Quebec Sovereignty Research Articles

The Special Relationship Transformed. The Canada–Quebec–France Triangle after de Gaulle

ABSTRACTBecause of France’s unique role in Quebec’s international relations, any study of Quebec’s emergence on the international scene necessarily involves an analysis of this relationship. This article proposes an examination of Canada–France–Quebec relations in the decades following de Gaulle’s resignation in 1969. Several scholars focus on France’s implicit support for Quebec independence, considering that to be the essential ingredient of their “special relationship,” whereas I demonstrate that the foregoing interpretation overlooks the fact that France began to withdraw from the Canadian internal debate soon after de Gaulle’s resignation. During the last forty years, France’s abstention from interfering in Canadian internal affairs enabled both the flourishing of Quebec diplomacy and the deepening of the France–Quebec relationship.

Is There an Obligation to Negotiate Secession in International Law? From Reference re Secession of Quebec to Kosovo Advisory Opinion and Beyond

This paper analyses the international community’s response in the recent cases of attempted secession and tries to answer the question whether international law has progressed to the level regulating the very process of secession. It will start by examining the provisions of the Reference re Secession of Quebec as it is the first document that has outlined the obligation to negotiate secession. In this landmark opinion, the Court has found that the obligation to negotiate stems from the enshrined constitutional principles, a view that has been accepted by the vast majority of scholars. Contrary to this position, the article will argue that, while negotiations are a very important step on a particular entity’s way towards secession, the obligation itself cannot be obtained from constitutional law. Instead, the obligation can be actually derived from the international law through, as this paper proposes, a novel theory of presumed or nascent statehood. Additional cases analyzed include the Kosovo Advisory Opinion and the view that the ICJ has taken on the final status negotiations and the Ahtisaari-led process. The case of Kosovo is further juxtaposed with other cases of attempted secession, mainly those of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Somaliland, Transnistria, South Soudan and Bougainville. All these case studies are used in order not only to argue the emerging obligation to negotiate secession, ie to undergo a form of a dispute settlement process with the host-state, but also to outline how the different conduct of the parties during this process can affect the international support for the succeeding entity.

Risk Aversion, Gender, and Constitutional Change

Independence movements are today present in several stateless territorially concentrated nations, irrespective of their level of self-government. Among advanced industrial democracies, the stronger secessionist movements are found in Belgium, Canada, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom (Keating 1996; Sorens 2005). In the absence of a secession clause in their respective constitutions, a broad array of political parties and civil society groups have mobilized to demand a self-determination referendum as a means to let the citizenry of their territories express their will (Muñoz and Guinjoan 2013). Canada held a referendum on the secession of Quebec in 1980 and 1995. The United Kingdom called a popular vote on Scotland's independence in September 2014. In the Spanish case, Catalonia convoked a consultation in November 2014, although the central government did not recognize its legality.

Addressing the Senate’s “Triple-Deficit”: The Senate as Driver of its own Reform

Instead of arguing for or against a “Triple-E” Senate, I argue that, whatever one’s position on the Senate (short of abolition), the Senate suffers from a “Triple Deficit”: (1) an integrity deficit; (2) a legitimacy deficit; and (3) a democratic deficit. It suffers from an integrity deficit because of the reputation that the Senate has for not being a particular demanding job, and, more importantly, because of recent scandals that are a continuation of a history of scandal which the Senate has never taken concrete steps to address. The Senate suff ers from a legitimacy deficit because of the integrity deficit and because of its history of patronage appointments. Finally, it suffers from a democratic deficit for more than the obvious reason that it is unelected. As the Supreme Court stated in the Quebec Secession Reference, democracy as it has come to be understood in Canada means more than simply respect for majority will: “to be accorded legitimacy, democratic institutions must rest, ultimately, on a legal foundation. That is, they must allow for the participation of, and accountability to, the people, through public institutions created under the Constitution. The system must be capable of refl ecting theaspirations of the people.” Rather than allowing for public participation and accountability, the Senate has allowed itself to become isolated from the Canadian people. This sense of isolation has exacerbated the Senate’s democratic deficit and has led Canadians to view it as distant, elitist, andout of touch with the people.

