CANADIAN SOCIALISTS, POLITICS IN QUEBEC
REID, MALCOLM
When I was small I lived in Ottawa. My father worked for the Canadian government. And I suppose that is what Ottawa evokes for the foreign reader. It is Canberra or Kuala Lumpur,...
...His eyes narrow...
...One of the elements of our proFrench dissent was the belief that this entente between the English industrialists and the FrenchCanadian ward-heelers could not go on forever...
...English Canada acted as the unsuspecting victims of intimidation have always acted: it tried to meet the politics of blackmail with the politics of appeasement...
...Oddly enough, however, these will also be the years when Quebec will be in the world's news because of another group, its small but imaginative extreme left...
...We find it still, though, in the other piece of antique Francophobia I happened upon as I began to write...
...This will be the starting point of a book I will write on Quebec several years later...
...The years of the terrorist kidnappings of 1970...
...And the trade-union militant, the consumer organizer, once become a PQ minister, often resembles them...
...McGill students invite them to explain their case...
...I will have to try to get inside the society, the contradiction, hinted at by these newspaper headlines I am trying to decipher...
...Sovereignty, coupled with economic association with Canada...
...Religious intensity...
...Canadians were permitted to act together and identify themselves collectively only at times and in ways that French Canada condescended to approve...
...Indeed, the sprawl of French-speaking suburbs around the cities is the main change in the social landscape since 1960...
...from Gratien Gelinas's working-class heroes, or losers, on the Montreal stage...
...We were waiting for this development, catching tremors of it from writers and intellectuals even in the'50s...
...Francis River, he chats with the inhabitants...
...I'm a laborer," the inhabitant answers...
...French-Canadians were •becoming a proletarian people, stuffed into the factories and slums of east Montreal, Hull, Trois-Rivieres, Thetford Mines, Sherbrooke, Drummondville...
...Here is the excitement I came to Montreal to find...
...He is Rene Levesque...
...But who controlled these institutions...
...By this they mean that he is indeed a leader of French Canada, but one cultivated by the English businessmen who control Quebec economically...
...The PQ as the late flowering of French-Canadian social democracy...
...It had to rule in very tight loyalty to those who did own the economy...
...We drive down to a shantytown on the other side of the St...
...We emerge from the shacktown, and I'm trying to explain the old Wobbly song about long-haired preachers promising pie in the sky, trying to make it mean something to Steenland...
...The new Liberal government is doing so many of the things we'd like to do...
...In Montreal cafes, perhaps, or in the bush, the Arctic...
...The Parti Quebecois is formed...
...He has been fired for his pains...
...And then let the social-democratic farmers of Saskatchewan and the social-democratic coal miners of Nova Scotia jump to keep up...
...Levesque had been asked about what he thought of the NDP in its early days...
...It is the conservative Toronto historian Donald Creighton, in Maclean's...
...Why doesn't it send Rene Levesque a letter noting that he has often called his party social-democratic...
...Such stereotypes hardly even existed in French Canada before a 1969 film comedy called Deux Femmes en Or, in which we saw the restless two-child families of these snowmobile camps...
...A group forms around him, and soon all other separatist leaders step aside for him...
...from Fathers Dion's and O'Neill's polemics against bought elections...
...Their unions, their co-operatives, their university campuses, would give forth a new leadership...
...There used to be a lot of Communism in the textile unions here...
...In Quebec, through their concentration there, and the sharing of power within Canadian federalism, they had other classes, they had lawyers, politicians, clergy, men who ran their own provincial government and served as right-hand men to federal regimes...
...And we're in 1977, and I'm pondering my vote in the promised referendum on independence for this almost-colony where socialism has been so long getting together with national liberation...
...It is the separatist movement, now born, and very social-democratic, very technocratic in spirit, the first modern nationalist movement in French Canada that is not religionsteeped...
...He is a weird apparition in this mill town, and his pitch for New Democracy leaves eyes unresponsive, puzzled...
...Laurent, Trudeau...
...In Canada it is the preindustrial radicals of the Liberal party, now reactionary, who traditionally have a grip on the subject nation's voters...
