Quebec and The Future Of Canada
Just as Canada's native peoples drew inspiration from the national liberation movements of the late 1950s and 1960s, so too did the Quebecois . Ever since the conquest of 1760, francophones had been deeply concerned about la survivance , the continuation of their language and culture. Periodically this anxiety had been heightened, notably during both world wars, when the Quebecois opposed the introduction of conscription because it seemed to subordinate their interests to those of Britain. Nevertheless, despite these difficulties, the essentially conservative Quebecois political- religious establishment usually recommended accommodation with the British and later the federal authorities. This same establishment upheld the traditional values of Catholic rural New France, a consequence of which was that Quebec's industry and commerce developed under anglophone control. Thus, in early twentieth-century Montreal, a francophone proletariat worked in the factories of anglophone owners, an anglophone dominance that was compounded by the indifference of Canada's other provinces to French-Canadian interests, spurring the development of a new generation of Quebec separatists . Held in Montreal, Expo '67 was meant to be a confirmation of Canada's arrival as an industrial power of the first rank. However, when France's President de Gaulle used the event as a platform to announce his advocacy of a "free Quebec", he ignited a political row that has dominated the country ever since. That same year, Rene Levesque formed the Parti Quebecois (PQ), with the ultimate goal of full independence and the slogan Maitres chez nous ("masters in our own house"). In 1968, however, Pierre Trudeau , a French-Canadian politician dedicated to the maintenance of the federation, was elected prime minister - and the scene was set for a showdown. The PQ represented the constitutional wing of a social movement that at its most militant extreme embraced the activities of the short-lived Front de la Liberation du Quebec (FLQ). In 1970 the FLQ kidnapped and murdered Pierre Laporte, the province's Minister of Labour, an action which provoked Trudeau into putting the troops onto the streets of Montreal. This reaction was to benefit the PQ, a modernizing party of the social-democratic left, which came to power in 1976 and set about using state resources to develop economic interests such as the Quebec hydroelectric plant on James Bay. It also reformed education - including controversial legislation to make Quebec unilingual - and pressed ahead with plans for a referendum on secession. But when the referendum came, in 1980, sixty percent of Quebec's electorate voted " non " to separation, partly because the 1970s had witnessed a closing of the opportunity gap between the francophone and anglophone communities. This did not, however, end the affair. In 1985, Quebec's PQ government was defeated by Robert Bourassa 's Liberals, not so much reflecting a shift in francophone feeling but more Bourassa's espousal of the bulk of the nationalist agenda and what many felt to be the PQ's poor economic track record. The Liberals held power in Quebec until 1994, when the PQ bounced back into office, promising to hold another independence referendum. They seemed well set. Polls regularly rated support at around sixty percent, but in 1995 the PQ lost again in a second referendum that rejected independence by just 50,000 votes. Despite all the subsequent bluster, this was a political disaster for the PQ, and, with the momentum lost, subsequent polls have seemed to suggest that the separatist bubble may well have burst. If this is the case, one of the key reasons is the PQ's failure to define the precise nature of Quebec sovereignty and how future relations with the rest of Canada would be conducted.
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