Parti Quebecois Research Articles

No Better Home? Jews, Canada, and the Sense of Belonging ed. by David S. Koffman

Reviewed by: No Better Home? Jews, Canada, and the Sense of Belonging ed. by David S. Koffman Gerald Sorin (bio) No Better Home? Jews, Canada, and the Sense of Belonging. Edited by David S. Koffman. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. 314 pp. No Better Home? begins with an audacious question: "Has there ever been a better home for Jews than Canada?" The question, however, seems rhetorical, inviting only one answer: "No. There's never been a better home for the Jews." But David Koffman, the editor of this extraordinarily rich anthology, has asked more than a dozen top-ranking specialists in Canadian Jewish history to take the question seriously and to shape their answers in scholarly articles, essays, and personal memoirs. Koffman says he raised the question "because it has seldom been asked" (3). One might argue, however, that it is seldom asked because it can't be answered. What, after all, do we mean by such non-academic categories as "better" or "best," or even by the concept of "home?" Putting aside these epistemological problems, there remain enormous methodological barriers to answering the question. A responsible conclusion would require comparing the quality of Jewish life in Canada, not only to the US, which has been done several times before, but to Jewish life in more than one hundred other diasporas over many continents, over the course of many centuries. Canada, with 390,000 Jewish residents, is the fourth largest Jewish community in the world, trailing only Israel, the US, and France, but not by very much. This alone merits the attention of Jewish historians, anthropologists, and sociologists and explains why they established the now long-standing field of Canadian Jewish Studies. It is not clear to me, however, whether the book at issue here, as good as it is, muddies the waters or serves as a useful exploratory start to answering the question it raises. Morton Weinfeld wisely restricts his comparative essay to the Western liberal democracies of the past two hundred years. He examines a series of data points which reveal aspects of Jewish self-possession and religious and communal freedom in a multicultural Canadian society. Weinfeld is confident that within his circumscribed comparisons, Canada has been the best home for Jews over the past two centuries. In her chapter, however, historian Hasia Diner takes issue with Weinfeld. Canada, she writes, certainly offered a better home than the various other "homes" Jews left behind. But this does not mean that immigrants to Canada made the best choice, particularly in comparison to destination USA. Diner points to the fact that in the vast compendium of information consumed by East European Jews considering a new home, "Canada occupied a decidedly minor role" (35). But how does that claim address [End Page 314] the question about the quality of life Jews actually experienced in their new location? The essay fails to say. Kalman Weiser's chapter demonstrates that Jewish intellectuals, especially those who visited Montreal in the first half of the twentieth-century, envisioned the city as a "Vilna on the St. Lawrence." They had reasonable expectations that Montreal's Jewish culture might prove fertile ground for Yiddish and Yiddishkeit when sheltered from some of the assimilating forces Jews faced in the US Jews were the largest immigrant group in Montreal, and Yiddish did indeed remain the third most spoken language in the city into the early decades of the twentieth century. Other essays by historians Harold Troper, Ira Robinson, and Richard Menkis pay attention to positive transformations in Canadian Jewish life over time, including increased political and cultural influence and more assurance of Jewish continuity through the growth of Jewish day schools. The picture is mixed, however. Robinson describes the institutional and demographic shifts that reshaped the Canadian Jewish experience, particularly in Montreal after the Parti Quebecois gained influence in the 1970s. The pronounced nationalism expressed in French Canada's "Quiet Revolution" was alarming to Jews who thought their safe and stable home, as one group among other minority groups, might be threatened. For some Jews, the reemergence of a radical French nationalism prompted memories of Canada's restrictive immigration policy toward Jewish refugees during the Holocaust years. The...

