Sameer’s article on Quebec

for HIR World in Review section

Summer 1999

The recent tragedy in Kosovo of a minority’s struggle for self-determination has unfortunately been representative of the violent ethnic conflict that prevails across continents. Groups with different religions, languages, or ancestry from their neighbors fight the perceived tyranny of existing borders to win recognition, liberty, and political autonomy. Too often, frustrated at the slowness and intransigence of the larger nation-state to grant concessions, ethnic groups escalate their tactics to violent and destructive levels. However, one ethnic sub-region, Canada’s Province du Quebec, stands out as a place where leaders of an independence movement have relied on legal, codified avenues to win their ends. The case of Quebec may be seen, paradoxically, as a triumph for institutionalism.

Laying Claims

The French explorers Samudel de Champlain and Jacques Cartier, as well as the Briton Henry Hudson, first laid claim to the territory of Canada four centuries ago. Both France and England established colonies throughout the continent, but at the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, France was forced to abandon all of its North American colonies. Over the next century, Upper Canada, the region now known as Ontario, outpaced Lower Canada (now Quebec) in its industrialization, so that by 1867, the two Canadas were substantially different places: one was predominantly urban, Protestant, and anglophone, the other agrarian, Roman Catholic, and francophone. The British crown issued an Act of Confederation in that year uniting the two regions as the Dominion of Canada. Gradually more provinces, all English-speaking, joined the Dominion, until the current nation took shape. Quebecois nationalist sentiment finally exploded when French President Charles de Gaulle visited Canada in 1969 on an official diplomatic mission. While addressing a fevered crowd from a Montreal balcony, de Gaulle cried out the now-famous epigram, “Vive le Quebec libre!” Ottawa immediately asked him to leave the country, but the forces his statement unleashed would not be contained.

Immediately thereafter, a group of young separatists calling themselves the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) began a campaign of angry activism throughout the province. Although the group postured as the “working people of Quebec who are committed to do everything they can for the people of Quebec to take their destiny in their hands,” the activists’ tactics included mailbox bombing, as well as the 1970 kidnapping and murder of a Quebec cabinet minister. Judgment from the people of Quebec was harsh; while many endorsed the FLQ’s ultimate end, very few supported its means. The Quebec government asked the federal government for 10,000 troops to arrest and dissolve the FLQ. Quebecois society had long been stabilized by prominent social structures including the Catholic Church and the French civil code, both of which the FLQ explicitly railed against. Seeing the FLQ as a destabilizing, non-democratic presence, very few Quebecois could support the nascent group despite their sympathy with its cause. The FLQ’s death outlined the future course of Quebecois separatism.

In 1982, the federal government won true independence from Britain, establishing or “repatriating,” with the agreement of the British Parliament, its own constitution. Quebec refused to sign the new document. The long process of union and sovereignty had been carried out within an explicitly legal framework. Unlike many of Canada’s fellow Western hemisphere nations, there was no war of Canadian independence against a European colonial power. Rather, because of Canada’s position as a bulwark against the United States, Great Britain actually encouraged the formation in the hemisphere of a democratic nation loyal to the Empire. This situation explains the peaceful nature of Quebec separatism: violent struggle would be inimical to a country and people without any armed rebellion in their history.

Instead, separatist leaders decided to sever their relationship with the establishment from within. The 1970s witnessed the birth of the Bloc Quebecois, a federal party that fielded candidates only in Quebec, and the Parti Quebecois (PQ), a party constructed to win leadership of the provincial legislature, called the National Assembly—a semantic expression of separatist hope. The Bloc had a strange mandate: candidates ran for a Parliament of which they really wanted no part. The PQ had more early success, winning the 1976 provincial election and forming a government in Quebec.

The following year, the PQ began reifying its conception of Quebec as a distinct society with Bill 101, the French Language Charter, which promoted the use of French across the province, requiring, for example, that the French lettering on store signs be twice as high as the English lettering. Merchants in predominantly anglophone regions like Montreal groused, but it was difficult to protest a law passed by a popularly elected legislature. Through similar measures in education and business, separatists hoped to forge the “right” kind of Quebec before independence—a state kind to francophones and hostile to others. They eschewed the tactics of, for example, Bosnian separatists, who illegally imprisoned many Serbs within Bosnia-Herzegovina prior to Bosnia’s secession from Yugoslavia. The popularly elected government thus legitimized the suppression of rival cultural groups who could derail the separatist movement.