Dialogue, Reassurance and Understanding: Framing Political Translations during the 1980 and 1995 Quebec Sovereignty Referendums

In Canada during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, more than one thousand works – and about one hundred translations – were published on the topics of Quebec nationalism, independence movements, and sovereignty referendums, in both of Canada’s official languages. Despite the diversity of these publications, which included biographies, political analyses, and polemical essays, almost all the works touched on themes that have generated controversy in Canada. The paratexts in these translations are therefore an important resource that highlight perceived differences between the political opinions of Francophone and Anglophone readers. This article will analyze the paratexts in the English and French translations to show how the target language audience was encouraged to read a translation of a work that was very clearly not addressed to them, and which in some cases even criticized the very audience it now addressed. Finally, it will examine which features these English and French paratexts do and do not share, while trying to determine why these similarities and differences exist.

Canadian Cinema since the 1980s: At the Heart of the World by David L. Pike

Reviews 295 the Champs-Élysées, selling copies of La commune. This reference is reinforced when a purse thief is gunned down in the street. The thief, the police who shoot him, and the mesmerized crowd all seem to be thrown into the movie by chance, their only purpose being to highlight this act of irrelevant violence. With scenes such as bar owners killing their patrons, the loss of limbs and lives to the guillotine, and even a gunfight with the police, meaningless violence quickly emerges as a theme. This random violence, coupled with the absurdity of the storyline’s progression, echoes the director’s view of contemporary society as overly and senselessly violent. While at the core La fille du 14 juillet tells a simple story of a young man trying to impress a young woman with a road trip, it quickly becomes confused and complicated. The spectator must sort through time discrepancies, disconcerting flashbacks, and characters who continually break the traditional fourth wall; all of which force the spectator to take an active role in piecing together the story. The film, appropriately categorized as a road film by its director, contributed to the 2014 My French Film Festival . While it is at times hard to follow, with several miniadventures along the way and flashbacks to events that were initially (and intentionally) skipped over, Peretjatko’s film is entertaining as well as intriguing. This film, a must-see for those who want more than just visual stimulation, is not for the faint of heart, but for true lovers of the absurd. University of Alabama Ann Marie Moore Pike, David L. Canadian Cinema since the 1980s: At the Heart of the World. Toronto: UP of Toronto, 2012. ISBN 978-1-4426-4399-4. Pp. 367. $75 Can. Published during a resurgence of Québécois film on the global stage, Pike’s “sprawling academic monster”(xv) is a timely addition to a body of English-language work on cinema north of the 49th parallel. More than a decade has passed since Bill Marshall’s Quebec National Cinema (2001) examined the relationship between Quebec cinema and le projet national, while all of the titles discussed in Scott Mackenzie’s Screening Québec (2004) were released prior to 2001.Enter Pike and his broad,sweeping look at the “golden age” of Canadian national cinema, a fifteen-year period that saw the unparalleled rise of an outward-looking independent filmmaking sector and the creation of a rich hybrid cinema of high artistic value.Written in a style that might be described as hybrid, Canadian Cinema locates the origins of this phenomenon within the fertile tensions and polarities that define Canadian society as a whole, and which place its national cinema in a unique position vis-à-vis Hollywood’s global culture and Europe’s art cinema tradition. The book looks at influential filmmakers and movements, and includes close readings of individual films, both French- and Englishlanguage , canonical and genre. It also examines ways in which government and industry policies (e.g., the creation of the National Film Board in 1939 and its long attachment to documentary realism) and key political events (e.g., the 1980 Quebec sovereignty referendum) influenced how narrative fiction films have been created, distributed, and viewed both locally and by global audiences. Borrowing from approaches used in textual analysis, cultural studies, genre studies, and queer studies, Pike’s “variegated methodology” (12) results in a work whose nine chapters alternate loosely between broad survey and detailed case study. The latter are especially rich in their ability to challenge widely-held cultural assumptions opposing art and commerce , cinema and advertising, international film and local television, English and French. For example, chapter 3 revisits the “time capsule” films of Anglo-Canadian Patricia Rozema and Québécois Denys Arcand, juxtaposing the career paths of two idiosyncratic directors who succeeded in bringing an art cinema perspective into the realm of popular commercial film, using satire as a vehicle for expressing deep personal concern with societal and spiritual values. In his treatment of contemporary screen stars, Pike profiles Québécois ‘crossover icons’ Pascale Bussières and Roy Dupuis, whose popularity and professional longevity can be...

