Canadians who voted Liberal in 1963 expected to restore the tranquil, prosperous era John Diefenbaker had interrupted. The prosperity had already returned; the tranquillity would not.
As a vigorous alternative to Diefenbaker’s moody indecision. Liberals promised “Sixty Days of Decision.” Lester Pearson rapidly patched up relations with the Kennedy White House. His finance minister, Walter Gordon, equally promptly produced a budget to penalize the foreign investors Gordon had criticized in a 1957 report on Canada’s economic prospects. To the government’s embarrassment, the Gordon proposals were both so inept and so unpopular that they had to be withdrawn. It was the start of two years of retreats and embarrassments. Through much of 1964, Parliament was stalled while Pearson’s determination to endow the country with a distinctive national flag tangled with Diefenbaker’s fervent defence of the old red ensign. Memories of the nasty 1956 pipeline closure delayed the end of debate until December. In the intervals, Tories raised allegations of Liberal scandal that ranged from free furniture to cabinet-level intercessions for a notorious drug dealer, Lucien Rivard. A vengeful Diefenbaker was in his element; Pearson was not.
Amid the cacophony, few noted the achievements. By 1965, Canada had a new flag, a national contributory pension plan, a Canada Assistance Plan for the poor, and an unemployment rate of only 3.3 per cent. The integration of the armed forces’ command structures was complete and beneficial. A fairer system of locating constituency boundaries ended a venerable political abuse. Burgeoning revenues and the power of example allowed the government to imitate many of the policies of Kennedy’s “New Frontier” and Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” The short-lived “Company of Young Canadians,” resembling the U. S. Volunteers in Service to America program, attempted to harness youthful activism. Consultants swarmed into Ottawa to give well-paid advice on the cure of poverty, regional underdevelopment, and the plight of Native people.
Such a flood of good works. Liberal strategists insisted, would earn the government a clear majority and freedom from its Tory and ndp tormentors. A reluctant Pearson called an election for November 8,1965, and promptly unleashed Diefenbaker for another burst of shallow populism. English-speaking Tory audiences revelled in accounts of scandal that somehow always involved Pearson’s French-speaking colleagues. “It was on a night like this,” Diefenbaker told audiences on warm evenings, that Lucien Rivard had been allowed to make ice on the prison skating rink—and had used the hose to scale the wall. Pearson’s limp performance and a floundering campaign even managed to leave the Liberals short of money by election eve. On November 8, voters chose a Parliament that was virtually a replica of its predecessor. Only the ndp gained strength, adding 50 per cent to its voter support. Unnoticed, exasperated Canadians had voted for social reform, not the old politics.
Almost nowhere in 1965 did Canadians debate the issue that now preoccupied the Prime Minister. Indeed, in most of the country, it was hard to believe that Confederation was in crisis. Since 1945, however, Pearson had witnessed the birth of dozens of
New nations; he could now see the same symptoms in Quebec, and he wondered if they could be reversed.
John Diefenbaker had had no such perceptions. Like most Canadians outside Quebec (and many English-speaking
Cartoonist Duncan Macpherson captured the apparent confusion and weakness of the Pearson government, “all at sea” in the 1960s.
Quebecers), his knowledge of French Canada had been shaped by obsolete myths of a priest-ridden rural society, intent on guarding a noble but archaic culture. In 1958, Maurice Duplessis’s desire to be on the winning side had given the Conservatives a chance to build a Quebec base. It was an opportunity Diefenbaker had fumbled. Like other western Canadians, Diefenbaker believed that his “unhyphenated Canadianism” was the only acceptable alternative to a Babel of conflicting languages and cultures. To be denied recognition as a “founding nation” was as insulting to Quebecers in the 1960s as it had been to Henri Bourassa in the 1900s. A very different version of history taught Quebecers that they formed one of two founding nations, that Confederation was an equal “compact” between two equal peoples which could not be altered unilaterally without dissolving the union. It was an enchanting myth and a political weapon of great power.
In the 1960s, it was Quebec, not Saskatchewan, that set Canada’s political agenda. As elsewhere, affluence had transformed French Canada. Montreal and those communities that enjoyed American markets for their raw resources shared unprecedented wealth; rural Quebec fell behind. Prosperity and a new secularism mocked the old nationalist faith in Catholicism and poverty. In the 1950s, Duplessis’s alliance of church, state, and bien pensant Quebecers did their best to hold the line. For inspiring Refus Global, a ringing appeal for freedom of expression, the painter Paul-Emile Borduas had been fired from his teaching position in Montreal. His manifesto inspired a generation of younger artists and writers. A year later, in 1949, a strike by Catholic unionists in the mines at Asbestos pitted workers and a few younger nationalists and church leaders against the Duplessis regime, most of the Catholic hierarchy, and the American-owned employers. After much violence, the strike was settled. Prosperity and fresh battles with Ottawa restored Duplessis’s popularity, but Asbestos was not forgotten by Jean Marchand, the union leader, or by Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a wealthy young law professor who had espoused the union cause. By 1960, Marchand had helped convert his Catholic-based unions to a secular nationalism.
