We have an open mind
about the world that my parents didn’t have.”
It’s a generation shift that hasn’t gone unnoticed.
“When I see a French-speaking student in my
class right now, they are here to learn English
and skills valuable in a global market,” says Con-
cordia political science professor Rick Bisaillon,
“It’s just not the issue that it used to be.”
Generation Y simply doesn’t feel oppressed
the same way their parents did. Economist Ma-
thieu Laberge articulated the reasons why in an
essay published in Quebec Federalists Speak up
For Change: Reconquering Canada:
Today’s thirty-year-olds—and those of us who fol-
lowed—never knew the time when downtown
Montréal was plastered with English signs. Simi-
larly, we have never been served in English at Ea-
ton’s, and some of us do not even know that this
store once existed! Any more than we knew first-
hand the ferocious struggles for the emancipation
and the recognition of the rights of francophones.
Instead, we have lived in a Québec where French is
recognized as a language of public exchange and
where the rights of francophones are guaranteed.
In a sense, the struggle’s successes, from language
lawstogreatercontroloverimmigration,haveun-
derminedthestruggleitself.FrenchQuébecersno
longer feel like an oppressed minority, and the
ROC—Québécois for “the rest of Canada”—is no
longer so antagonistic to the notion of the prov-
ince as a distinct society within Canada.
“There are a lot of areas where we have
achieved the possibility of being masters in our
own home,” says Concordia Professor Daniel
Salée. “This has been achieved within the federal
framework, and the message it has sent over the
years is that, in the end, maybe things are work-
ing out. We can get pretty much what we want
without having to secede.”
Since 1995, Canadian politicians across the
spectrum have also started to recognize the in-
herent dangers in antagonizing Québec, prefer-
ring instead to try and appease nationalistic sen-
timent within the province.
“Québec is a nation whether we like it or not,”
says Fabrice Rivault, former Director of Commu-
nications and Policy for the Liberal Party of Cana-
da (Québec). “From my understanding of history,
you either grant national recognition with gener-
osity or else they’re going to grab it by force.”
It’s a piece of wisdom that Ottawa seems to
have taken to heart. On November 27, 2006, the
House of Commons passed a motion that for-
mally recognized that the “Québécois form a na-
tion within a united Canada.” While largely sym-
bolic, it was an act of appeasement that would
have been unimaginable fifteen years ago.
Soft appeasement will be the way forward,
says Marc Garneau, the federalist MP for West-
mount-Ville-Marie. For a Québec-born hero,
Garneau certainly pissed off a lot of Québecers
in his early career. The first Canadian to ever
travel to space told the press in 2006 that separat-
ism was as foolish as the American misadventure
in Iraq. Garneau, who was running for a seat in
parliament at the time, warned that “sovereignty
would cause chaos for at least a generation,” and
called for a “war” against it. He lost that race, but
was elected to parliament in 2008.
Garneau, now a seasoned politician, says his
views have been “modified somewhat in the in-
tervening years.”
“Today, fifteen years [after the last referen-
dum], there is still a moderate-sized core of sepa-
ratists in Québec who are totally committed to
taking Québec out of the country,” Garneau says.
Their new-found focus, Garneau argues, is
the result of diminishing interest in the move-
ment, a consequence of the generational divide
and a Canadian nation more attuned to Qué-
bec’s concerns.
Garneau urges those who espouse federalism
to be respectful. “If we’re going to be able to one
day say that separatism is a way of the past, it will
be because we have convinced Québecers
through our actions and through what we say that
they’re better within the federation of Canada.”
LUCIEN BOUCHARD, ONCE THE
Moses of sovereignty, has become an old recluse.
Instead of preparing fiery speeches to arouse na-
tionalism, he’s vanished from the public eye, dis-
missing the PQ as nothing more than a “radical
niche” and sovereignty as a dead dream.
When Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe
celebrated his twentieth year in the House of
Commons, Bouchard was not there to congratu-
late him. He sent a letter.
The only presence the former leader had was
in the faded footage on a screen, the apparition
of a once-spirited leader who had lost all faith.
Yes supporters cheer during a speech by Bloc Québécois leader Lucien Bouchard
at a junior college in Montréal, Tuesday, Oct. 24, 1995.
№65
![by colin j. fleming
LUCIEN BOUCHARD’S WORDS SEEMED TO MARK THE DEATH OF A DREAM.
He was the father of the Bloc Québécois, once premier of the province under the sovereigntist
banner, who for years played elder statesman to a surging independence movement. But this winter
it was not “les maudits Anglos” he was denouncing—it was one-time compatriots. The Parti
Québécois leader, Pauline Marois, was spearheading a charge against a law that permitted Orthodox
Jewish schools to hold classes on Sunday. Bouchard saw it as a sign of deep disrespect, another
milepost marking the party’s wild swerve away from its origins. “I think of [Parti Qubecois] founder
Rene Levesque,” Bouchard said. “René Lévesque was a man of generosity. He didn’t ask questions like
that. He didn’t think our identity was threatened.” Yet it wasn’t Bouchard’s attack on Marois that
made headlines the next morning. It was something far more unexpected.
“SOVEREIGNTY IS NOT FEASIBLE, BOUCHARD SAYS.” The headline in Le Devoir
stunned the nation. The legendary Lucien Bouchard had finally given up. Fifteen years ago,
Québecers came within a few thousand votes of independence. The “no” camp won the
referendum by only a single percentage point. Now, separatism is anemic and limping,
abandoned by some of its most fervent supporters. So what happened to the nationalist fervour
that almost ripped a hole in Canada?
№62
SEPARATION
ANXIETY
Fifteen years ago, Québec came within a hair of secession.
Now the separatist movement seems to have all but disappeared.
When did Québec become part of Canada again?](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)