Exporting the clarity ethos: Canada and the Scottish independence referendum

Canada's Clarity Act, an act governing the process and practice of future referendums on Quebec sovereignty, has managed to find its way into the discourse, discussion and debate surrounding the 18 September 2014 referendum in Scotland. This article explores the notion of ‘clarity’ as it is being applied to the Scottish referendum, the consequences of this emergent ethos and how the question itself has become a preoccupation for both Separatists and Unionists alike. Having taken form in Canada, and now being utilised by lawmakers in the UK, the ‘clarity ethos’, as we argue below, is altogether an unattainable ideal. Subject to interpretative/cognitive bias, referendum questions, and how they are formulated, deserve the same level of analysis as the debate and discussion precipitating them.

Some economic dimensions of the sovereignty debate in Quebec: debt, GDP, and migration

This paper shows that the quest for sovereignty in Quebec is explained by its role as the abode for a French-speaking minority in North America. It notes that there was no commonly agreed legal framework for the 1980 or 1995 referendums and that the attempt to impose one in 2000 has been rejected by Quebec. Using results from existing papers and original research, the paper shows that the quest for sovereignty can have an impact on the cost of financing the public debt of the entity doing this. It also shows that labour flows can be affected by the existence of a sovereignty movement. This GDP would be higher if the secessionist threat had not had an impact on the size of the labour force since the early 1970s.

Respecting Democratic Constitutional Change

The present paper comments on the author's Canadian House of Commons private member's Bill C-470, An Act Respecting Democratic Constitutional Change, introduced in February 2013 as an alternative to the federal Clarity Act by the author in his capacity as Member of Parliament for Toronto-Danforth and Official Opposition Critic for Democratic Reform. It is an edited version of a lecture delivered at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law in March 2013 and of a paper presented at a seminar at Glendon College, York University, in January 2014. The focus of the paper is the law, politics and policy around secession within Canada's constitution. The paper has a special focus on the reasoning of the Supreme Court of Canada in Reference re Secession of Quebec and on the infirmities of the Clarity Act as a response to that judgment, situating the analysis within broader aspirations for a more robust integration of Quebec into the Canadian constitutional framework.

Finding Legitimacy: Examining Quebec Sovereignty from Pre-Confederation to Present

This article traces the roots of Quebec separatism as early as pre-Confederation to show a long tradition of collective rights, such as language, religion, and the ability to practice civil law, which have grown over time to create a province with its own legislature with its separate powers. The article argues that the sovereignist movement in Quebec should not be regarded as an illogical emotional response to the Conquest, or any other assimilation attempt, as it is grounded in a long historical tradition and in interpretation of law, which legitimizes the movement. Quebec sovereignty has emerged as a result of the province’s different interpretation of Confederation, one that gives the province a certain level of freedom, which it feels has not been upheld, and thus it wishes to leave the federation.