...This is the first time I have heard the analogy between Quebec and the colonized peoples in Africa and Asia...
...His name is Rene Levesque...
...A nationalist French-Canadian newspaper has just nailed French Canada's oftenelected nationalist tyrant...
...I'm dismayed, too, by the ministers I never used to see at our old NDP meetings...
...He is running for the NDP in Sherbrooke...
...That is what the dialect material was saying...
...It was as if John D. Rockefeller had groomed Booker T. Washington for the presidency, and the custom had continued...
...Soon I will be going to Montreal to study...
...by the voices of hungry young FrenchCanadian business...
...The dialect jibe, on the other hand, is implicitly based on it, all the way through...
...The NDP in Quebec has run Michel Chartrand, legendary firebrand of a score of Cat.Iolic-union strikes against arrogant English-speaking companies...
...On the floor of the car are pages of this paper...
...There have been too many Lauriers, St...
...The controllers were the priests and notables of that French-Canadian elite...
...The party's progress will be steady from there, to the November 1976 victory, won with a minority vote in this several-party system...
...These wholehearted adoptions of the Third World analogy for Quebec had more to offer the imagination of young Quebecois, and sympathizers like me, than Levesque's cautious separatism...
...I remember reading his response to some curious friends from India in a rooming house near McGill...
...English-speaking farmers and factory managers in the outlands were incidental...
...They were, of course, facts of economic oppression, and this is what Creighton, the respectable conservative, avoids speaking of, all the way through his arguments...
...Later I'm interviewing him for my paper, and ask again...
...Laurents, Trudeaus, too many mirages of French-Canadian fulfillment...
...An remember, halways talk loud and wit de hands...
...We are in 1960...
...This despite its bad standing in all the statistics—unemployment, hygiene, secondary industry .. . But things didn't work out that way...
...No longer is Fiddle Joe's violin the only sound from Quebec...
...And it was certain that the English minority in Quebec, containing as it did many of the most powerful businessmen in Canada, would be accorded very firm rights not to be integrated into French life...
...Laurier, St...
...Sometimes they even had honorary leadership of a Canada that continued to be ruled by English-Canadian business chieftains, more and more tied to American money as the century went on...
...An impenetrably close-knit ethnicity...
...The coming infights will have to determine which is the main tendency...
...We also assumed the Quebec move would be to the moderate left, for we did not see religion fading with any suddenness, and we perceived Quebec as basically a North American kind of society...
...Why...
...In power in two of ten provinces, it is never a front-runner as its counterpart is in Britain, but never eclipsed, either, as in the United States...
...The response to colonialism, an anticolonial movement, a left...
...English Quebec was English Montreal...
...The office of the Commissioner of Official Languages was soon crowded with a robust army of dedicated snoopers, and the commissioner himself appeared to think that his most important public duty lay in abusing and hectoring English Canadians for their neglect of a language only an infinitesimal minority would ever have occasion to use...
...There is only one element missing from this petulance in order for it to correspond to the antiFrench irritability I heard about me as a child...
...We listen to him...
...At the NDP founding convention I am listening to an English-Canadian interviewer ask a Quebec union man why there is not more support for the new socialist party in Quebec...
...There is only one might-have-been in this story...
...Meanwhile, I have a litmus test to suggest...
...Its strength flowed from the millions in the churches each Sunday, from the millions in the booths on election day...
...Part of me is for it...
...The Catholic Church was always like that with the workers, too," Gus says, to my surprise, for he's a believer...
...These people are menials, they do lowly work and have about them an unshakable cheapness, of which mispronounced vowels are the reflection...
...One man might have made all this jell...
...It would seem now to have tried every possible tack in Quebec and to have demonstrated that moderate leftism cannot be implanted there by an existing movement from the dominant nation...
...Education is being secularized, hospital insurance introduced...
...Duplessis has died, his party has been defeated...
...I have never seen housing like these shacks, even in St-Francoisd'Assise back in Ottawa...
...Well, yes, but it is hard to persuade people that a socialist party is necessary...