An extraordinary election? A longitudinal perspective of the Québec 2018 election

From 1970 to 2018, either the Quebec Liberal Party or the Parti Quebecois won the elections in Quebec. The Coalition Avenir Quebec ended this long period of bipartisan alternation by winning a majority of seats in the 2018 election. Using datasets that cover five elections (2007, 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2018) over a period of 11 years, we provide a unique longitudinal perspective of citizens’ vote choice calculus. More specifically, we analyse long-term factors that are known to be crucial to make sense of electoral outcomes. Do factors such as generations, sex, attitudes towards Quebec sovereignty and party identification have the same weight in voters’ calculus over time? Our results show a relative stability, but also several interesting variations, especially regarding the effect of support for Quebec independence. This perspective deepens our understanding of recent political developments in Quebec politics.

The Matter of Quebec Movement: A Review on Canadian Domestic Politics

The Canadian government has succeeded to maintain its political stability by implementing middle-ways approach to face the separatism movement. Parti Quebecois has been the biggest promoter of Quebec sovereign movement. This political party has held referendums to be independent from the central government and managed to gain public attention. This paper aimed to figure out how the series of Quebec sovereign movements affected Canadian domestic politics. It used constructivist approach to explain why the Quebec struggle for independent and how its strategies influence the Canadian domestic structure. The data obtained from library research. This paper examines the effort of Quebec movement consist of (1) creating a political discourse of “self-determinantion”. The social movement transforms into Québécois political party and it visioned to gain territory of the province since the decade of the 1960s; (2) social construction dealing with the issue of French identity as non-Canadian culture. The supports of the idea embedded in the several forms of regulations and propaganda in the public sphere.

Did Separatism Hurt Quebec's Economy? The Causal Effects of the Election of the Parti Québécois in 1976

Is separatism economically costly or is the violence associated with separatism to blame? Most separatist movements overlap with violent ethnic tensions and are associated with economically destructive outcomes. In this paper, we consider a (largely) peaceful separatist movement. Specifically, we use the synthetic control method to study the economic consequences of the surprising victory of the Parti Quebecois in Quebec in 1976 and the subsequent referendum on Quebec’s independence in 1980. We find that, relative to our control, the election of separatists had a small positive effect on economic activity until 1980 after which a small negative effect appears. We find no effects on Canada as a whole as well as similar results following the 1994 election. We further find that the size of the provincial government (relative to GDP) constantly and significantly exceeded the counterfactual. We argue that the economic costs of separatist movements may arise from the frequently associated violence and not be intrinsic to any sort of attempted political disintegration.

The “Quebec Values” Debate of 2013: Minority vs. Collective Rights

This article investigates the debate in the province of Quebec, Canada in 2013 over the Charter of Quebec Values introduced by the separatist ruling party, the Parti Quebecois. It relies in particular on government documents, debates in Quebec’s National Assembly, and editorials in the French-language press. It relates the Charter to the preceding Bouchard-Taylor Commission Report in 2008 on accommodation by public bodies of particular religious requests. The debates concerned the right to manifest one’s religion, the rights of (particularly Muslim) women, and the rights of the collectivity as opposed to the minority. Part of the debate was about Quebec’s particular policy of interculturalism, as opposed to Canada’s policy of multiculturalism. The article concludes by advocating multiculturalism grounded in liberal human rights over coercive integration of minority groups into the pre-existent collectivity.

Two nations in Canada: the New Democratic Party, the Waffle movement and nationalism in Quebec