Bienvenue

Bienvenue Jen Harvie (bio) Erin Hurley National Performance: Representing Quebec from Expo 67 to Céline Dion Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Click for larger view View full resolution Book cover of Erin Hurley’s National Performance: Representing Quebec from Expo 67 to Céline Dion (University of Toronto Press, 2011). Jacket photograph courtesy of Fotosearch Jacket design by Greg Devitt Design Erin Hurley’s National Performance is a highly accomplished, generous, and ground-breaking book. In at least three different ways—its choice of objects, deployment of inventive critical methods, and performance of scholarly ethics—it contributes to the understanding of an array of important, timely issues, making it relevant to readers concerned with Quebec, with nation, and with performance, as well as to anyone interested in ethical and multidisciplinary scholarly practice. First, as promised on the cover, the book considers how performance objects broadly conceived have stimulated and complicated senses of québécité (Quebecness) from the 1960s [End Page 83] to the first decade of the twenty-first century, a politically vibrant period that has witnessed Quebec’s Quiet Revolution and various “national legitimation crises” (19), including two referenda on Quebec sovereignty. After two introductory set-up sections, chapters three to eight focus on the following performance objects: Expo 67, with its pavilions, architecture, situation in Montreal, contents, narratives, and hostesses; le nouveau théâtre québécois of the 1960s to 1970s, led by Michel Tremblay and exemplified in his iconic Les belles-soeurs (1968); the culture immigrée (immigrant culture) or transculture of the 1980s produced by so-called néo-Québécois who were allophone (originally neither French- nor English-speaking) and whose writing Hurley demonstrates through the drama and poetry of Italo-Québécois author Marco Micone; the devised dance-theatre of Carbone 14, founded in 1980 and rising to international prominence across that decade and the next; the music and persona of international chanteuse Céline Dion; and the often collective feminist theatre of the 1970s and 1980s. Hurley’s considered choice of objects is significant in a number of ways. The objects are emblematic of important cultural moments, offering examples that are vivid in themselves and vivid as ways into understanding a broader historical trend in each chapter as well as an historical throughline over the arc of the book. In chapter six on Carbone 14, for instance, Hurley offers perceptive and exciting readings of various shows but also notes how the company’s move away from words toward images was symptomatic of a “relatively apolitical interlude” in Quebec culture of the time, following “the political and cultural effervescence of the 1960s and 1970s” (114). Second, the variety of objects—which range formally from architecture via theatre to pop song, and in status from the “legitimate” to the “marginal” (10)—demonstrates the myriad cultural sources that inform national identity, as well as the necessity of a critical approach which democratically includes them all. Hurley consistently pays each set of practices rigorous attention—through luminous description, helpful inclusion of images, and relevant critical, historical, and social context; and she brings to each a truly inspiring disciplinary expertise which makes her detailed analysis especially persuasive. Third, Hurley examines some surprising objects that might not normally be seen as affirming national identity, or that do so differently than might at first be expected. Indeed, she is interested in most of her objects for the ways they complicate québécité by challenging common understandings of cultural productions as transparent representations of national identities (26). For example, chapter seven’s analysis of Céline Dion as “the phenomenon” and singer starts from the understanding that because Dion is both loved and hated by Québécois (as by other audiences), she is a source of national pride but also national shame; and chapter three’s consideration of Expo 67 argues that a conventional masculine reading of its claiming of pays (land) risks ignoring the important social, emotional, and narrative work that the Quebec pavilion hostesses performed. As these last two examples demonstrate, Hurley’s choice of objects focuses on the role of women and feminine signification as agents of nation, rather than...

Nina Lee Aquino, Ed. Love + Relasianships: A Collection of Contemporary AsianCanadian Drama