Prosperity and secularism seemed to draw Quebec closer to North American norms. An added pressure was television, with its universal values and homogenized culture. Among the personalities who opened Quebecers’ minds to the world was a balding, chain-smoking television commentator named Rene Levesque. By the end of the 1950s, the major remaining barrier to Quebec’s full modernization seemed to be Duplessis and his Union Nationale. The rest of Canada took heart when two Catholic priests boldly denounced the electoral corruption of the regime. In Le Devoir, Pierre Laporte
This congenial gathering of Maurice Duplessis and Archbishop Joseph Charbonneau at Ste-Therese may have symbolized relations of church and state in Quebec in 1946, but they were not to last. In 1949 Charbonneau espoused the cause of the Asbestos strikers against their American employers, while Duplessis set out to frighten church leaders into submission.
Exposed scandal at the heart of the Union Nationale. Cite Libre, a small magazine edited by Trudeau, even argued for lay control of education. Unexpectedly in 1959, Duplessis died. An able young successor, Paul Sauve, proclaimed his allegiance to reform with the slogan “Desormais"’ (“From now on” ). But within months, Sauve, too, was dead. His successor, Antonio Barrette, was a shop-worn survivor from the old guard.
The 1958 Liberal defeat in Ottawa had released Jean Lesage, a St. Laurent minister, to become Quebec’s Liberal leader. Duplessis’s decision to back Diefenbaker gave Lesage sweet revenge. No longer were Quebec Liberals the “travelling salesmen” for their Ottawa cousins; the Union Nationale could now be blamed for Diefenbaker’s misdeeds. Powerful allies now joined the Liberal cause, among them Rene Levesque, furious that the Diefenbaker government had allowed the CBC to shut down its French network rather than settle a contract dispute with him and his fellow television producers. In June 1960, Lesage won a narrow victory. After sixteen years, the Liberals were back in power in Quebec.
“Ilfaut que fa change!” (“Things must change!”) Lesage told cheering backers, but it was by no means clear that he himself wanted change. A courtly, old-fashioned politician, he preferred to speak of “the hour of restoration.” But Levesque and other Liberal ministers had nothing to restore. At once they began to create a modern, professional—and high-salaried—bureaucracy. Lesage had sworn that there would never be a provincial department of education. By 1964, a provincial ministry presided over a highly centralized, lay-controlled school system; within a few years, Quebec created secondary schools and a network of junior colleges, and achieved dramatic increases in school attendance. At Levesque’s insistence, Quebec’s private hydroelectricity industry was nationalized. In a snap election in 1962, provincial voters showed that they overwhelmingly approved.
So did most of Canada. Exciting changes in Quebec, promptly labelled the “Quiet Revolution,” seemed to make the province more like the rest of Canada. After all, most provinces ran the public schools, controlled hydroelectricity, and, outside Atlantic Canada, had curbed the ugliest abuses of political patronage. What outsiders were slower to recognize was that the prime motive for reform was not modernization but Quebec nationalism. The nationalists who set the pace for Lesage’s government insisted that Catholicism and rural poverty were lamentable defences for French Canada. In a secular age, cultural and linguistic survival depended on a powerful government. Given the resources, there was nothing that a Quebec state could not do at home, from fostering the arts to creating a nuclear industry at GentUly. What it could not do was defend the French-Ganadian minorities beyond its borders. The rest of Gonfederation could concede the resources and powers Quebec needed or the world would soon have yet another sovereign nation—richer, larger, and more lavishly endowed than most. The logic seemed inescapable.
Outside Quebec, it also seemed invisible. At its creation in 1961, the ndp had endorsed the “two nations” theory and bilingualism, confident that Quebec would also endorse its vision of a nationwide social democracy. Nothing was so simple. Having digested the Quiet Revolution, Canadians were astonished, in 1962, by the popularity of Real Caouette’s Creditistes: clearly, old-fashioned, illiberal Catholic nationalism had persisted outside the urban and middle-class glitter of the Quiet Revolution. For Pearson and the Liberals, utterly dependent on Quebec votes, the evolution of French Canada easily became a central national issue. It justified the weary 1964 struggle for a flag. It had already inspired the creation, in 1963, of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. Headed by Andre Laurendeau, editor of Le Devoir, and A. Davidson Dunton, a former head of the CBC, the commission would do as much teaching as listening. Canadians would have to learn that French must be an equal national language. Canada’s government could no longer speak only English. If Quebecers could not be persuaded that all Canada was their homeland, the country would break up.