Following the election of the separatist Parti Quebecois (PQ) to a minority government in September 2012, the federal New Democratic Party (NDP), which had used a large number of first-time victories in Quebec to help propel them to a record number of seats and the status of Official Opposition in the federal election the previous year, was forced by the media to clarify its position on Quebec sovereignty. The official policy had been drafted in 2005 under then-leader Jack Layton in what became known as the Sherbrooke Declaration; it stated that the party would support Quebec's claim to independence if a majority of voters, or 50 per cent plus one, voted in favour in a referendum. The media, however, claimed that this position seemed to 'run counter to the federal Act, which was passed into law in 2000. It says negotiations leading to the secession of Quebec from Canada could take place only after a referendum result with a majority, as determined by the House of Commons' (Galloway 2012). Federal NDP leader Thomas Mulcair, referencing the Act rather than the Sherbrooke Declaration, later admitted that a 50 per cent plus one vote would require the federal government to negotiate but not necessarily accept independence (Macpherson 2012). Yet in January 2013, the NDP tabled a private member's bill in the House of Commons that attempted to put 'clarity back into the Clarity Act' (Pfeffer 2013); the so-called Unity Bill 'would see the federal government enter into negotiations after a simple majority vote on a clear question' (Macfarlane 2013). While these attempts to clarify the NDP's position and establish a process by which to negotiate sovereignty perhaps did not satisfy anyone, they nevertheless highlight the struggle the NDP has had addressing nationalist sentiment in Quebec.As a social democratic party that takes seriously government intervention and involvement as a way to improve the lives of Canadians, and as an explicitly federalist political party that has historically viewed the unity of the country as imperative to progress, nationalist sentiment remains a difficult issue. Yet in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as separatism gained support within Quebec, one group within the NDP sought to acknowledge these ideas while at the same time promoting a different Canadian nationalism. This group, which came to be known as the Waffle, recognised the 'existence of two nations within Canada, each with its own language, culture and aspiration', and insisted that '[a]n English Canada concerned with its own national survival would create common aspirations that would help tie the two nations together once more'. Concerned with the increasing dominance and influence of the United States over Canada, they argued that the country could maintain unity if it adopted socialism and acknowledged that Canada was comprised of two nations ('For an Independent Socialist Canada' 1969). Yet members of the Waffle also recognised Quebec's right to self-determination; they insisted that all people, including Quebeckers, should have the right to make their own decisions free from external force or influence. These positions proved to be enormously controversial and divisive at the time. Nevertheless, the Waffle played an important role in the ongoing struggles within the NDP to develop a position regarding Quebec sovereignty and self-determination.Time for reassessment: literature on the NDP and QuebecShockingly little scholarly attention has been paid to the history and development of the New Democratic Party. Monographs by Desmond Morton (1974, 1986), Ivan Avakumovic (1978), Norman Penner (1992), and Alan Whitehorn (1992) chronicle the existence of socialism in Canada, the emergence of the NDP, and the evolution of the party. As well, there are biographies and autobiographies of varying quality on many of the major players in the NDP that provide further insight into the evolution of social democracy in Canada (see Lewis 1981; MacDonald 1998; Shackleton 1975; Smith 1989; and Stewart 2003). …

Untangling myths and facts: Who supported the Québec Charter of Values?

In 2013–2014, the Parti Quebecois’ (PQ) Quebec Charter of Values was hotly debated in the province of Quebec and the rest of Canada. For some Canadians, it was seen as a calculated move from the PQ to win a majority in the next provincial election, highlighting the stereotypical Quebec citizen’s aversion towards immigrants. For others, it was an important policy that confirmed the secular status of Quebec. The media played a large role in depicting the average Charter supporter. The goal of this study is to empirically test the claims regarding the sociodemographic profile of the Charter’s supporters. Using opinion poll data, we demonstrate that most of these assumptions were false, and that the nature of the support evolved during the debate.

Extreme Right in Quebec?: The Facebook Pages in Favor of the “Quebec Charter of Values”

