Quebec Referendum Research Articles

The Contemporary Russian Cinema Reader: 2005–2016 by Rimgaila Salys (review)

REVIEWS 771 (and Dhooge in particular) brings into focus the need for a new edition of Nabokov’s lectures, especially if such serious scholarship on the lectures is going to continue. Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages and Meghan Vicks Literatures, University of Colorado, Boulder Salys, Rimgaila (ed.). The Contemporary Russian Cinema Reader: 2005–2016. Film and Media Studies. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2019. 402 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $29.95 (paperback). In the midst of teaching a rather generic history class at McGill University some years ago, class discussion moved to issues related to national mythmaking, invented history, the creation of national heroes, and the like. Rather unimaginative topics even then, though in the wake of the 1995 independence referendum in Quebec, they all seemed to have both more urgency and relevance. More than a few students, when questioned by their instructor, while insisting Canada had ‘no heroes’, also noted to me if they were forced to choose, and Pierre Trudeau was after all too clichéd a choice, then Paul Henderson would suffice. Who? Henderson was the hockey player who led Team Canada to victory over the Soviet Union in the ‘Summit Series’ in 1972. This was not only, it seems, a foundational moment in modern Canadian nationalism. For many Soviet citizens it represented a time when they strode across the global stage, globalization before the term became superfluous. Legend No. 17 (released in 2013), one of the most popular Russian films in recent decades, is a biopic representing the life of the late Valerii Kharlamov, a star of that Canadian-Soviet contest. It is also a film that, for whatever its flaws, has proven to be especially popular among my students. It is also the subject of Greg Dolgopolov’s discerning chapter in Rimgaila Salys’s uneven, but ultimately rewarding, edited book under review. Legend No. 17, especially its celebration of the Soviet victory in game one in Montreal was, according to the film’s producer Leonid Vereshchagin, something that might ‘unite’ all generations in a collective outpouring of pride ‘for our country’; indeed he compared it to ‘Gagarin’s flight, this victory’ (p. 272). The editor’s parameters for this collection are that it ‘seeks to provide undergraduate students [in Russian cinema and culture courses] with an introduction to significant Russian films that are available with English subtitles’ (p. 7). Salys’s volume comprises chapters on seventeen ‘Russian’ films made over the past fifteen years. There are additional chapters further elucidating some of the seventeen films or their directors. There are little obvious motifs that link the films, except that they might be labelled as Russian SEER, 98, 4, OCTOBER 2020 772 (whatever that might mean in the ‘globalized’ world perpetually signified by Vlad Sturkov in his introduction), and that they were released after 2005. More on allusive common themes later. Some of the chapters address films that are now well-trodden artifacts in contemporary film literature. These writings include informed and detailed synopses of the films, and offer perceptive discussions of their historical and production contexts. This is, of course, essential in a text ostensibly aimed at the uninitiated. The more instructive chapters are richly dialogic, enveloping the reader in a post-Soviet Russian cinematic culture that is both part of a perceived global film industry and frustratingly, to some, bound to the Soviet past. These include chapters on the late Aleksei Balabanov’s Dead Man’s Bluff (2005), by Aleksandr Prokhorov; and Cargo 200 (2007), by Anthony Anemone; Salys’s on Valerii Todorovskii’s Hipters (2008); and Sergei Loznitsa’s My Joy (2010), written by Justin Wilmes. Andrei Zviagintsev is the most celebrated, at least internationally, post-Soviet Russian director, and two of his films are treated here: Elena (2011), written by Elena Prokhorova, and Leviathan (2014) by Julian Graffy. Tatiana Mikhailova’s contribution is a fascinating piece on Silent Souls (2010), directed by Aleksei Fedorchenko. Hard to Be a God (2013), by the late Aleksei German, is the subject of chapters by Anton Dolin and Elena Stishova. Directors such as the late Balabanov, Loznitsa, Zviagintsev and the late German, are fixtures in the rapidly expanding literature on modern Russian film. The attention given...

So Near and Yet So Far: The 1995 Quebec Referendum in Perspective

Abstract Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney failed to reconcile Quebec with the rest of Canada. The Parti Québécois (PQ) government under Jacques Parizeau called a referendum in October 1995 to decide if the province would secede. While the federal government under Jean Chrétien barely intervened, the fiery rhetoric of Lucien Bouchard brought the separatists close to victory. Quebecers voted to stay in Canada by only 1 per cent. A massive late rally of non-Quebec Canadians pleading with Quebecers to remain probably tipped the balance. Bouchard, who succeeded Parizeau, never felt confident of winning another referendum. Later the PQ lost ground as separatism ceased to appeal. In the EU referendum of 2016 the British government failed to learn from Canada’s experience. The Remain side campaigned negatively rather than positively, and did not mobilize its supporters as well as the Leave camp did. Canadian comparisons also remain relevant for Scotland.

