Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health - Chapter 26 - The Poet as Revolutionary: Third Section - by Dave Jaffe

The Poet As Revolutionary - The Life and Times of Paul Chamberland : Third Section


         These bombers, " confessed one anglophone in Montreal in about 1965. "They're getting me worried. The French are becoming a problem."
       In the next ten years quite a few anglophones would leave Montreal and Quebec. After Rene Levesque's Part Quebecois  sovereigntist government got elected in 1976, the trickle of anglophone people leaving Quebec turned into a flood. About 125,000 anglophones left Quebec in the next ten years. Part Pris writers did not support the FLQ terrorists. But they didn't condemn them either. In the end, the FLQ cells killed three people. Yet for every bomb that went off in Quebec from 1963 to 1970, there were ten bomb threats.
      Things became a lot more tense in Quebec in the late 1960's. Levesque's Parti Quebecois was a sovereigntist democratic party. Levesque abhorred terrorist groups like the FLQ. Still tensions rose quite high in Quebec in the late 1960's.
      In the end the dreams of Paul Chamberland and other Parti Pris writers didn't come true. Yet Quebec is still a place quite different than Canada's other provinces.  "Quebec, c'est ne pas un province comme les autres," francophones in Quebec used to say in the 1950's.  In English this means "Quebec's not a province like the others." This is still true.
     Quebec to-day (2016) is ruled by a right wing Liberal government at whose head is a very conservative premier, namely Phillipe Couillard. 85 per cent of the population, or nearly seven million people speak French as their first language. The main sovereigntist party the Parti Quebecois, sits in opposition in the National Assembly in Quebec City. The right wing but nationalist CAQ or Coalition for the Future of Quebec has a few seats too. So does the left wing sovereigntist party Operation Solidaire.
      Capitalism or free enterprise rules the roost in Quebec as it does in most countries. And in two referendums in the past 40 years, Quebec voted to remain in Canada. Of course in the 1995 referendum on leaving Canada, it was a very close call. If  50,000 voters had voted for the 'yes' side and not the 'no' side Quebec would have become an independent state.
     So on the surface very little has changed except that you don't see many signs in English anymore. Rene Levesque's PQ government imposed a tough language law that gave French a secure place in Quebec. "French is now the language of Quebec," one observer said at the time. "Just as English is the language of Ontario."
     Yet Quebec still remains a province quite different from the others. First off, there's the difference of language. Yet politics can be very volatile in Quebec and sometimes language issues can cause all sorts of problems.
      (To be continued).