In August 2013, the Government of the Parti Québécois first introduced the idea for a Quebec Charter of Values. This led to a stiff debate during which anti-immigration and anti-Islam sentiments were expressed by government officials, newspaper columnists and other well-known public figures. These opinions were in turn appropriated and disseminated by a number of citizens throughout social medias. In some regards, these attitudes and opinions are akin to those of extreme right movements and parties in Europe and the United States. In this article, we ask whether we are witnessing the rise of an extreme right in Quebec, a political stance so far estranged to this society. We start with a conceptual discussion of the notion of extreme right and then proceed to analyze the arguments put forward to support the Charter of Values. We conclude that even though the debates do reveal the “radicalization” of certain segments of public opinion toward the right, it is not possible to categorize this shift as the blooming of an “extreme right” in the full sense of the term. En août 2013, le gouvernement du Parti Québécois lance pour la première fois l’idée d’une “Charte des valeurs québécoises”. Dans les mois suivants, le projet va générer d’intenses débats durant lesquels de nombreuses personnalités (politiciens, éditorialistes, chroniqueurs, comédiens, etc.) revendiqueront publiquement des postures anti-immigration et anti-islam. Ces prises de position seront ensuite appropriées et largement relayées par divers groupes de citoyens sur les réseaux sociaux, dont Facebook. Dans la mesure où ces discours s’apparentent à ceux de mouvements ou partis politiques qui, en Europe, sont associés à l’extrême droite, cet article demande si les débats autour de la Charte sont révélateurs de l’émergence d’une extrême droite québécoise. Il débute par une discussion conceptuelle autour de la notion d’extrême droite, puis entreprend d’analyser les arguments avancés par les partisans de la Charte pour soutenir le projet. Si nos observations permettent d’établir la « radicalisation » effective de certains segments de l’opinion publique vers la droite, ce glissement ne peut être catégorisé comme étant révélateur d’une « extrême droite » dans le sens plein du terme.

Jefferson in Montreal: The Unusual Intervention of a Long-Deceased American President into the Debate over Québec’s Charter of Values

The last Quebec election campaign featured an interesting (if unusual) injection of a long-dead American president into the heated public-policy debate over the Parti quebecois’s proposed “charter of values,” which if adopted would have imposed certain restrictions on the manner in which civil servants and some others would be permitted to give symbolic expression to their religious convictions while functioning in the public sphere. The president was Thomas Jefferson, and his involvement in the contemporary domestic political arena was invoked by two Quebec cabinet ministers, Bernard Drainville and Jean-Francois Lisee, in late 2013. They sought to rebut allegations that the proposed charter represented a retrograde and anti-democratic attack upon civil liberties; to do so, they invoked the author of the Declaration of Independence and a major source of inspiration for the Bill of Rights. This article assesses the Drainville-Lisee thesis by examining what American scholars have claimed about Jefferson’s f...

The Province that Cried Wolf: Quebec and the Future of Canada

The election of the separatist Parti Quebecois (PQ) in September 2012, after a decade on the opposition benches, was greeted in the rest of Canada with mass indifference, along with a dash of media...

The Quebec Election: Spring Upsurge Echoes, But Faintly

Richard Fidler’s article “The Quebec Election: Spring Upsurge Echoes, but Faintly” examines Canada’s largest protest movement— the student strikes and protests in Quebec—and concludes that “Quebec students and environmental activists won important victories in the immediate aftermath of the province’s 4 September general election.” Upon her election, Pauline Marois, leader of the Parti Quebecois government, announced the cancellation of tuition fee increases introduced by the previous Liberal government, and also repealed the repressive provisions of Law 12 (formerly Bill 78). On the environmental front, the Jeffrey Asbestos Mine will not be reopened, and the province’s last nuclear reactor will be decommissioned.