The Secondary Sex Ratio at Birth Was Depressed in Quebec by the Sovereignty Referendums.

Globally, male live births exceed female live births by approximately 3%. The secondary sex ratio is conventionally expressed as male births divided by total live births (M/T). Many factors have been implicated as influencing this ratio, such as stress (including non-violent political events) and toxins, both of which reduce it. The Quebec government twice proposed referendums to its populace advising sovereignty. This study was carried out in order to ascertain whether the referendums had any effect on the M/T ratio in Quebec and in Canada as a whole. Annual births in Quebec and Canada were compared for the index (referendum) years 1980 and 1995 versus the sum of the preceding and following five year periods, for each event. The monthly M/T ratio for Quebec before and after the 1995 referendum was also calculated. This review covered 8 099 600 live births. In Quebec, the M/T ratio was lower in the two referendum years than in the preceding and following five year periods, and was significantly lower after the 1995 referendum (P = 0.04). No significant changes were noted for Canada as a whole. Monthly calculations for Quebec showed a decline in the M/T ratio three months after the 1995 referendum (P = 0.035), followed by a rapid recovery (P = 0.001). The second Quebec referendum on sovereignty in 1995 had a higher voter turnout than the 1980 referendum and was more closely run. Reductions in the M/T ratio have been noted in association with stressful population events, including non-violent political activities. This may have been the case in Quebec, where the M/T ratio declined in association with two referendums that proposed sovereignty, possibly due to the stress engendered by these events and the potential outcomes.

The Prince of Pine Avenue and the <i>Père de la Patrie</i>: A Machiavellian Analysis of Pierre Trudeau and Rene Lévesque

This study was inspired by the remarkable number of Machiavellian references we noted in journalistic and scholarly accounts of the 1970 War Measures Act and the Quebec Referendum that followed a decade later. The notion that Machiavelli’s insights in the sixteenth century might have utility for a critique of 20th century Quebecois political life seemed outrageous and we wanted to explore the validity of such associations. There’s nothing wrong with this. We wanted to see if there was more to them than the shorthand of short-cycle journalism or if they actually possessed enough analytical force to usefully illustrate aspects of that period of Quebec’s history. We discovered that the Machiavellian lens was remarkably illuminating, especially with respect to the clash of two of Quebec’s most influential personalities, Pierre Trudeau and Rene Levesque although, with the notable exception of Denis Arcand, the connections made at the time failed to extend much beyond attempts to make ad hominum slurs against the principle actors in the drama.

The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film ed. by Russell J. A. Kilbourn, Eleanor Ty (review)

