Conrad Black: Why Quebec Is Unlikely to Separate From Canada Anytime Soon

Commentary

At first sight, it may seem that the replacement of the ambiguous Coalition Avenir Québec party by the Parti Québécois in Quebec’s election last week is a victory for the forces of Quebec independence. This is an illusion. The CAQ was a fusion of interests that wished to de-emphasize constitutional issues and emphasize policies that would encourage increased Quebec and particularly French Quebec prosperity. It exploited the fatigue with constitutional matters, which over the last 60 years has seen Toronto vastly surpass Montreal as Canada’s leading city and has caused the emigration from Quebec of more than 500,000 mainly non-French-speaking people.

The CAQ won 14 percent of the vote but lost all its members in the National Assembly. It is the third party to defeat the Quebec Liberal Party in a provincial general election since the defeat of the last Quebec Conservative government in 1897. The Quebec Liberals coasted for many decades on the fact that the Liberal Party of Canada alternated English- and French-speaking leaders and opposed the conscription of French Canadians for overseas combat service in World War I, inflicted on the French Canadians by the Conservatives. The implication was that French Canadians have no reason, unlike English Canadians, to feel any gratitude to or fraternity with Great Britain or France. Mainly as a result of this, the federal Liberals governed for 52 of the 63 years from 1921 to 1984.

The Quebec Liberals governed for 39 years after 1897 until, in 1935, Conservative Leader Maurice Duplessis formed an alliance in mid-election campaign in the midst of the Great Depression with dissident reform Liberals, and created the Union Nationale. His secret was to be more nationalistic and emphasize provincial jurisdiction more than the Liberals, while resisting higher taxes, giving greater lip service to the Roman Catholic traditions of the province that had preserved the French language in the school system, and legislating progressively on behalf of workers while restraining the power of labour unions.

Duplessis’s methods enabled him to reduce taxes, balance the provincial budget, and pay comparatively to other provinces a smaller share of the provincial budget in the salaries of schoolteachers and hospital personnel, as these were largely provided by the religious orders at minimum cost to the taxpayer. Thus, Duplessis was able to devote almost the entire budget to what would today be called infrastructure. He brought electricity to 80 percent of the province, built 3,000 schools, a host of post-secondary education specialized schools and institutes, and every university campus in Quebec except McGill’s. He vastly increased the road system, including the autoroutes, and he made Quebec a modern society in all respects except secularized national and political mores. It was the first time in history that Quebec was gaining, by most economic measurements, on Ontario.

Duplessis gave Quebec its fleur-de-lys flag and announced that Quebec would have an office in Paris after de Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic. He also started the preparations for the great world’s fair of Montreal in 1967. The technique was to raise Quebecers’ pride without frightening off investors or oppressing cultural minorities within the province. French-speaking Quebecers voted for Duplessis in seven consecutive general elections, and he emerged as the government for a record five terms and died in office.

Duplessis’s chosen successors, Paul Sauvé and Daniel Johnson, also understood how to attract conservative and nationalist voters simultaneously, though it was a very delicate process, involving a lot of nationalist symbolism. Both Sauvé and Johnson died in their early 50s, and the nationalist torch, which had been held by the right in Quebec since Confederation, passed to the left and René Lévesque.

The Union Nationale vanished and was replaced by the Parti Québécois, which was more nationalistic than the Liberals. Lévesque devised the formula of sovereignty-association, a method of jurisdictionally eating the cake while retaining it. All the benefits of Confederation would be kept, including a shared currency, while Quebec exchanged embassies with the world as a sovereign country. Not only was the goal ambiguous, but in the independence referendums of 1980 and 1995 there was a trick question which only authorized negotiations towards the indistinct goal.

The prolonged debate about Quebec’s independence did considerable economic damage to the province. Quebecois are descendants of Norman and Breton working people who cannot be stampeded very far from their bourgeois material interests by demagogy. It became timely for a party whose leaders had nationalist credentials to announce that it would single-handedly pursue Quebec’s economic interest. The CAQ arose and the PQ almost disappeared, and was challenged as the leading nationalist party by Québec solidaire.

Québec solidaire is a separatist party but supports Francophone immigration to Quebec, an impossible formula: the Quiet Revolution that followed the death of Duplessis in 1959 secularized the education and health-care systems. The same personnel departed the religious orders, enjoyed a tremendous increase in their personal incomes, and the Quebec trade unions became a powerful force of inflationary pressures and social strife. The decline in ecclesiastical influence caused the collapse of Quebec’s legendarily prolific birthrate, and the province could only maintain enough Francophones to retain political leverage in Canada by seeking immigration from such places as Haiti, Morocco, and Lebanon. These immigrants have had an acoustically interesting influence on spoken French and have preserved some of Quebec’s demographic influence, but most of them have little interest in Quebec nationalism.

The Quebec election on Oct. 5 gave the PQ 28 percent of the vote but almost half the legislators. The great Quebec Liberal Party was reduced to 24 percent of the vote, but less than 10 percent of French-speaking Quebecers. The newly relaunched Quebec Conservative party gained 22 percent of the vote, almost all French-speaking federalists. The CAQ is circling the drain, while Québec solidaire gained 12 percent of the vote for the chronically minority position of promoting immigration and separatism.

Quebec is in flux and appears to be headed back towards a two-party system: federalist, free enterprise centrists, and the other more socialistic and nationalistic. But nearly 60 years after René Lévesque founded the Parti Québécois, there is little prospect of Quebec actually departing Canada.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.