Canada-Quebec Immigration Agreements (1971–1991) and Their Impact on Federalism

Introduction In the period 1971-1991, Quebec was the province that constantly pressed and negotiated with the federal government for more provincial rights in the field of immigration. The province signed four immigration agreements with the federal government in the immigration sphere: the Lang-Cloutier Agreement of 1971, the Andras-Bienvenue Agreement of 1975, the Cullen-Couture Agreement of 1978, and the McDougall-Gagnon-Tremblay Agreement, known as the Canada-Quebec Accord of 1991, which is still in effect today. Each new agreement gave the province additional powers and autonomy in this field. The role that the provincial government of Quebec acquired in the selection, recruitment, reception, and settlement processes of new immigrants over those two decades is enormous--well beyond that which any other Canadian province has aspired or managed to accomplish. The main argument used by Quebec to justify its demands has always been that the province is distinct society and, therefore, needs and autonomy to determine who settles in the province. It has to be noted as well that three of the four immigration agreements cited above were initiated by the provincial Liberal Party and only one by the Parti Quebecois. Thus, the immigration policy of the province of Quebec during the period in question was consistent and essentially followed the same direction, regardless of the political party in power in the province. This essay will argue that the Canada-Quebec immigration agreements had crucial effect on the Canadian federal system, because they maintained asymmetrical federal-provincial relations in the immigration policy of Canada. Each new agreement enlarged this while additionally undermining the role of the Canadian government in the immigration process. This essay will also examine how Quebec used the immigration autonomy that it obtained as foundation and incentive for its independence movement. Finally, this essay will analyze the impact that this policy might have had (or might continue to have) on the other Canadian provinces and on the immigrants destined for Quebec, and discuss whether these agreements infringed on the mobility rights of the new permanent residents, as defined by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, section 6. Asymmetrical Federalism and the Distribution of Powers in the Immigration Policy A number of Canadian political scientists consider asymmetry the term of choice to replace special status rhetoric, which is more or less discredited in the ears of many Canadians, particularly those from western Canada. Asymmetrical federalism is a form of federalism in which one or more constituent units have differing powers and responsibilities. (1) The ideally symmetrical federal system would be system in which all units are equal to each other in regard to factors such as territory, jurisdiction, culture, and history, whereas the ideally asymmetrical system would be model in which every unit has unique feature. (2) This is theoretical definition, of course; in practice, one or few units need in any given federal system. In the Canadian federal system, however, there is only one province--Quebec--which strongly demands asymmetry, and it does so in various areas, including in the authority over immigration. There are two extremely different views regarding Quebec's demands. Supporters of such argue that it is the best way to retain Quebec in the federation and to satisfy Quebec's needs as province with different culture than the rest of Canada. The opponents, however, argue that an asymmetrical system is just strategy of the provincial government of Quebec in move toward complete independence. (3) The alignment of roles between the federal and the provincial governments in the field of immigration is predetermined by the Constitution: * Section 95 of the British North America (BNA) Act of 1867 defines both the federal and provincial authority over immigration policy. …

Gestion de l'eau au Québec: quand politique de l'eau et politique agricole se conjuguent à l'imparfait

The Quebec Government enacted a National Water Policy in 2002. Its goal was to set up a holistic approach toward water management, as opposed to the sectorial approach that previously prevailed. Largely inspired by the water management policy set up in France as of 1964, the National Water Policy launched by the Parti Quebecois government makes provisions for the creation of watershed-size management units as well as for water planning decided by local socio-economic stakeholders. However, the heart of the policy rests on the principles of pollution and consumption taxation, principles that directly infringe on the agribusiness sector. It is therefore not surprising that the Quebec Ministry of Agriculture is reluctant to make farmers subject to more stringent environmental regulations and to reduce subsidies that do not foster sustainable farming, as strongly suggested by the Quebec Auditor General (Verificateur general). The Quebec Government is therefore confronted with a dilemma: is it possible to deve...

The European Union and Sovereignist Politics in Quebec: Who Forgot Their Glasses?