Attempting to further sharpen Quebec’s identity, the PQ deliberately enlarged the public sphere in Quebec, modeling it as a social democratic state after European nations, especially France. A “Quiet Revolution” in the 1960s had already expanded the role of provincial government in Quebec, and the nascent PQ postured as the heir and builder of this legacy. The PQ’s assuming of these roles accomplished several goals: first, it demonstrated to anglophone Canada that it could successfully manage Quebec; it solidified the distinct feeling of many Quebecois; it demonstrated to Quebecois that its own paternalism rather than the constitutional paternalism of Canada could work; and it mitigated the angry feelings of separatists toward the rest of Canada. No one with a safe, government-supported job would likely organize violent protests.

Ballot Wars

Poised to strike, the PQ decided in 1980 that it would break away from Canada with complete legal sanction. A ballot question for all Quebecois asked whether Quebec should remain a province of Canada or become a sovereign nation. The “No” side easily won with 60 percent to 40 percent. Shaken by the sound loss, the PQ was also removed from office by voters the next year, replaced by a new Liberal government. Given the experience of other secessionist movements, the sight of a separatist group quiescently retreating looked almost surreal. The Liberals embarked on a decade-long program of engagement with Ottawa, attempting to reconcile the constitutional differences. However, the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Constitutional Accords, which would both have admitted Quebec officially into the new Dominion, recognized its “distinct society” status, and elevated the nationwide status of French, could not muster enough approval in Quebec and other provinces. Following those ignominious collapses, Quebec voters returned the PQ to provincial power, fed up with anglophones and Ottawa-philes. The federal Bloc Quebecois party, though it fielded candidates only in Quebec, won over 50 seats in the 1993 parliamentary elections, good enough to become Canada’s official opposition to the ruling Liberals. Backed by democratic change, separatists now seemed poised to realize their ultimate goal.

The PQ called another province-wide referendum for the fall of 1995. Separatist and federalist activists marshaled all the support they could to campaign for and against the question of sovereignty. 1995 was an unusual year in that part of North America: a group of secessionists as well as agents of their nation’s federal government posted signs, bought television time, and held public rallies for their respective sides. Perhaps guilty at times of political guerrilla warfare, neither side practiced the true guerrilla tactics occasionally used in other nations. Redolent of a true battle, though, the Canadian federal government was able to acquire more money and resources for the campaign. The fate of Quebec hinged on a single day’s vote count rather than on the blood of the innocent. In the end federalists eked out a slim victory with 50.6 percent of the popular vote, postponing independence for at least a few years.

Jacques Parizeau, then Premier of Quebec, had prepared a victory speech, now in the public domain, to deliver in the event of a oui majority. He had planned to follow a victory at the polls with a unilateral declaration of independence. But even in his prospectively greatest triumph, Parizeau took care to sound the rhetoric of legality rather than that of secessionist escapism: “. . . because Quebec is now standing up, it can first extend its hand to its Canadian neighbor, offering it a new contract, a new partnership, based on the principle of equality between peoples . . .” Such was the degree to which the Quebec separatist movement had extolled at every step justice through the rule of law.

Instead of his victory address, Parizeau made an angry speech marking the defeat, blaming “money and the ethnic vote” in Quebec for the loss. In reality, it was these elements, as well as the heavy concentration of English speakers in the Montreal area, that did in the “yes” side. The public outcry against Parizeau’s slurs forced him to resign within days; Lucien Bouchard, the former leader of the federal Bloc, replaced him. Coupled with the commitment in Quebec to democracy, this change was, at least on the surface, a fealty to fairness and justice, showing separatism to be a movement with inbuilt tempering forces. However, separatism has not always been kind to ethnic or linguistic minorities, as Bill 101 demonstrated. The sentiment of Parizeau’s comments quickly undermined the rhetoric of tolerance and equality that Quebecois leaders had presented to the world. Still, the instant condemnation of Parizeau shows the leadership adopting a more palatable position while retaining its core goals.