Reviewed by: The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film ed. by Russell J. A. Kilbourn, Eleanor Ty Hannah McGregor Russell J. A. Kilbourn and Eleanor Ty, eds. The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier UP, 2013. 342pp. $85.00. Contemporary media is obsessed with memory. Take, for example, the season three finale of bbc’s Sherlock, which culminates in a revelation about villainous media mogul Charles Augustus Magnussen. Whereas our hero has believed Magnussen to be in possession of vaults of information, accessed remotely through a Google-Glass-like digital interface, the show reveals that Magnussen in fact, like Sherlock himself, accesses his blackmail material via a mind palace—an ancient mnemonic device that organizes information by translating memory into spatial arrangements. The digital interface is disclosed as a visual metaphor for recollection rather than a mediation of information. This revelation mirrors the premise of the show itself, a contemporary adaptation that enthusiastically relocates Sherlock’s deductive skills in the world of contemporary media and technology while assuaging anxieties about the technologization of memory by insisting that cellphones and databases are only prosthetic enhancements of the human mind. In so doing it gestures toward the fundamentally intertwined concerns that shape The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film: the ever-increasing mediation of memory, the parallels between remediation and adaptation, and the tensions between technological and cultural memory. Together, these topics reinforce editors Russell J. A. Kilbourn and Eleanor Ty’s claim that “there is nothing outside of memory” (24). This interdisciplinary essay collection, originating from a conference held at Wilfrid Laurier University in 2011, approaches memory studies through the lens of media theory to ask how memory may be constituted, or at least profoundly reshaped, by its mediations and remediations in literature, film, and television. How does our contemporary media ecology, in which the same narratives are recycled endlessly between multiple media, in which technology blurs the distinctions between reality and representation, shape what and how we remember? Despite the presentism that Kilbourn and Ty identify, in the introduction, as endemic to modern memory studies, the collected essays in fact span a range of texts and historical moments, from the propaganda posters of the First World War [End Page 224] (Sarah Henstra) to the Heritage Minutes’ production of nationalist nostalgia in the wake of the Quebec referendum (Erin Peters). Kilbourn and Ty’s introduction clearly states the collection’s allegiances: to poststructuralist theories of subjectivity and representation, to cultural theory, and to interdisciplinarity. In the process, the introduction offers a wide-ranging survey of the field, less systematic than evocative as it leaps from Bergson to Proust to Freud, stopping along the way at Deleuze, Hitchcock, St Augustine, and Matt Damon. It culminates in the claim that close engagement with specific texts and cultural objects is key to “an ethics of memory” capable of resisting the ideological deployment of memory as political propaganda. It is through this engagement, they assert, that “[t]he relentless and ineluctable technologization, exteriorization, and virtualizations of memory is mitigated by this model of memory as intersubjective, dialogical, social exchange” (25). The strongest essays in the collection are testaments to the ethical, political, and theoretical value of close engagement with cultural objects. Tanis MacDonald’s analysis of Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries reads poetry as a public archive of mourning and as a prosthetic for the violent rupture of the body and memory. She models how attentiveness to the fragmented and scattered dynamics of the text enacts a refusal to indulge in a fantasy of literature as undoing the violence of the past, concluding that “Brand’s exhumation of a non-existent ossuary is as imperative as it is impossible” (104). In a different register, Anders Bergstrom roots his argument that “cinema has shaped and continues to shape our conceptions of how memory operates” (197) in nuanced comparisons of contemporary memory films, taking into account genre conventions, techniques of representation, and modes of production and circulation. In the process, he convincingly demonstrates that the impact of media on conceptions of memory does not begin and end at the level of representation but...

Entrenching Euro-Settlerism: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Nationalism in Québec

I'M TALKING LANGUAGE (BUT NOT RACE) In my admittedly open reading of Eve Haque's remarkable study, she casts a light on the many frayed threads hanging from the bilingualism/multiculturalism discourse in Canada; threads that beg unraveling since their apparent coherence masks a reformulation of national belonging that codifies the racialization and exclusion of people of colour and indigenous peoples. Pulling at these threads is a vital intellectual project, particularly at this juncture when colour-blindness (Bonilla-Silva 2010) and/or racial liberalism (Mills 2008), which define anti-racist analyses as themselves racist or more insidiously, as reverse racism, gain ascendance in society and the academy. Through her research and analysis, Haque points to the shift from race to culture, from ethnicity to language, and we now know, to the official multicultural logic that makes considerations of the persistent racial inequities in Canada nearly impossible to hear against the din of self-congratulatory cheer. We are, after all, multicultural or in the case of Quebec, intercultural--open signifiers that have come to mean anti-racist, in the sense of never openly discussing, let alone tackling racism. For those working to challenge the stranglehold that such fantasies have on our national imaginations, Haque's study offers an invaluable historical and political outline of the construction of state-based racialized logics. Multiculturalism Within a Bilingual Framework begins with Jacques Parizeau's remarks about money and the after the defeat of the Yes side in the 1995 referendum in Quebec. Haque moves us beyond the now-infamous declaration, however, to Parizeau's explanation of it in the 2003 documentary, Public Enemy Number One: The vote--the words might not have been well chosen - but the fact is that is what happened ... the non-francophone vote ... I'm talking language ... I'm not talking ... origin or whatever ... it was a language issue (4). Instead of relying primarily on ethnicity to explain the defeat of the referendum, Parizeau enters the presumably safer political register of language. Haque uses this high-profile example effectively to situate her study: More than a semantic slip, Parizeau's shift onto the terrain of language to clarify and support his comments was illustrative of the convenient alibi for racial ordering that can be provided by a multicultural nation established on the foundation of a putatively open linguistic duality (4). She begins with this example not to hold Quebec up as uniquely xenophobic--as is often the case in English Canada--but to direct the reader to her examination of the language-race-culture nexus. She asks the reader later in her introductory remarks: How, in Canada, did language come to be the site for articulating exclusions which can no longer be stated in terms of race and ethnicity? (4) As a scholar of Quebec, I was pleased to see Haque introduce the question animating her study with the language qua race problematic. In what follows, I discuss Quebecs counterpoint to Canadian multiculturalism: Interculturalism. Turning to its development allows me to develop further Haque's arguments about the shifting relationship among culture, race, and language in the 1960s and 1970s. QUEBEC AND THE LIMITS OF MULTICULTURALISM Haque expertly leads us through the formal opposition among a variety of ethnic organizations to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism's (B and B Commission) limited terms of reference and conclusions regarding Canadian society--opposition that Haque (53-71; 75-9; 149-50) convincingly connects to the eventual development and adoption of the Multiculturalism Policy. Yet, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's vision of multiculturalism also energized fierce disagreement in Quebec given the already tense political atmosphere following the previous fall's October crisis. …