You know, at fifty plus one, I was not about to let go the country, Chretien himself later reflected. You don't break your country because one guy forgets his glasses at home. (2) Introduction While the last provincial election in Quebec ushered the Liberal party to power, the defeated Parti Quebecois (PQ) is already debating a new referendum on Quebec sovereignty should it be reelected. The question that has arisen subsequently to the last referendum in 1995 was what implications Quebec sovereignty would have for Canada-U.S. relations. (3) Yet, in our view, reflecting upon this relationship, in case of a yes vote, depends upon the political and institutional arrangement of a Canada-Quebec union. Since the referendum campaign of 1995, the PQ rallied its members around positions favored by leaders Lucien Bouchard and Bernard Landry, chiefly among them the idea of Quebec sovereignty combined with an economic and political partnership with Canada. Although not endorsed by some prominent hard-liners such as former Premier Jacques Parizeau, the template for the PQ leadership was always the European Union (E.U.). (4) In this paper, we contrast the claims and aspirations of the PQ with the institutional and policy realities of the European Union. We question that the latter would be satisfactory from the vantage point of the PQ by comparing the workings of the E.U. to the discourse of the PQ on the need for sovereignty. The epigraph purports former Prime Minister Jean Chretien's perspective on the eve of the narrowly defeated 1995 referendum. In analogy, we will argue that sovereignists have a rather blurred reading of the European Union. The paper is divided into four sections. The first one delineates the explicit references of sovereignists to the European Union, while the second section compares PQ ideas about sovereign statehood, both in its internal and external dimensions, to the situation of E.U. member states. The third section examines how the partnership elements of the Union taken up by the PQ (single market, monetary union, and institutions) work in Europe, and what the position of a sovereign Quebec would be with similar arrangements within Canada. The fourth section concludes by assessing whether or not Quebec sovereignty based on the E.U. model would have any implications for Canada-U.S. relations. Sovereignist Views of the E.U. While the PQ's model of a sovereign Quebec is ambiguous, it does have the European Union as its source of inspiration. This was made very clear in the year before the 1995 referendum. Bernard Landry, then Minister for International Relations, suggested that the sovereignist project, with its ideas of common currency, common institutions, and free movement of goods and people, was almost identical to the preamble of the 1957 Treaty of Rome. (5) During the referendum campaign, then Bloc Quebecois (BQ) leader Lucien Bouchard pushed the idea of partnership with Canada in reference to the E.U. (6) More specifically, it was the Maastricht Treaty which was hailed as a model for a future Quebec-Canada partnership. (7) Jacques Parizeau, whose preference was always to campaign simply on sovereignty, officially supported Bouchard's partnership proposal, even stating that si une entente du type de Maastricht nous etait offerte, nous sauterions dessus. (8) Critics could charge that the references to the European Union by sovereignist leaders during the 1995 referendum campaign were perhaps mere party-political rhetoric to woe soft separatists into the PQ camp. However, the Draft Treaty of Partnership between Canada and produced that year by PQ MNA (9) Daniel Turp and presented to the Commission on the Political and Constitutional Future of Quebec, shows quite clearly the influence of the European model on sovereignist thinkers. Although the E.U. itself is not mentioned in the document, many of its provisions are taken directly out of its treaties. …

Globalisation, regional integration and the evolution of the independence rhetoric of the PQ and the SNP

Whether it is accomplished peacefully through the democratic process or as a result of violent insurrection, minority nationalist movements will only attain independent statehood if the political elite can successfully rally the masses to support the cause. In the words of Anthony Smith, 'As an ideology, nationalism can take root only if it strikes a popular chord, and is taken up by, and inspires, particular social groups and strata' (1995: viii). Although most scholars working in this field have suggested that nationalist leaders use a discourse designed to appeal exclusively either to the emotions or the reason of the regional group, the reality is such that virtually all nationalist discourses contain elements of both. References to the shared language, customs and history of a people as a means of generating support for independence - the so-called 'blood and belonging' types of appeals (Ignatieff 1993) - are frequently heard alongside arguments that the minority group is being economically exploited, lacks control over policy-making in key areas, or could be more prosperous on its own. Minority nationalist leaders have been astute enough to appreciate that the best way to mobilise a regional group for independence has been to formulate and articulate a discourse that captures their hearts and imaginations as well as their minds. But for minority nationalist movements in countries of the developed west, where financial prosperity is a foremost concern, the economic arguments tend to predominate. In this chapter, the nationalist mobilisation strategies of the Parti Quebecois (PQ) and the Scottish National Party (SNP) will be examined, demonstrating that economic arguments have been at the forefront of both debates particularly since changes in the international political economy have provided the minority nationalist leaders with a compelling new discourse from which to promote independence. Despite the different historical, political and economic contexts in which the nationalist movements in Quebec and Scotland emerged, this chapter will demonstrate that the mobilisation strategies of the PQ and the SNP parties were virtually identical. While appeals to the primordial sentiments of Quebeckers and Scots have been heard at various times by the PQ and the SNP, economic considerations have played a far more prominent role in their nationalist discourses, particularly after the Second World War. This is consistent with the claim of the noted political theorist, Gianfranco Poggi (1990), who argued that there has been an economisation of modern western politics. But even though the devotion to economic considerations has been constant in the post-war era, there have been some crucial changes in the nature of the nationalist debates. Specifically, this chapter will assess the impact of changes in the global economy on the tone and content of the nationalists' independence message in the period from the mid-1980s onwards, when there were notable developments both with respect to regional integration and globalisation. There was an expectation that both the PQ and the SNP not only altered their independence strategies during this time, but that these changes reflected transformations, both political and economic, in the international environment. Others have written about the connection between globalisation and the emergence of a new minority nationalist mobilisation strategy (Newman 2000; Meadwell and Martin 1996; Keating 1996; Meadwell 1993), but these studies have not carefully scrutinised the evolution of the nationalist rhetoric. To that end, in the new global economy, one marked by greater trade liberalisation and where a premium is placed on human resources and adaptability to rapid change, this chapter documents how the nationalist parties shifted the focus of their attention from negative economic security to positive economic advantages. Both parties began to use a rhetoric that was designed to respond to the exigencies of the new international political economy. …

