Dead Letter

By early evening it was evident that a landslide was in the making. As Liberal Party faithful gathered to celebrate at Montreal's Centre Pierre Charbonneau, loudspeakers boomed What a Feeling, the stirring theme song from the movie Flashdance. Liberal Party Chief Robert Bourassa, 52, took the microphone and, speaking in French, hailed his party's triumph as "a great victory for Canada." Switching to English, he pledged to "give back to Quebec the prosperity we had 15 years ago."

Across town, at the election-night headquarters of the Parti Quebecois, which had swept to power in 1976 vowing to withdraw the predominantly French- speaking province from the Canadian confederation, incumbent Premier Pierre- Marc Johnson, 39, conceded the election. "The people of Quebec have spoken," he declared. "They wanted a change, and from the appearance of things, they wanted a profound change." The scale of the victory surprised even veteran political observers. Liberals won 98 of the 122 seats in the provincial legislature with 58% of the vote, up from 46% in the 1981 provincial elections. The Parti Quebecois saw its tally plummet to 37%, down from 49% four years ago under the wily but erratic leadership of Rene Levesque.

Liberal Boss Bourassa, who served as Quebec's Premier between 1970 and 1976, did not benefit from his party's prosperity: he was defeated in his home district. A colorless personality, Bourassa was frequently referred to in the Canadian press as "the most unpopular man in Quebec" because of the general perception that his previous administration was incompetent. Having thus lost his own seat in the provincial legislature, the Premier-elect will have to run his victorious party from the public gallery until a Liberal agrees to give up a "safe" seat that he can win in a by-election.

Most observers attribute the Liberals' triumph to a decline of separatist sentiment among Quebec's 4.6 million voters, some 80% of whom speak French. Over the past decade, laws requiring special treatment for the French-speaking majority have caused more than 100,000 English speakers, many of them leaders in finance and business, to leave the province. The subsequent economic drain has worsened unemployment, now nearly 12%. At the same time, many French speakers feel confident that their language and culture are now adequately protected. The result: few wish to risk any longer the economic costs of separatist politics.