Causes of the Quebec Referendum Direct and Indirect Credits: Britannica Online

DIRECT CAUSE Rene Levesque was elected the first leader of the Parti Quebecois (PQ), was dedicate to a split from Canada in the form of a relationship known as sovereignty association. By 1976 the PQ had won power in Quebec and prepared to implement their plan with a calling of a referendum in Quebec over the question of sovereignty association. The main opponent to Levesque and the PQ was bound to be Pierre Trudeau who completely rejected the concept of a Quebec outside of the Canadian Federation. Levesque set May 20th, 1980 as the date for the vote and laid out their argument and their plan for taking Quebec out of Confederation.

The PQ set the following question for the referendum: "The Government of Quebec has made public its proposal to negotiate a new agreement with the rest of Canada, based on the equality of nations; this agreement would enable Quebec to acquire the exclusive power to make its laws, levy its taxes and establish relations abroad — in other words, sovereignty — and at the same time to maintain with Canada an economic association including a common currency; any change in political status resulting from these negotiations will only be implemented with popular approval through another referendum; on these terms, do you give the Government of Quebec the mandate to negotiate the proposed agreement between Quebec and Canada?"

INDIRECT CAUSES: HISTORICAL ECONOMIC INEQUALITY MAKING QUEBECERS SECOND-CLASS CITIZENS DUPLESSIS REGIME: HAVE LOTS OF BABIES AND GO TO CHURCH QUIET REVOLUTION: REALIZATION THAT QUEBECERS NEED TO GET EDUCATED! THANK YOU CEGEP! FLQ: EVERY MOVEMENT HAS ITS CRAZIES, RIGHT? AL- QAEDA, HUTU EXTREMEISTS, JUST TO MENTION A FEW WE’VE SEEN SO FAR… PQ OFFERS A NEW NATIONALISM: SEPARATISM…WELL, SOVEREIGNTY-ASSOCIATION = WE KEEP YOUR MONEY, BUT THIS MARRIAGE IS DONE.

HISTORICAL ECONOMIC INEQUALITY French Canadian nationalism was also the outcome of profound economic and social changes that had taken place in Quebec since about Until that time French Canadians had lived by agriculture and seasonal work in the timber trade. The middle-class French of Quebec and Montreal acted as intermediaries between the working-class French and the English industrial and commercial leaders. The growth of hydroelectric power and the wood pulp industry helped to create manufacturing plants in Quebec and Ontario and brought French Canadian workers into the cities, particularly Montreal. The rate of growth of the French Canadian population and the lack of good workable land outside the narrow St. Lawrence and Richelieu valleys contributed to the rush to low-paying jobs in urban industries and to the growth of urban slums, especially in Montreal. By 1921 Quebec was the most urbanized and industrialized of all Canadian provinces, including Ontario, which remained the most populous and the wealthiest. The Quebec government, devoted to the 19th-century policy of laissez-faire economics, recklessly encouraged industry and did little to check its worst excesses. With few exceptions the new enterprises were owned and directed by English Canadians or U.S. businesses.

DUPLESSIS REGIME At the same time, industrialization destroyed the myths by which French Canada had survived: that of the Roman Catholic mission to the New World and the cult of agriculture as the basis of virtuous life. The clash of the traditional and the new came to a head in the last years of the regime of Premier Maurice Duplessis, an economic conservative and Quebec nationalist who led Quebec in 1936–39 and 1944–59. As leader of the Union Nationale party—a party he had helped to create—Duplessis’s first term in office ended when he lost the 1939 election after challenging Ottawa’s right to intervene in provincial jurisdictions during wartime. Reelected in 1944, Duplessis refused to cooperate with most of the new social and educational initiatives launched by the King and Saint Laurent governments. Duplessis favoured foreign investment, supported the Roman Catholic church as Quebec’s chief agency of social welfare and education, and strongly opposed trade unionism. Quebec society was changing dramatically in the late 1940s and ’50s. Montreal and other urban centres grew rapidly after the war, and a burgeoning French-speaking urban middle class was entering business and other white-collar professions. Increasing numbers of students completed high school and entered Canadian colleges and universities. A prolonged and bitter strike by asbestos workers began a period of labour conflict and gave young idealists—one of them Pierre Trudeau, future prime minister of Canada—a chance to combine with labour in a struggle for a free society of balanced interests. A new Quebec was emerging, despite Duplessis’s best efforts to keep it Catholic, agrarian, and conservative. At the time of his death in 1959, the province was ready for major political changes.

QUIET REVOLUTION The 1960's had begun with the emergence of the quiet revolution in Quebec and the rejection of the traditional conservative coalition of provincial power with the catholic church and big business. Quebecers wanted more control over their province and destiny and as the Liberal government nationalized utilities, changed the laws and opened up the government to the people, the demand for nationalistic causes increased dramatically. During the late 1960s the nationalist movement was motivated primarily by the belief, shared by many Quebec intellectuals and labour leaders, that the economic difficulties of Quebec were caused by English Canadian domination of the confederation and could only be ended by altering—or terminating—the ties with other provinces and the central government.

FLQ: Extreme Nationalist Terrorism Other social revolutionaries, inspired by refugees from Algeria and by events in Cuba at that time, began to practice terrorism. Bombings began in 1963 and continued sporadically. Most French and English Canadians considered these actions “un-Canadian,” but they illustrated both the social ills of Quebec and the ties of the French intellectuals with the world outside Canada. In October 1970 a terrorist group, the Front de Libération du Québec (Quebec Liberation Front), kidnapped the British trade commissioner, James Cross, and Quebec’s labour minister, Pierre Laporte, who was subsequently murdered. Quebec’s government asked for federal intervention, prompting enactment of the War Measures Act, which suspended the usual civil liberties. Subsequently some 500 people were arrested, and troops were moved into Quebec. The Canadian public generally approved of the act, but few convictions followed, except of those accused of the murder of Laporte.

PARTI QUEBECOIS IS BORN By the mid-1960s, Quebec’s political spectrum revealed a wide range of nationalist sentiment. The Liberal Party was federalist, holding that the reforms needed in Quebec could be obtained within the federal system. The Union Nationale also remained fundamentally federalist, but it stressed the importance of remaining Québécois and of obtaining greater provincial power. To the left of the traditional parties, however, opinion ranged from a demand for a special status for Quebec to support for separation and independence. An active minority of leftist Montrealers broke with the Liberals and began advocating independence as a first step to social change. Their efforts resulted in the establishment of the Parti Québécois, which advocated secession from the confederation.