The Book of Others ( Book IV ): Canadian Multiculturalism, the State, and Its Political Legacies

THE MULTICULTURAL MOVE TO LANGUAGE It is always worth reminding Canadians that when Pierre Elliott Trudeau introduced Multiculturalism Policy to Parliament in October 1971, it was not an attempt to change fundamental character of modern Canadian nation-state. Rather, policy's intent was to manage non-French and non-English peoples of nation, as Eve Haque clearly explains in her discussion of Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism's (B and B Commission) production of other ethnic groups of Canadian body politic (186-237). The B and B Commission's work simultaneously cemented idea that French and English/British ethnicities constituted founding races of Canada (5-8, 14, 53-56, 87-93, 140-52). Furthermore, move to language rather than ethnicity for white French and English/British was a cover to preclude racial designation as foundational to nation, all while making it fundamentally so (6, 18, 62-71, 75-78, 160-62). Indeed, late Robert Stanfield, Progressive Conservative Opposition Leader, stood to endorse policy by saying that, wish to state immediately, Mr. Speaker, that emphasis we have given to multiculturalism in no way constitutes an attack on basic duality of our country (234). The duality that was already assumed and came to be enshrined in bilingual and multicultural articulation of nation-state as fundamental to its founding was soon after enshrined in legislation and law. MULTICULTURALISM AS RACIOLOGICAL THINKING Eve Haque's Multiculturalism Within a Bilingual Framework: Language, Race and Belonging in Canada returns us to origin scene of Canadian nation-state's formation and management of its non-French and non-English/British others, to provide an account of how language, race, and culture have produced modern context of contemporary multicultural Canada. Haque's engagement with Canadian multiculturalism focuses squarely on the Preliminary Report and Books I (The Official Languages) and IV (The Cultural Contributions of Other Ethnic Groups) (7); her focus cannot be downplayed, for effects of Book IV continue to mark Canadian multicultural policy, politics, and their associated imaginaries. Haque begins her study with Jacque Parizeau's 1995 outburst that money and ethnic vote were reasons that No Campaign was narrowly successful in last referendum in Quebec (3-4, 238, 264). By beginning there, Haque pinpoints how deep structures of language, culture, and continue to shape contemporary Canadian politics, public sphere, and national imaginary. This shaping of contemporary Canadian national imaginary is fashioned through a recourse that places two languages outside boundaries of and ethnicity, only to be remarked by their accent as cultures - founding cultures of Canada. Indeed, Haque's work seeks to unmake such remarking as troubling work of and raciological thinking. Furthermore, it is Haque's argument that multiculturalism as policy usefully operated and operates in a space where public policy as biologically based racial exclusions became increasingly politically and socially disreputable (6). The disturbing impact in aftermath is how language and culture has come to stand in for and raciological thinking and in new and sustained ways more than forty years later. It is precisely manner in which language and culture appear to foreclose discussions of race and racism in Canada that makes Haque's contribution and reading of historical documents so important to contemporary debates on multiculturalism and racism. Indeed, Haque's analysis in part points to reasons why term barbaric cultural practices is currently used by Government of Canada to describe exclusively non-white cultural in Canadian citizenship guide (Zine 2012, 18). …

Self-determination and the Use of Referendums: the Case of Quebec

On two occasions (1980 and 1995), Quebeckers rejected the Quebec government's sovereignty proposal. Many lessons can be drawn from the Quebec referendum experience. The purpose of this article is to shed light on the origins and motivations of the independence movement. It focuses more specifically on the 1980 and 1995 referendums, examining in both cases the political context, the judicial–institutional framework within which these public consultations were held and the arguments raised during the referendum campaigns. Furthermore, it analyses the results as well as the political, constitutional and juridical consequences of the federalist victories. The article concludes that attempts by Quebec sovereignists to question the Canadian political system have invariably resulted in a stronger and more consolidated central state while significantly weakening the Quebec state's ability to determine its own political future.