Political Ambivalence towards the Parti Quebecois and Its Electoral Consequences, 1970-2003

Political Ambivalence towards the Parti Quebecois and Its Electoral Consequences, 1970-2003

Political Ambivalence towards the Parti Quebecois and its Electoral Consequences, 1970-2003

Political ambivalence towards the Parti Québécois remains a basic characteristic of Quebec electoral politics, but no attention has been paid to it by analysts. Yet the notion of ambivalence is central in Zaller's new synthesis concerning the nature of mass opinions. The ambivalence towards the Parti Québécois stems from opposite forces, that is, attraction towards it and reservations concerning its sovereignist option. While the analysis shows that those who do not reveal their vote intentions to pollsters are always a source of the underestimation of support for the Quebec Liberal Party, independently of ambivalence, the latter remains a more critical factor in many respects. First when in an election a high degree of ambivalence prevails, vote intentions for the Parti Québécois are highly overestimated in polls, which leads vote intentions for the Liberal Party to be more underestimated than usual. Second, because of this ambivalence, the Parti Québécois never reaps the benefits which satisfaction or dissatisfaction towards incumbents should yield, while the Liberal Party often does better than prevailing levels of satisfaction/dissatisfaction would entail. On the basis of that analysis, new solutions are proposed for the correction of systematic poll errors in Quebec elections, solutions which could be relevant in other similar instances. The possible importance of ambivalence in other electoral settings is finally mentioned.

Las políticas de reorganización municipal y supramunicipal en Quebec

El propósito de esta investigación es estudiar la fusión de los municipios en la ciudad de Quebec y la creación. de la Comunidad Metropolitana de Quebec (Communauté Métropolitaine de Quebec). Este estudio de caso se enmarca dentro de un contexto más amplio, ya que la política de fusión de los municipios y la consolidación de estructuras supramunicipales no solo afectó a la ciudad de Quebec, sino que también se planificó para toda la provincia. Las reacciones contra la política de reorganización municipal y supramunicipal se pueden relacionar con el Parti Québécois que pierde las elecciones de 2003 y la aprobación de una ley por parte del Partido Liberal, que permite que los municipios fusionados se reconstituyan. Una vez más, podemos ver que los criterios racionales para mejorar la eficiencia y la gestión no son suficientes para explicar las políticas de las organizaciones locales en el marco de los procesos de descentralización.