NINA LEE AQUINO, ed. Love + Relasianships: A Collection of Contemporary Asian-Canadian Drama. Volumes I and II. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2009. Vol. I xi + 307pp; Vol. II xi + 279pp. NINA LEE AQUINO and RIC KNOWLES, eds. Asian Canadian Theatre: New Essays on Canadian Theatre. Volume I. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2011. xvi + 276pp. The twelve plays collected in two-volume set of Love + Relasianships, first comprehensive collection of Asian Canadian drama, vary widely in terms of their stories, aesthetics, and production histories. Many of them are what editor Nina Aquino describes as theatrical milestones (ix): for example, M.J. Kang's haunting Noran Bang: The Yellow Room was first play written in North America depicting contemporary Korean diasporic experience. Miss Orient(ed), a biting satire of Filipino beauty pageants by Nina Lee Aquino and Nadine Villasin, marked entry of Carlos Bulosan Cultural Workshop into realm of professional Toronto theatre. And pioneering playwright R.A. Shiomi's detective story Yellow Fever was first professionally produced Asian Canadian play (first staged in San Francisco in 1982, play received its Canadian premiere in 1983, by Canasian Artists Group in Toronto). These and other dramatic works bring us into broad terrain of contemporary Asian Canadian politics, raising formative questions of exclusion and racial violence, diaspora and immigration, transnational community, gender and sexuality, and stereotyping and media. Winston Christopher Kam's Bachelor-Man addresses queer identities and masculinity in context of 1923 Exclusion Act and bachelor communities of Chinese labourers. In The Plum Tree Japanese Canadian internment leaves its scar on present-day characters and defines their sense of home, land, and country. Jean Yoon's whimsical valentine to Yoko Ono, Yes Yoko Solo and Leon Aureus's hard-hitting Banana Boys both explore how cultural stereotype and expectation affect young identities and relationships. The range of stories attests to fact that there is no one definitive Asian-Canadian experience, and raises important questions about theatrical representation of diverse and multinational identities. Set in early twentieth-century Shanghai, Marjorie Chan's China Doll imagines how Ibsen's A Doll House might inspire a young woman with bound feet. Hiro Kanagawa's riveting Tiger of Malaya depicts Manila War Crimes trial of General Tomoyuko Yamashita. The complexities of intimacy, recognition, and communication are poignantly staged both in Betty Quan's family drama Mother Tongue and David Yee's engagingly varied vignettes, Paper Series. Such unruly identities and stories don't fit neatly into any one ethnic or racial box. At same time they test easy claims about universal human experiences by emphasizing how racial, ethnic, cultural, and national differences matter. In Marty Chan's Maggie's Last Dance neither concerns nor identities of thirty-something characters dealing with romantic fallout of their high school years are recognizably Asian Canadian; at same time, characters compare their anxieties about love to Quebec separatism, referencing most visible fracture in Canada's national identity. This subtle allusion to disunity is openly interrogated in anthology of critical essays, Asian Canadian Theatre. Its essays reflect how politics of race in present-day Canada are shaped by policies of contemporary multiculturalism, and how questions about representation and visibility are markedly different from those of a generation ago. Editors Nina Lee Aquino and Ric Knowles note how official multicultural script (ix) demands a certain kind of conformity: the very mechanisms of visibility that allow it to emerge also paradoxically might undercut its power to change and critique (viii). …

The Historiography of the Front de Liberation du Quebec: Frameworks, ‘Identity’ and Future Study

This paper examines the historiography of the Front de Liberation Quebecois within the context of three frameworks, each used to devaluate the FLQ, the idea of separation, its potential support and most importantly, the perspectives of historians who oppose these frameworks. Through an examination of the literature, the FLQ are framed as an attack on British liberalism, an attack on Canadian Unity, or violent in a political climate where such actions were unjustifiable. These understandings work cooperatively together to de-legitimize alternative views on FLQ history, and Quebec independence. I will examine also the benefits in studying the FLQ outside of the tensions of separation and the potential for future study in the history of the FLQ.

Fear and Disappointment: Explaining the Persistence of Support for Quebec Secession

Since the election of the first Parti Québécois government in 1976, support for secession in the province of Quebec has demonstrated a surprising capacity to maintain itself, despite two lost referenda. Despite numerous attempts to explain such persistence, no definitive consensus has been reached. In this article, we propose a model that gives a primary role to governing parties at the provincial and federal levels. As the title suggests, certain parties generate fear while others produce disappointment. The interaction between the two and the fact that parties have tended to alternate in power in the last 35 years leads to a relative stability in public opinion, as these effects cancel each other out.

