Part Two

You wish to understand Quebec's October Crisis? Let me introduce you to Pierre Maheu, an educated young man from Outremont with a boring job writing ads in a publicity firm. He adored writer Jean-Paul Sartre, considered Sartre his "guiding light" and endorsed Sartre's precept that one must become committed. But committed to what? In Quebec?
"To me, people here were stupid and it was no use committing yourself to them," Maheu told Globe and Mail journalist Malcolm Reid in 1972. "All I wanted to do was get out of here."
But something happened. On March 8, 1963, three armouries in Montreal were struck by incendiary bombs. An unknown Front de Libération du Québec burst on the scene and Maheu experienced an epiphany. "My God, I said to myself, history can happen here as well as anywhere else."
The FLQ ended its first communiqué with this call to arms: "Students, workers, peasants, create your underground groups against Anglo-American colonialism. Independence or death!"
Maheu now found commitment, and in Quebec. In October, 1963, he and others launched Parti pris (Taking a Stand), a publication committed to the revolutionary decolonization of Quebec. It was a bombshell: "The alienation that afflicts us and which exists at all levels arises from the fact that we are colonized and exploited. ... We shall soon liberate ourselves from this alienation because Quebec society has entered into a revolutionary phase."
Maheu understood decolonization as did his mentor Sartre. The existentialist French author had prefaced the book, The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, the ideologist of violent decolonization in Algeria. Sartre summarized the doctrine memorably: "In the early period of the revolt, one must kill. To slay a European is to kill two birds with one stone, that is, it eliminates an oppressor and an oppressed. The outcome is that one man is dead and one man is liberated. The survivor, for the first time, feels a national soil under his feet."
Quebec was a milder Algeria. That revelation swept the Québécois intelligentsia in the 1950s and 1960s. Decolonization became the foundational principle of the Quiet Revolution. It took many forms, from moderate, as with the Quebec Liberal party's Maîtres chez nous, to extreme, as with the FLQ's bombs and kidnappings. But the same fundamental thought became pervasive: if francophones were poorer than les Anglais, if the Catholic church held a rigid control over most of society and the education system was pre-modern, if families had too many children and les Anglais controlled most of industry, there was one explanation, one solution: Quebec was colonized and must be decolonized.
The decolonization model had consequences. It de-legitimated Canada's constitutional structure which must be transformed. In 1963, the National Assembly launched a committee on the Constitution to define the new constitutional arrangements. It soon concluded that the status quo was unacceptable, and that Quebec must choose between special status, associate statehood or independence.
The issue was never resolved but it precipitated four decades of federal-provincial negotiations and confrontations. Within Quebec, it polarized politics between federalists and secessionists, and produced three inconclusive referendums.
The decolonization model identified a culprit, the enemy: les Anglais. Earlier, a long tradition identified les Anglais with the threat of religious, cultural and linguistic contamination. A theory was developed, the "compact" myth of the "two founding peoples," which held that two equal societies, French and English were confederated in 1867 to develop side by side, each insulated from the other ("autonomy"), to meet only at the top, in the legislatures.
With the Quiet Revolution, the old xenophobia now took the form of fashionable decolonization. The oppressive English language must be disestablished and confined, while the "State of Quebec," no longer a mere province, must grow immeasurably, acquiring ever more powers to protect and promote the French-speaking majority.
The 1960s spawned a multitude of movements and parties dedicated to decolonization. Some accepted the rules of democracy, but many, like the FLQ, considered democracy as simply the Anglo-American ruling class's instrument to control the colony and exploit the Québécois. The FLQ was not an aberration. It simply pushed the decolonization doctrine to its pure, logical conclusion.
Now the FLQ has disappeared. Terrorism is no longer a continuing threat. But the decolonization theory still exerts its influence on Quebec's public life. It's expressed in the conviction that Quebec can secede unilaterally, regardless of the constitutional order, on the mere strength of a majority Yes in an equivocal referendum. The Parti Québécois has never accepted to be bound by the Constitution in its pursuit of secession, and Premier Jean Charest now defends before the courts Lucien Bouchard's Bill 99 that claimed Quebec's right to secede unilaterally, with its current territory intact.
The decolonization model underlies Quebec's progressive thrust since 1974 to restrict ever more severely the presence of English in Quebec, claiming a fictitious vulnerability of the French language. Quebec even denies that English is one of its two official languages, even while every law ever passed in Quebec was and is passed in both French and English, otherwise it is invalid.
So it is with Quebec's insistent refusal to accept the legitimacy of the 1982 Constitution Act patriating the Constitution even after its legitimacy was confirmed categorically by the Supreme Court of Canada in its judgment of December 1982.
Decolonization theory has prevented Quebecers from considering other Canadians as fully their fellow citizens, bound with them in the solidarity of a shared country. Instead, in six consecutive federal elections, Quebec has chosen a majority of MPs from the secessionist party that vows to defend the interests of Quebec alone.
The FLQ is gone. The October Crisis is over. But the seeds of terrorism will remain until Quebec renounces the decolonization model and embraces the constitutional order. Otherwise, the FLQ could revive after the next referendum on secession. We still await the real Quebec spring.
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Veteran journalist and commentator William Johnson is former president of Alliance Quebec.