The Drama of Identity in Canada's Francophone West

The imaginary community that was Canada began to disintegrate in the 1950s as Quebec emerged from the Grande Noirceur, as historians have come to call the long and oppressive rule of conservative Premier Maurice Duplessis, and entered into modernity. During the 1960s, the social, economic, educational, and political transformation of Quebec that is known as the Quiet Revolution, revived nationalist impulses and gave rise to new demands for Quebec sovereignty. It is during this period that Quebec francophones begin to call themselves rather than French Canadian, when they began to speak of la quebecoise rather than la canadienne-francaise. These changes are momentous since they mark Quebec's determination to shape its own future as a geopolitical entity, separate from the Acadians and the francophone minority communities living in other Canadian provinces. The breakup of Canada became painfully obvious during the tumultuous 1967 meeting of the Etats generaux du Canada francais. Turning its back on the old notion of Canada, Quebec told Acadians and its own diaspora Hors du Quebec, point de salut! Later, Parti Quebecois leader Rene Levesque put it bluntly when he called speakers outside of a separate and sovereign Quebec dead ducks. Novelist Yves Beauchemin was slightly less brutal when he called them cadavres encore chauds (cited by Paul Dube 80). Francois Pare refers to these events as a rupture catastrophique and describes the impact on francophones outside of Quebec: L'emergence d'un Quebec quebecois et non plus canadien-francais vers 1968 a jete les collectivites francophones vivant a l'exterieur des frontieres quebecoises dans le desarroi, ce qui a provoque la panique et produit chez elles le profond sentiment d'avoir ete injustement trahies, deinvesties, debaptisees, excommuniees. (Pare 1994, 47) As Quebec divorced itself from Canada, francophones in the other provinces were not only faced with the prospect of losing their status as a privileged minority group in a multicultural Canada, they were also forced to define new identities for themselves. While their first reaction was to bemoan their plight as orphelins d'une nation (Theriault 11) and to accept that assimilation was inevitable given their isolation and small demographic presence, they soon began the difficult work of fashioning new identities as Franco-Ontariens or Ontarois, Franco-Manitobains, Fransaskois, Franco-Albertains, and Franco-Colombiens. Given their history, Acadians already had a strong sense of their separate national identity so it was less traumatic for them to re-think identity in regional terms such as Acadiens du Nouveau-Brunswick, de la Nouvelle-Ecosse, de l'Ile de Prince Edouard, de Terre-Neuve. The question for them all was, as Raymond-M. Hebert puts it, Peut-on posseder une identite sans territoire? (63). The Quebec government clearly did not believe that it was possible and began to use the expression [la] population canadienne to refer to what it called [les] groupes deterritorialises (Hebert citing Brisset 1988, 290). In their groundbreaking study, Du continent perdu a l'archipel retrouve (1983), Laval University geographers Dean Louder and Eric Waddell argued that what remains of l'Amerique francaise, the lost continent, should be called Franco-Amerique: at the center is the mountain of Quebec with its 80 percent majority speakers of French; the surrounding foothills are New Brunswick, Eastern Ontario, and Northern New England with their large francophone minorities; beyond that lies a string of francophone islands. The fragmentation of Canada has also been theorized by cultural geographers and sociologists (Theriault, Louder, Trepanier, Waddell, Morisset, Stebbins, Gilbert, Dumont) who began to substitute the notion of les espaces francophones for the older visions of l'Amerique francaise and le Canada francais. …

Toward a Reception of Canadian Plays in German-Speaking Theaters

Not long ago, it would not have occurred to Europeans interested in theatre that there was a lively theatrical scene in Canada. The plays written in the wake of Canadian nationalism and regionalism in the late 1960s and 1970s were hardly of interest to European audiences. They were too specifically Canadian, dealing as they did with life on the prairies, with Western settlement, ice hockey, the Parti Quebecois , or the problems of people living in the faraway outports of Newfoundland. Since the early eighties, however, new topics and new approaches have altered the characteristic features of Canadian plays. Cultural differences have increasingly been thematized, and more and more playwrights are voicing their different experiences from marginalized positions. Experiments count more than ever before; there has been a remarkable influx of new voices, and innovative concepts are being developed by women playwrights.