Cinéma québécois: de I'artisanat à I'industrie by Gilles Marsolais

be victims of and/or perpetuators of stereotypical and/or negative, hegemonic ways of thinking. With a cameo by Arthur’s favorite political figure, Lionel Jospin, and scenes such as the one in which Baya dramatically cries when, during the second round of the 2002 elections, she finds herself forced to vote for Chirac (over Le Pen), this film could be appropriate for a French culture or politics syllabus as it would undoubtedly generate interesting comparative discussions with the American political system. Similarly, the first fifteen minutes of the film are devoted to flashbacks motivated by Arthur’s and Baya’s reflections on their respective upbringing and parents’ origins. These flashbacks consist of scenes of World War II Nazi Occupation and its aftermath as well as of the French-Algerian War and events that lead Baya’s father to take refuge in France. Although nudity is present in the film, making it possibly a questionable addition to a high school French course, it must be noted that during Baya and Arthur’s love-making scene, Arthur dresses—not undresses—Baya. This twist on traditional filmic depiction of sexual acts is motivated by the previous scene in which—comically in keeping with her free-spirited personality—Baya absentmindedly leaves her apartment completely naked, only to be “saved” by Arthur who covers her with his conservative suit jacket as she exits the metro. Thus demonstrating that, at times, Arthur’s conventional nature is actually quite charming and useful to even the extremely liberal-thinking Baya. The title, Le nom des gens (peculiarly translated as The Names of Love), gains in significance throughout the film as the word “name” becomes increasingly synonymous with “label.” From Arthur’s comments about sharing his name with a pressure cooker and Baya explaining that most people mistakenly assume her name is Brazilian to the wish of Arthur’s mother to abandon her Jewish-sounding surname, the film’s characters repeatedly reflect on the often-false currency of proper names as well as that of political monikers. In fact, the French title does what the English translation cannot: provide a distance between people (gens) and the names (le nom) with which we associate them. Boise State University (ID) Mariah Devereux Herbeck MARSOLAIS, GILLES. Cinéma québécois: de l’artisanat à l’industrie. Montréal: Triptyque, 2011. ISBN 978-2-89031-727-7. Pp. 317. $30 Can. Marsolais has published several noteworthy books, including L’aventure du cinéma direct revisitée (1997), and hundreds of articles, many in the Quebec film journal 24 images. This volume is a collection of his articles, spanning four decades and a gamut of films from classics of Quebec cinema, including documentaries , to more recent features and even short subjects. The collection is preceded by what Marsolais calls a “Mise en situation,” that attempts to trace the main tendencies of Quebec’s film history, with a particular focus on the National Film Board and the documentary tradition. The last section of this introductory material presents some basic socio-political information, along with a biting analysis of multiculturalism and pluralism in the Quebec context, revelatory of the author’s “point of view” (a phrase he uses to designate the unifying theme of this collection), and reflective of the fact that this particular excerpt was written the same year as the second failed referendum on Quebec sovereignty. Reviews 171 The remainder of this volume is organized mainly by director, some of whom are familiar names, such as Michel Brault, Claude Jutra, Denys Arcand, and Pierre Falardeau, while others will be relatively unknown to all but a few specialists, either because they work mostly in documentary, like Arthur Lamothe and Serge Giguère, or because their best films are from an earlier time, such as Jacques Leduc’s On est loin du soleil (1970), or, lastly, because they are not considered canonical, making their work hard to find or even forgotten, and here we can cite Claude Gagnon’s The Pianist and Claude Fortin’s Le voleur de caméra, both from the early 1990s, which are the subjects of two of Marsolais’s critiques. The organization of the articles by directors, however, does not...

