Sovereignist supporters mourn their defeat in the 1980 referendum. For a generation, the "Quebec Question" dominated Canadian politics.

Robert Bothwell - It is now 50 years since Canadians awoke, startled, to discover that their prosperous, peaceful country was threatened with discontent and disunion. “Separatism” was born — an old word used mostly to describe religious disputes, to describe a new thing, support for the secession of Quebec from Canada. At first separatism seemed to be confined to a radical right-wing fringe, but by the mid-1960s polls showed that it was attracting a larger and larger number of Quebecers. Starting in 1963 there were terrorist incidents, bombs in mailboxes, bombs at an armoury, bombs at the Montreal Stock Exchange.
Language, it appeared, was the key, as French-speakers demanded pride of place for their language in Quebec and, if they still held out some hope for Canada, in the federal government. A royal commission told Canadians that their country faced the greatest political crisis in its history, and that unless something was done, Canada might not survive. A separatist political party, the Parti Québécois (PQ), led by a prominent and popular politician, René Lévesque, took shape and then, in 1976, took power in the province of Quebec. It seemed that Canada’s dissolution was only a matter of time, and not much time at that.
For years the “Quebec Question” dominated Canada’s national politics. From 1968 to 2006, 38 years, Quebecers led one or the other of Canada’s dominant political parties, Liberals and Conservatives, and four Quebecers, Pierre Trudeau, Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin were prime minister for all but one year of the 38. A separatist party, the Bloc Québécois, appeared in the House of Commons, at times holding the balance of power. Quebec held two referendums on separation, and the second one, in 1995, came within a whisker of success. Had it succeeded, Quebec would today be an independent country.
And then, one day, it was gone. That was another surprise, just as Canadians had adjusted to the permanent presence of separatist parties on the national scene and in Quebec, the federal separatist formation, the Bloc, imploded in the 2011 federal election, losing all but four of its MPs. It would be an understatement to say that this was a complete surprise — the phenomenon showed up only in the last two weeks of the campaign as previously impregnable separatist ridings suddenly became insecure. On election day, the NDP moved from one seat in the province to 59, with 43 per cent of the popular vote.
The provincial separatists, the PQ, have been hemorrhaging members — some to private life, others to a new political formation, the Coalition pour l’Avenir du Québec (Coalition for Quebec’s Future) which has the unfortunate acronym of CAQ (pronounced CAK). Its leader is a former PQ minister, François Legault, who left politics in 2009 only to re-emerge two years later as leader of a political group that proclaimed political separatism was a dead end and that Quebecers must now focus on practicalities — education, health care and the economy. Language, inescapable even for the CAQ, is a fourth priority, along with culture. Missing are the revision of the Constitution (a preoccupation for Quebec federalists for the past 50 years), and independence and a referendum to bring it about (the nostrum of Quebec separatists).
Polls suggest that the CAQ, which did not exist at the time of the last provincial election, could probably win the next one, decimating if not eliminating the PQ and its unpopular leader, Pauline Marois, and trouncing though probably not exterminating the provincial Liberals under Premier Jean Charest.
For the short term, if not the medium term, this is good news. But in the longer term the Quebec question may not really have gone away. The signs of future trouble are in the federal sphere. The Constitution requires the redistribution of seats after every census — even the maimed census imposed by the Harper government. In the broadest terms, the House of Commons is supposed to mirror the distribution of the population, but it has also, informally and often imperfectly, reflected Canada’s ethnic and linguistic makeup. And language, of course, means the English-French divide.
For over 100 years, the proportion of French-speakers in Canada hovered just under 30 per cent. At times, it seemed possible that it would grow. And roughly a third of the seats in the Commons were either predominantly francophone or heavily influenced by the francophone vote. But then there was the advent of effective birth control, the decline of the Catholic Church and the rise of women’s rights.
One would search in vain for any of these things on anybody’s political agenda, but over 40 years or more they constitute a political fact — the proportion of French-speakers in Canada is declining and with it the representation of francophones in Parliament. The latest estimates place the number of francophones at 22 per cent, down from 28 or 29 per cent in the middle of the last century. The proportion has been going down rapidly, and a projection of 20 per cent by 2020 is not impossible.
The Harper government has been wrestling with the problem. Alberta and British Columbia need — deserve — more seats to reflect their rapidly growing populations. Ontario, the largest province, has become even larger since the previous redistribution. At first Harper and his ministers proposed to solve the problem on Ontario’s back, depriving the province of seats it deserved, while rewarding Alberta and B.C. That proposal fortunately died, and in the current Parliament the government has come up with a plan to expand the number of seats in the Commons.
The key to the redistribution is, however, the number of seats in Quebec, whose population has not grown rapidly and has fallen further and further behind the rates of growth in Ontario and the West. The effect is that Quebec will maintain more or less its existing number of seats — but in a larger Parliament. The hope is that this will be sufficient bromide for what is in fact a decline in Quebec’s political power.
Parliamentary representation is the easy part of the problem, however. There is also the place of the French language. Canada is a bilingual country and goes to considerable expense to implement that constitutionally recognized fact. Symbolically, in the 2011 election debates, all but one of the federal leaders could speak passable French, a sign of the attention that bilingualism has received. But if francophones fall below 20 per cent of the national population it does not take a genius to predict that bilingual institutions will be imperilled. If bilingualism becomes a political issue — as in a minor way it was in the 1960s — hard feelings may follow. And if bilingualism is informally disestablished, French may retreat to its Quebec fortress. But even behind provincial walls, the ratio of five to one, or eventually 10 to one, may not be enough to secure the future of French.
Generations of Canadian politicians have, if they are honest, mumbled to themselves, “Politics is one damn thing after another.” One nightmare is averted, and another takes its place. Where Canada and Quebec are concerned, that is all too probable.
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Robert Bothwell holds the May Gluskin Chair in Canadian History at the University of Toronto and is the author of The Penguin History of Canada.