Right, Left and Centre: The Poltiocs of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 44, Part Three.

   Change Your Name, Change Your Status. Part Three, by Dave Jaffe.


           In 1969 Arthur Rosen graduated from the Faculty of Law and soon became a lawyer. Yet though he got a job with an Anglophone law firm in downtown Montreal, the political situation in Quebec was heating up. In Canada's centennial year of 1967, Ross and his fiancé Deborah Steinberg went along with hundreds of thousands of others to the world's fair held in Montreal. They enjoyed themselves at the fair called 'Expo 67' and the fair was a landmark in Canadian history. Yet at the same time, French  President Charles De Gaulle came to visit Canada.
     "Vive le Quebec libre'  or "Long live a free Quebec" de Gaulle told a mostly separatist crowd at Montreal's city hall. By saying this, De Gaulle encouraged a growing separatist feeling among Quebec's French Canadians.
    In 1968, Pierre Elliot Trudeau won the general election for the Liberal Party and became Canada's new Prime Minister. Yet just around that time, Rene Levesque stalked out of the Quebec Liberal Party and set up a separatist political party later to be named the Parti Quebecois.
      "We are Quebecois," Levesque said in his book that was soon published after he left the Quebec Liberal Party. "We are attachéd to this one corner of the earth where we can be completely ourselves."
Levesque's book was called 'Option Quebec' and called for a completely independent Quebec.
      Then in 1969, a big sovereigntist march demonstrated outside  McGill University. The march was led by the Marxist political science instructor Stan Gray, whom Ross had clashed with several times when they were both undergraduates. Bombs also kept going off at anglophone targets.
      In 1970 a violent separatist cell kidnapped the British consul in Montreal James Cross. A second cell kidnapped and then killed the Quebec Liberal cabinet minister Pierre Laporte. Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau imposed a War Measures Act on Canada. Troops patrolled the streets of Montreal, Ottawa and Quebec City. Some troops came right past Ross's downtown law office. Hundreds of separatist sympathizers had their houses searched and some ended up in prison.
     "Just watch me," Prime Minister Trudeau said when asked by reporter Tim Ralfe how far he would go to crush the terrorist Front de Liberation de Quebec that claimed credit for the kidnappings and bombings. Trudeau did indeed crush the FLQ, which never re-appeared after 1970. Yet the sovereigntist threat didn't disappear. In 1976, the separatist Parti Quebecois led by Rene Levesque won the provincial election. Soon tens of thousands of anglophones left Quebec.
       Ross and his wife Deborah and their two children were among the people who fled.  Ross's mother Leah and his father had told Arthur about the French crowds that attacked Jews in east end Montreal in the 1930's and 1940's. "They hate us the Francoisen," Leah told Arthur and his wife Deborah. Arthur thought that the Quebec sovereigntists weren't as anti-Semitic as the French Canadian fascists of the 1930's. Still neither he nor his wife wanted to take any chances. They moved to Toronto, where Arthur got articled as a lawyer. "I miss Montreal," Deborah said. "But this is a nice place to bring up children.
     Ross remained a federal Liberal. He ended up as the president of Liberal constituency organization. Yet as usual he kept his religion in the background and changed his surname officially to Ross. He rarely went to synagogues though his children, a son and a daughter did go to Hebrew school. In the wealthier atmosphere of Toronto he felt at home. He was now a bond expert and his law practice thrived.