Why Don't Dogs Bark (or Bomb) in the Night? Explaining the Non-Development of Political Violence or Terrorism: The Case of Quebec Separatism

Studies of individuals or groups that use violence or terrorism in the pursuit of political goals typically focus on the specific actions that these individuals or groups have taken, or may take, and on the policies that defenders against such actions adopt in response. Comparatively less attention is devoted to the preconditions that may lead to the contemplation and commitment of such actions and how or why defenders may obviate these actions before they occur or why they may never occur. This case study is an examination of the politics of Quebec separatism, which looked set to follow a violent path in the 1960s and early 1970s, but ultimately did not, and explores why it did not.

Why is Quebec Separatism off the Agenda? Reducing National Unity Crisis in the Neoliberal Era

Abstract. The development of federalism in the context of the neoliberal era in the 2000s has partly created the conditions for a more stable co-operation between the federal and Quebec governments, contributing to the trend of separatism being sidelined in Quebec. In the context of neoliberalism, federal–provincial agreements have created conditions for just enough asymmetry in the relationship between the federal government and Quebec, something that Quebec has historically demanded, for separatism to remain off the agenda. What separates this relationship from past ones is a significant change in the context whereby the neoliberal orientation is becoming the common currency for co-operation. If Canadian federalism continues its present course under neoliberalism without any major mishaps, for the first time since the divisive period of the 1990s and early 2000s, federal–Quebec relations likely will be stable without national unity crises of the kind that culminated in the 1980 and 1995 Quebec referenda on sovereignty.Résumé. Le développement du fédéralisme dans le contexte de l'ère néolibérale dans les années 2000 a en partie créé les conditions pour une coopération plus stable entre les gouvernements fédéral et québécois, contribuant ainsi à la tendance du séparatisme au Québec d'être marginalisés. Dans le contexte du néolibéralisme, des ententes fédérales-provinciales ont créé les conditions pour un peu assez de relation asymétrique entre le gouvernement fédéral et du Québec, quelque chose que le Québec a toujours exigé, au séparatisme de rester hors l'ordre du jour. Ce qui sépare cette relation de celles du passé est un changement significatif dans le contexte dans lequel l'orientation néo-libérale devient la monnaie commune pour la coopération. Si le fédéralisme canadien continue son cours actuel sous le néolibéralisme sans encombre majeur, pour la première fois depuis la période de division des années 1990 et début des années 2000, les relations fédérales-Québec probablement seront stable sans crises unité nationale du genre qui a culminé dans les années 1980 et 1995 référendums sur la souveraineté du Québec.

The Sixties: Passion, Politics, and Style (review)