Quebec might not even wait. By 1963, one Quebecer in six believed in separation. That year, a handful of youthful terrorists began bombing mailboxes and armouries in the name of “Quebec Ubre” When provincial premiers met in Quebec City to discuss the Canada Pension Plan, student mobs chanted outside. A flushed, angry Lesage raged at Ottawa’s failure to hand over the money that Duplessis had forfeited for refusing shared-cost programs in the 1950s. Quebec would go it alone on a pension plan, collecting a huge reserve fund for its own investment purposes instead of Ottawa’s cheaper “pay-as-you-go” scheme. Other premiers, cash-starved as usual, demanded the Quebec plan, and Pearson gave way. Ottawa’s post-war fiscal pre-eminence had taken another beating. Whatever Quebec won, other provinces would have too.
For all his apparent ferocity, Lesage was a frightened man, pushed by forces he could not control. In 1963, he had insisted that Queen Elizabeth pay a visit to commemorate the Quebec Conference of 1864. When she arrived in October 1964, riot police held off thousands of jeering students. Lesage blamed the episode on Ottawa. Nationalizing the hydro companies had absorbed the surpluses Duplessis had squirrelled away. Creating a modern education system sent Quebec deeper into debt. Abolishing the traditional patronage system enraged the thousands of local notables and rural workers that any Quebec party needed, particularly to control a legislature in which small towns and country districts were lavishly over-represented. In June 1966, over-confident Liberals found themselves beaten by a man and a party they despised: Daniel Johnson of the Union Nationale.
Johnson, defeated in 1962, had modernized his party and attracted nationalists as fervent as any in Lesage’s Cabinet. There was no dismantling of what the Liberals had done, but neither was there money to do more. What the Johnson government could afford was a systematic challenge to every federal constraint on Quebec’s autonomy. In France, President Charles de Gaulle was an eager ally, since he regarded Canada as just another of the Anglo-Saxon countries that had humiliated him during the war. Quebec would be a convenient surrogate for the new age of glory his Fifth Republic was creating for France. Johnson’s representatives in Paris rose in status; Canada’s ambassador was snubbed, and a visit by the Governor General, Major-General Georges Vanier, was
When Montreal’s Expo ’67 opened, critics and doubters fell silent, and Canadians celebrated their newfound sense of style, showmanship, and elegance. For once, protests over cost and practicality were forgotten.
Bluntly rejected. Pearson was angry and helpless.
Of all the projects that symbolized the new Quebec, the most grandiose was not provincial at all. Montreal’s Mayor Jean Drapeau had dreamed up the idea of holding a world’s fair to celebrate the centennial of Confederation. He had sold the idea to the world and then bullied and blackmailed both Ottawa and Quebec City into grudging co-operation. Despite all of Canada’s open spaces, the fair had to be built on artificial islands in the St. Lawrence, shaped from the dirt excavated for Montreal’s new subway system. Of all the absurdities of centennial year, Expo ’67 took the prize. A city that could not afford to clear its slums or provide sewage treatment was spending millions on a show. Moreover, as the deadlines approached, strikes and disputes almost guaranteed that it would not be finished on time.
Yet, to national astonishment and then delight. Expo ’67 managed to meet its deadline. Then came a suffusing mood of pleasure and even smugness as Canadians came to believe that it was they who had sponsored an unmixed artistic and innovative delight. Suddenly, in the warm spring of 1967, it felt good to be a Canadian. The improbable Drapeau became a national hero, the logical successor if the Tories could rid themselves of John Diefenbaker. It was easy to forget that Quebec separatists had fashioned their own licence plate tags for the year, proclaiming “100 ans d’injustice” (“100 years of injustice”). This time, there were no angry mobs when the Queen came. If President Lyndon Johnson, resentful of Canadian criticism of his Vietnam policies, paid only a perfunctory visit, few Canadians felt repentant. There would be a warm welcome, too, for the aged President of France, a war hero most Canadians admired. Few knew of Ottawa’s frustrations. Quebec’s Daniel Johnson had monopolized the arrangements, almost excluding federal officials. A long triumphal procession up the
St. Lawrence from Quebec City led to a climax in a vast rally in front of Montreal’s City Hall. There, on July 24, arms outstretched in a great V, de Gaulle cried out his greeting: “Vive Montreal! Vive le Quebec! Vive le Quebec libre!” The crowd roared in ecstacy.
De Gaulle’s ringing endorsement of the separatist slogan and the echoing cheers produced a sharp, undiplomatic rebuke from Pearson, indignation in most of Canada, and unrepentant glee in much of Quebec. At a Confederation of Tomorrow conference sponsored by Ontario’s peaceseeking premier, John Robarts, Daniel Johnson proclaimed that henceforth the State of Quebec would deal as equal to equal with the rest of Canada. By the end of 1967, Rene Levesque had broken with the Liberals, created the Mouvement Souverainete-Association, and set out to organize quarrelsome separatists in a single independence movement.
World History
