Return of a Prodigal Province

By Pico Iyer

Weary of separatism, Quebec decides to give Canada a chance

Quebec has often struck outsiders as a byword for radicals and recalcitrance. The French-speaking province sends its own delegates abroad and calls its legislature the National Assembly. In 1970 a lunatic fringe agitating for Quebec's secession from Canada murdered a Cabinet minister, kidnaped a British diplomat, and set off so many explosions, both verbal and physical, that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act, Canada's equivalent of martial law. Even today the nation's most eccentric voice of disaffection, the nonsensical Rhinoceros Party, is based and enjoys its greatest following in Montreal. Though the independence-minded Parti Quebecois has controlled the provincial legislature for eight years, Quebec has long voted overwhelmingly Liberal in national elections.

This year, however, the province made a stunning about-face. During the past 67 years, the Progressive Conservatives, perceived in Quebec as the party of English-speaking Canada, had carried the province only once, in 1958; in the last election, they managed to win just one of Quebec's 75 seats. Last week they captured 58. The remarkable shift emphasized just how dramatically the political tide in Quebec has turned: after 25 years of mounting autonomist fervor, the urge to unmerge is subsiding. "On the scale of things outdated," wrote Lawrence Martin, a Montreal-based columnist for the Toronto Globe and Mail, "separatism finishes only slightly ahead of the Hula-Hoop."

Both nature and culture have long conspired to excite Quebec's yearning for autonomy. As Canada's largest province, with twice the area of Texas and a gross domestic product double that of New Zealand, Quebec is confident that its thick forests and clear mountain lakes afford it the resources to go it alone. As a pocket of Europe, American-style, graced with both fairy-tale cobbled streets and shiny futuristic shopping malls, the province seems already to belong to a different country from Newfoundland or the Yukon.

Capitalizing on this impulse, Provincial Premier Rene Levesque, 62, and his Parti Quebecois have always taken separatism as their driving ambition and rallying cry. The party stormed into power in 1976, as teachers, intellectuals and unionists -drawn from among the 5 million French speakers, who predominate among the province's 6 million residents -rallied behind the secessionist cause. Before long the new provincial government had enshrined French as Quebec's only official language and forbidden the use of English-language signs even in predominantly English-speaking neighborhoods. Thus a Montreal greasy spoon known as Irv's Light Lunch was rechristened Chez Irv.

Perhaps because of such absurdities, the independence movement started to lose momentum. In a 1980 referendum, 60% of Quebecois voted against granting the PQ a mandate for negotiating a system of "sovereignty-association," under which Quebec would enjoy political independence from Ottawa yet still participate in a national economic common market. A poll conducted for a militant group earlier this year revealed that only 6% still supported outright independence. Even the scrappy Levesque has begun to acknowledge that the issue is losing its drawing power. "Let's be realistic," the diminutive leader said in June. "I don't think that it is the smart thing to emphasize."

It is not difficult to explain the evaporation of both the issue's urgency and the Parti Quebecois's popularity. After 17 years in prominence, the PQ now strikes many young activists as an Establishment body encumbered with all the creaking machinery of a bureaucracy. In addition, scandal has tainted the erstwhile bastion of idealism. One prominent Parti Quebecois minister was found guilty of shoplifting; another legislator was imprisoned for having sex with girls as young as 13.

Most important, in Quebec as in much of North America, conservatism has flourished as political involvement has wilted. These days the young of Montreal would rather discuss the Expos than collective Utopian visions. Less and less interested in public service, the new generation seems more and more taken with private enterprise. "The old nationalism, which evokes flags and anthems, is passe," observes Marc Lavallee, a former Parti Quebecois activist. "But there's another kind of nationalism that insists that Quebec must be competitive, economically and technologically, with the rest of Canada and with the U.S."

That ambition has not been -helped by the long recession. Facing fan unemployment rate of 13% and the highest taxes in the land, many Quebecois find secession an expensive notion. "Small is beautiful' is a nice slogan," says Jean Bourbonnais, a student at the University of Montreal. "But with the current economic situation, we cannot afford independence." Convinced that the Liberal government has aggravated these woes by favoring the industries of neighboring Ontario over their own, many Quebec voters may have wanted less to support the Tories than to spite the Liberals.

Over the past two months, Prime Minister John Turner succeeded only in fanning those resentments. While Mulroney wooed his fellow Quebecois in a slangy provincial patois, the Liberal leader stiffly delivered his French speeches in the studiously correct tones of the Sorbonne. "Turner's the perfect Wasp," notes Lise Bissonnette, editor of the Montreal daily Le Devoir. "He looks like a Toronto businessman."

Mulroney, by contrast, took pains to acknowledge the sensitive issue of Quebec's independence, even if he never exactly addressed it. Late in the campaign, he attracted widespread support from the Parti Quebecois (three Tory candidates were onetime separatist activists). He shrewdly cultivated alliances with such local power brokers as former Labor Negotiator Lucien Bouchard and Senator Arthur Tremblay. And his ads invariably identified him as the "Boy from Baie Comeau." In the end, Quebecois simply found Mulroney the stronger candidate. "The French in Quebec aren't Martians," says McGill University Professor Daniel Latouche. "Like all Canadians, they're reacting to Turner's gaffes, the Liberals' patronage issue, Mulroney's perfect campaign." That in itself suggests that as the separatist impulse fades, the once single-minded province is increasingly of one mind with the rest of Canada.

With reporting by Andrew Phillips, Marion Scott