Forcing Choice by J. Patrick Boyer

Author:J. Patrick Boyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2017-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

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Jacques-Yvan Morin’s étapiste approach of gradual steps rather than one bold and alarming jump helped separatists avoid the deal-breaker issue of Quebec’s outright independence. The Parti Québécois convention of 1974 officially adopted this strategy of gradualism. For true believers, though, the longer-term goal remained an independent country. After 1974 the Parti Québécois refined étapisme into stages that appeared moderate and consensual: attainment of power through general election, a period of preparation, a first referendum on a mandate to negotiate with Ottawa, negotiations, a second referendum, conclusion of economic association with Canada, and declaration of independence.

Step one of this acclimatizing journey was successfully completed on November 15, 1976, when the Parti Québécois won the general election and took power. Across the country Canadians suddenly took seriously the prospect that the talk about Confederation breaking up would now be translated into action. With a separatist government controlling power in Quebec, the referendum became a topic of constant public discussion as the second phase of “preparation” began.

The Referendum Act initiated by the Union Nationale as Bill 55 in 1969 never became law, so on December 21, 1977, the Parti Québécois government introduced its own legislation, and by June 23, 1978, it had received third reading and Royal Assent. Quebec now had a permanent enabling statute by which the government could force the Confederation choice by ballot at the time of its choosing. The act included a key British precedent from the United Kingdom’s 1975 referendum on the European Common Market: the “umbrella” requirement for two committees representing the Yes and No sides. Forcing all supporters of one option to work together, or at least coordinate campaign messaging and control campaign financing, benefits voters by ensuring a rational referendum process. The umbrella committees bring together disparate elements the way political parties do in election campaigns. In the ranks of Quebec’s sovereignists and federalists are found the devout and the agnostic, capitalists and unionists, conservatives and socialists, Francophones, Anglophones, and Allophones (people whose first language is neither French nor English), the wealthy and the poor. By 1980, the advantage sovereignists had over federalists was that these differences had been smoothed over during a half decade devoted to a single higher purpose: unifying the separatist movement within the political party created by René Lévesque.

Meanwhile, other components of “preparation” ranged across a broad front. One was a sustained effort at providing good government — an end in itself, to be sure — but also a means of assuaging fears among those distrustful of a “separatist” government. This phase also entailed the subterranean work of political organization, with patient building and rebuilding of PQ campaign structures all across the province. More visible was the PQ’s campaign of preparing the public mind.

A constant flow of publicity and promotion from the government’s many departments and agencies reinforced a sense of cultural strength and national pride. The péquistes themselves had appropriated the symbols of Quebec: Maurice Duplessis’s blue-and-white fleur-de-lys provincial flag, Gilles Vigneault’s song “Mon pays” and celebratory ballad “Les gens du pays,” and the very name Québécois for the party itself.

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