Reviewed by: The Sixties: Passion, Politics, and Style Alvin Finkel The Sixties: Passion, Politics, and Style. Edited by Dimitry Anastakis. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008. Pp. 208, $75.00 cloth, $27.95 paper Efforts to capture the essence of the 1960s are becoming popular in the historical literature of Western countries, including Canada. This collection of papers attempts loosely to find the zeitgeist of the decade in movements and individual actions that challenged the ubiquitous hegemony of modernist ideology during the early postwar period. Though the emphasis is on Canadian developments, most of the essays attempt to draw parallels with developments elsewhere, specifically the United States, and at least one essay deals entirely with the United States. Overall, indeed, a limitation of this collection is that any real sense of a set of changes with truly global reach, or even just a reach across the industrialized nations, simply does not emerge. After a modest introduction for a set of essays drawn from papers for a conference, the book begins quite badly with a rambling reminiscence of the Quiet Revolution by journalist Gretta Chambers. Disappointingly, one of the other two Quebec articles in the collection also seems to have no place in the book. Olivier Courteaux outlines Charles de Gaulle’s reasons for supporting Quebec independence publicly during his visit to Canada in 1967 – reasons that said very [End Page 582] little about Quebec and a great deal about de Gaulle. If de Gaulle himself symbolized something particular about the 1960s, this biographical piece does not reveal what that may be. But The Sixties does prove effective in presenting several identifiable sub-themes for its emphasis on the divide between modernism and its challengers. Frances Early’s essay on the Voice of Women (VOW), the only piece in the collection that deals with social activists, makes use of that organization’s changing discourse and activities throughout the decade to demonstrate the shift from maternalism to second-wave feminism in left-wing women’s public activities during the decade. In practice, though, the organization found that maternalist tropes could be subverted towards radical ends. So, for example, in 1966, vow began a knitting campaign to provide clothing for Vietnamese children as a means of publicizing its opposition to the American-led war against North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam. The ways in which changing notions of gender affected women’s ideas of their place in Canadian life, explored in the Early article, is picked up by Kristy A. Holmes in an article on artist Joyce Wieland and her ambivalent attitudes to Pierre Trudeau and his notions about the necessity to have reason triumph over passion. Holmes presents Trudeau’s notions of citizenship marked by dispassionate reasoning as male and technocratic. Unfortunately the imprecision in Holmes’s touchy-feely interpretations of Wieland’s work make Wieland’s gender challenge to Trudeau unclear and unconvincing. Christopher Dummitt is on steadier ground as he examines the challenges to automobile culture in the 1960s, particularly as represented by the figures of Ralph Nader and Jane Jacobs, the former with an exposé of the flimsiness of the vehicles produced by the Big Three, and the latter with a demonstration of the bankruptcy of the modern city with its fixation on the automobile as the centrepiece of urban planning. Defenders of the modernist vision ‘found shelter behind the ideal trait of manly modernism: reasoned objectivity’ (88). Dummitt suggests that Jacobs’s critique of planning was gendered, the viewpoint of someone who lived in the communities that modern planning was creating rather than someone who drove through those communities on freeways meant to take middle-class male suburbanites to downtown offices. Several articles on urban architecture and urban renewal provide the most interesting and interconnected papers in The Sixties. France Vanlaethem, putting the spotlight on Montreal, notes the questioning evident by the sixties regarding modernist architecture in Quebec and [End Page 583] the rest of Canada. An interest in rehabilitating the past clashed with the architectural philosophy, with its emphasis on innovation and gigantism, that had characterized the 1950s. Meanwhile, as Krys Verrall argues, in Halifax and Nova Scotia generally as...

Figures of the native in 20th‐century Quebec: The subaltern and the colonial subject at the intersection of colony and nation

This article examines the representation of the Native in the Quebec essay on identity after the Quiet Revolution (1960–80). It analyzes the figure of the Native as a construction shaped by the forces of colonialism and nationalism; it further distinguishes between the two different types of colonialism historically present in Quebec and considers how they have influenced Quebec attitudes towards the Native. Three distinct figures emerge from this analysis. The first, the Native as absence, is explained in the light of Gayatri Spivak’s theory of the subaltern; the second, the Native as a threat to Quebec sovereignty, in the light of her theory of the colonial subject; the third, the Native as Quebec’s co‐colonized is a hybrid figure that does not correspond to either of these theoretical formulations. The author concludes that the use of Spivak’s notions of the subaltern and the colonial subject allows for a clear understanding of how Quebec’s dual colonial past as both settler colony of France and subsequently conquered colony of Great Britain have informed representations of the native, and furthermore that the figure of the co‐colonized is a unique discursive formation that can be linked to Quebec’s self‐identification as a decolonizing society.

The 2007 Provincial Election in Quebec

The 2007 provincial election in Quebec may be considered a milestone in recent Quebec politics. For the first time since 1878, voters elected a minority government in the province (Jean Charest’s Liberals), a third party (ADQ) replaced the Parti Québécois (PQ) as Official Opposition, and the PQ had its worst showing in 37 years. The pre-campaign was marked by the “reasonable accommodations” debate, which gave the ADQ the boost it needed to rival the two main parties. The incumbent Charest government suffered from its low popularity, due to what was largely perceived as a disappointing record. The PQ’s loss of support was mostly attributable to its new leader André Boisclair’s lack of appeal and to the party’s insistence on holding another referendum on Quebec sovereignty. Quebec’s new three-party system may last for some time, due to each party having strong and relatively well-defined regional support bases.