The Night Canada Stood Still by Robert Wright

Author:Robert Wright [Wright, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781443409674
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

On Sunday, October 8, Lucien Bouchard joined Mario Dumont and other leading sovereignists on the Yes campaign tour. Jacques Parizeau stayed home. The passing of the baton was complete, and it had taken but twenty-four hours.

Bouchard’s resuscitation of the flagging Yes campaign was immediate, exceeding even the most optimistic péquiste prognostications. Over the course of the weekend, ordinary citizens from across the province greeted Bouchard with the same adulation he had met in Montreal. Crowds chanted “Lucien, Lucien.” (When Parizeau had headed a rally, they had cheered “Oui, Oui, Oui!”) The Quebec press described this transformation as “Lucien-mania” and reported that he was now getting “rock-star” treatment.48 And with Bouchard’s every public appearance, the size and the enthusiasm of the crowds increased. “You feel it from him that he’s a man who speaks with heart,” retired plumber Raymond Lefebvre observed at a rally in the Plateau Mont-Royal district. “Parizeau is more like a technocrat, and we need people like him. But Lucien, he can talk to people in a way they understand. He carries people along with the strength of his conviction and with his big heart.”49 Construction worker Roger Langlois agreed. “People aren’t sure about Parizeau,” he observed. “But Lucien talks like one of us. With him we’ll have a chance to build a country.”50 Some ordinary Quebecers spoke of Bouchard’s near-death experience as having shored up his almost messianic popularity. Pundits spoke of l’effet Lucien (the Lucien effect).51

Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson set out on the campaign trail in Quebec to see l’effet Lucien for himself. He reported that Bouchard’s entry into the campaign had changed everything. “Here we are,” Simpson wrote from Sorel on October 12, “at a beans-and-buns breakfast in a working-class town, in a hall already packed with cigarette smoke, and when Mr. Bouchard arrives, what a contrast his reception offers to that given the previous day by Yes supporters to Mr. Parizeau. With a brilliant command of French and a sure sense of pace, Mr. Bouchard touches his audience, as if reaching into every listener to locate the touchstone of pride.”52

Out on the hustings, Bouchard’s message for Quebecers was simple and direct. Canadians would have no choice but to negotiate with Quebec after a Yes vote. “They know they will not be able to resist the political pressure that will be brought to bear on them the day Quebec speaks as a people,” he said. “With the onus that sovereignty will give us, English Canada has no choice.” Bouchard explained that a partnership deal was not a dilution of the main goal, sovereignty, but its culmination. Only as equals could Quebec and Canada reimagine their future. “Mr. Parizeau has no right to negotiate anything but sovereignty,” said Bouchard on Radio-Canada. “Anything less would be illegal and unimaginable. If we can put that into Quebecers’ heads, that we’re capable, that we’re not small and that we have collective authority, and that if we speak as people, we can win this referendum.”53 In subsequent interviews,

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