In August 1998, the Canadian Supreme Court delivered a highly anticipated decision on the legality of unilateral secession by Quebec. It ruled first that such a declaration by the Quebec government has no basis in either Canadian or international law. However, it ruled further that if the people of Quebec were to ever vote “yes” in a sovereignty referendum with a “clear majority on a clear question,” Canada’s government would be obliged to at least negotiate separation in good faith. Further demonstrating how deeply the whole movement has become steeped in institutional sanction, both federal and PQ politicians immediately accepted the Court’s decision as binding, and altered their long-term strategy. Bouchard celebrated the Court’s finding that a “oui” vote could eventually lead to an independent Quebec.

The separatists’ commitment to the legal and electoral process may have recently injured their cause, though. Jean Charest, a charismatic federal politician, stepped down from his seat in the House of Commons to lead the Liberal Party against the PQ in the November 1998 provincial elections. Many saw the battle between heavyweights Bouchard and Charest as a harbinger of the future of separatism. If Charest could somehow defeat the PQ and wrest control of the National Assembly, then the movement might be forever silenced, purely by electoral change. In the end the PQ retained control of the National Assembly by winning more seats, but Charest’s Liberals gained a greater percentage of the total popular vote, leading many pundits to conclude that with such strong opposition, a referendum may not be likely during the present PQ mandate. Originally actuated through electoral change, the movement has been at least temporarily silenced at the polls.

Of course, the United States, by its close proximity with Quebec, is a powerful agent keeping the more strident elements within the separatist movement quiescent. Events of the 1990s have further complicated political interests. Quebec by itself would be the US’s eighth-largest trading partner, a point that PQ politicians have often reiterated. However, to realize the lucrative gains of that status Quebec would have to gain admittance to NAFTA, the North American free trade zone passed in 1993. A violent—or verbally violent—campaign to win independence for Quebec would likely alienate US legislators who hold the key to Quebec’s admittance.

A Peaceful Example

Sadly, few follow Quebec’s example of nonviolent separatism. In places like Chechnya (to which then Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov once compared Quebec), Kosovo, Spain, and Angola, the destructive effects of attempted secession by ethnic groups have consumed global politics in the last decade. One obvious explanation for the non-democratic methods of such groups is the failure of their own government to moderate radical influences and to provide a stable, recognizable face for negotiation. In Turkey, where the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) has been agitating since the late 1980s for an independent Kurdish homeland, the Turkish government has been able to resist the separatists’ demands by marginalizing the representative force of the PKK. Without the legitimacy of an existing government that the people of Quebec enjoy nor with the strength of other large institutions such as Quebec’s Catholic parishes, violent resistance against agents of the nation-state may appear to give the quickest route to concessions.

A more apposite case may be the defections of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia from the Soviet Union in the early 1980s, then self-governing republics within the former USSR. In Latvia, for example, the Popular Front party was able to secure independence by acceding to power at the polls and replacing communist-friendly parliamentarians. In a 1991 referendum, 74 percent of voters there supported Latvian independence. Though not completely bloodless, the secession of the three Baltic nations was eased through the sanction of democratic processes as well as the calming influence of the church. The legitimation of the ethnic groups’ distinctiveness through official representative bodies, as in Quebec, made their sovereignty more acceptable to Moscow and the international family.

The case of Quebec, then, is an important lesson in nonviolent conflict resolution, the ahimsa advocated by Thoreau, Gandhi, and King. Both structural and contingent factors appear responsible for the movement’s democratic roots. First, having inherited the French civil code, Quebecois culture boasts a long heritage of solving problems through legal avenues. Second, given Canada’s birth as a contractual amalgam of two Canadas, Quebecois leaders have recognized that Canadians would accept no less than a similarly amicable agreement for their nation’s dissolution. Finally, given Quebec’s somewhat tenuous political and economic position, the pacific language of its leaders is vital in garnering international backing for its cause. And of course, this grand democratic tradition finds expression only by Canada’s very explicit recognition of the Quebecois as a distinct group of people.

Quebecois separatists have subjected the gravity of their ethnic cause to the ponderous machinery of democracy. This requires a tight, universal balancing act. While emphasizing differences in language and culture, accepting the homogenization and resulting sameness of polity with the larger nation-state: a trade-off for having political interests voiced. Ultimately, that step demands a strong existing government (or near-government agent) for the region, state, or cultural group seeking autonomy. Unfortunately, in cases across the world the larger nation-state has never allowed the smaller ethnic groups even this. Quebec, meanwhile, having expressed its popular will democratically, seems likely to stay part of Canada in the foreseeable future.