...We are in 1959...
...You're better off than me, I'm unemployed," says the candidate...
...But the amazing decline of the church in Quebec has made this harder for an earnest polemic to rest upon...
...I watch Rene Levesque sell nationalization of the private electricity companies to the church-basement crowds...
...But it happens that Ottawa was a good place for growing up to awareness of the French-English conflict in Canada, which is now what seems lively and identifying about the country...
...They speak of Marx, Lenin, the Canadian proletariat...
...Alas for French America...
...Quebec's new government is Liberal, but Rene Levesque is minister of resources...
...Le Devoir has just come out with a scandal about Premier Duplessis, his ministers have been caught stealing in a stock deal...
...My father worked for the Canadian government...
...He emerges from a silence with his formula for Quebec...
...There is a provincial election later, but I have nobody to work for...
...I'm dismayed, though, by the language debate...
...This sample comes from a "Quebec Passport" published in Bells Corners, a village near Ottawa...
...This one takes the low road of dialect joke...
...It has been led by a well-loved country lawyer, Robert Cliche...
...Dere is one small problem...
...Its program is socialist on the model of the West European parties...
...In one parish hall I ask a question about the nationalizations...
...An interesting contrast is Scotland, where Labour is so rooted that the party could not do without its Scottish fortress...
...I'm trying to point out their limits, but Levesque hears my English accent and figures I need reassurance...
...But it has not benefited the existing Canadian socialdemocratic movement, the New Democratic party...
...We assumed, or hoped, that this would break down barriers between Quebec and English Canada, at any rate our English Canada, left-wing English Canada...
...I remember feelings of both fascination and shrinking-away as I watched the houses turn into slums and drew warmth from the oblique sunlight on the tiers of steps up to the church doors...
...None of this has produced mass support, except a little in ethnic Montreal...
...The relationship of my English suburb to this French poverty was not felt as pure guilt or pure hatred, as it would likely have been in Montreal...
...Disdain always has its reasons...
...He keeps French-Canadians incensed about provincial rights so that they will not insist upon workers' rights...
...The NDP is the perennial third-runner in Canadian politics...
...The chief speaker is not a producer but a news commentator, an almost-bald man with some black hairs from one temple combed across the bald area to the other temple...
...It has had backing from the union movement, sympathetic coverage from the French press, leeway from the English-Canadian party, local candidates with soul, rural organizers, fighting priests, strike heroes...
...So if you need 'elp talk to de pries dats his job...
...Or as the early herald of FrenchCanadian embourgeoisement...
...They had been farm people, and came into the industrial system, once that system spread, as unskilled workers...
...Contentment with the past...
...We are in 1962...
...It is Labour that has to tremble contemplating the rise of autonomist feeling in the conquered nation...
...Here in Ottawa, the French were not the majority, merely the largest minority, about a third of the population, as in Canada as a whole...
...A decade and a half of FrenchCanadian self-assertion has rendered this raw disdain somewhat quaint, but oddly, as I sit down to write, I have in hand two just-found survivals of it...
...Not the working people who were its majority, certainly, and not the farmers who were extolled in the teachings of the institutions...
...The folk poet William Henry Drummond did this affectionately at the turn of the century...
...The movement that will claim him is growing steadily alongside the Liberal government...
...Wouldn't more nationalizations be needed to truly liberate FrenchCanadians...
...Why tackle the upgrading of the French language first, the one issue that'll, surely oh surely, drive the Greeks, the Portuguese, the Italians into the English bosses' arms...
...But it was Levesque who was gaining steady ground...
...This leadership would tie their old ethnic demands to socialism...
...The man is anti-French, but he must be curious too...
...De State of Qebcc don ave no hoffice no place...
...I couldn't follow the urging of the liberal teacher who wanted me to listen to the state radio network's series Fiddle Joes Yarns, where the Quebec village of yesteryear was sketched...
...It was settled by, among others, the extremes of the Canadian ethnic tension, puritanical Irish and Scottish Protestants, and Catholic French-Canadians...
...French-Canadians were low on the economic scale all across Canada...
...And raising with him the possibility of membership...
...This meant, in general, that the concept of French Canada as a distinct and separate community must always be allowed to prevail over the idea of Canada as a nation...
...The Liberals are defeated and Levesque's break with them comes in '68, over the national question...
...Is there not a desire for change...
...There were sob sisters speaking of the danger of socialism when Ontario nationalized electricity, too," he says...
...The streetcar I took to go downtown always went through a big French-Canadian parish called St-Francois-d'Assise...
...It is Canberra or Kuala Lumpur, Commonwealth Capital, with parliamentary politics and green grass, with the real life of the country, the lively and identifying life, lived elsewhere...
...Why not some big social reforms first...
...A Protestant school system, numerous middle-class municipalities on the west end of Montreal Island, a fat daily press, English radio, English TV, assurance of English in government services and the courts, miles of glittering downtown commercial development with signs hung out in English and English only...
...The whole development of Quebec since 1960 can be seen as the rise of social-democratic ideas in its people...
...It was located on the Ottawa River, which is the border between Quebec and Ontario...
...When that old-time bow whined over the violin, there seeped up several frightening images from my subconscious...
...One is on the high road of constitutional ideology...
...Right now it is just an intriguing thought, for something is missing...
...The French TV producers are on strike at the state network...
...Canada's news magazine: For 33 years, ever since Maurice Duplessis had regained power in 1944, Quebec has been playing the politics of blackmail...
...He says that some Quebec intellectuals are talking about Maurice Duplessis as a "Negro king...
...My suggestion is to the Socialist International...
...This power shone so strongly that virtually all of the hundreds of thousands of postwar immigrants to the Montreal area, even when they were from such culturally close-to-French lands as Spain, Portugal, and Italy, took it for granted that they would become English-Canadians, and not French...
...In Quebec City, "Ste-Foy" means government technocrat, and in Montreal "Ville Brossard" means insurance executive...
...The years of Pierre Valli?res's book White Niggers of America...
...There is a lot of fear of Communism in Sherbrooke," he says...
...Yet there was a disdain for the French that was standard in the English Canada of my childhood, during the '50s...
...It has recruited the wellloved French-Canadian TV star Lise Payette, now the separatist consumers' minister, and the socialist constitutional expert Jacques-Yvan Morin, now education minister...
...Now the extreme leftists, to distinguish themselves from the moderate socialists in power, often discard nationalism altogether...
...by Rodrigue Tremblay, who made his name with a book advocating Quebec's merging, economically, anyway, with the United States...
...I am in Sherbrooke, helping with the election campaign of Gus Steenland, Belgian immigrant, Catholic trade unionist, founder of the printers' union at the newspaper I work for...
...Sweden is often invoked, and a few years later Chile will be taken especially much to the Quebec heart...
...Even for me, there were certain unattractive notes in the French-Canadian style...
...And I suppose that is what Ottawa evokes for the foreign reader...
...Its ideal of a utopia-fromtheencyclicals never came to much, but its defense of free enterprise was very real, and armed with police clubs...
...In the high school yearbooks since, it has not been so affectionate...
...If you're talking about an all-out Soviet-type thing, we're not interested in that...
...This class had little money and little grip on the machines and resources of the capitalist economy...
...WE ARE in 1958...
...Yet it does seem to contain many progressive elements...
...There was a French-Canadian territory, then, with schools, a press, cultural associations...
...I am riding in the car of a rather anti-French Ottawa man...
...I'm embarrassed," he had said, "because I'm a Liberal minister, after all...
...I WAS brought up in a socialist family, not an untypical thing in English Canada...
...It's time some promiser of nationhood delivered...
...France, until now, has sent Quebec few immigrants...
...What do you do...
...We insisted on being pro-French...
...What were the facts behind this one...
...by Jacques Parizeau of Quebec's school of business administration...
...The NDP will never claim him...
...The city had been a lumbering town...
...It is the dark murmur about the Catholic church...
Vol. 24 • September 1977 • No. 4