A COURT IN NEED AND A FRIEND INDEED: AN ANALYSIS OF THE ARGUMENTS OF THE AMICUS CURIAE IN THE QUEBEC SECESSION REFERENCE

A COURT IN NEED AND A FRIEND INDEED: AN ANALYSIS OF THE ARGUMENTS OF THE AMICUS CURIAE IN THE QUEBEC SECESSION REFERENCE

CANADA AS A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT

CANADA AS A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT

The Politics of Love: The 1995 Montreal Unity Rally and Canadian Affection

The politics of love has been the subject of much scrutiny of late, yet the concept of love itself as a political tool has been virtually ignored. This essay attempts to rectify this by analyzing the Montreal Unity Rally, staged on the eve of the 1995 Quebec referendum on sovereignty. Relying on news articles published from across Canada in the period surrounding the referendum campaign and the months following, on video documentaries, and on personal recollections, this article discusses the role that emotionality played in the movement. Ultimately, this study led to a reconsideration of the nature of the “love” that was declared at the rally, and the connection of such love to issues of power in Canadian politics.

Britain, the Charter of Rights and the spirit of the 1982 Canadian Constitution

The Canadian Constitution remained a British statute from 1867 to 1982, a situation that endured even after the country became independent in 1931. As a result, every time Canadians wanted constitutional changes, legislation had to be passed in Westminster. Between 1980 and 1982, following the Quebec referendum on independence, the then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau undertook to change this situation. This meant devising a Canadian amending formula and, most importantly for Trudeau, the inclusion of an entrenched bill of rights in the constitution. Trudeau's initial project was opposed by eight of 10 provinces and this situation proved difficult for the UK. The opposing provinces lobbied British lawmakers in order to convince them to vote against the federal request. That situation eventually forced Ottawa to accept a diluted version of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Québec's “America Problem”: Differential Threat Perception in the North American Security Community

Does the Quebec of the early twenty-first century, by which I mean Quebec society and not necessarily the government of Quebec, have an problem? Is it experiencing something akin to the the United States was said, by John MacCormac, to have had during an earlier period of geostrategic upheaval--a problem stemming from a differentiated of, and reaction to, geopolitical threat? (1) Survey data over the past several years suggest that Quebeckers have become more critical not only of the American government but also of Americans in general than is the case with their counterparts in English Canada; indeed, even on the question of trade retaliation against the United States over the softwood lumber issue, Quebeckers outpace other Canadians when it comes to an appetite for engaging in commercial tit-for-tat. (2) Much of the recent testiness of the Quebec public vis-a-vis America has occurred as American foreign policy has become increasingly militarized, strongly hinting at a significant difference between the manner in which Americans and Quebeckers interpret threat in the world since 11 September 2001 (hereafter referred to by the shorthand formula, 9/11). This article examines both the sources and the potential consequences of this threat within North America, with particular emphasis upon (a) Canada-U.S. relations, (b) the national-unity question in Canada, and (c) the place of the United States with respect to a future Quebec referendum on sovereignty. Threat Perception and Allies It is generally considered that, among the numerous elements that impel governmental decision makers to action, one stands out: the of a clear and present danger to national security. Not only does the appearance of a crisp threat on the horizon have the ability to bestir often confused policy entities within states to coherent and robust activity, but it can similarly bring about a surprising (if never perfect) degree of harmony between states. (3) You do not have to be a realist--either of the structural or of the classical variety--to accept the proposition that common threat can elicit common resolve in meeting it. But what threat can entice together, it can also drive apart. The 2003 Iraq war is a good example of the tensions that can be generated, even between close allies, when those allies take a differing perspective on the threat. (4) For instance, Canada and the United States, which after 9/11 seemed to be headed toward tighter military integration as a result of the imperatives of the war on terror, (5) would soon fall out over what, if anything, Iraq had to do with that conflict. Importantly, nowhere in Canada was the sense of alienation from American policy greater than in Quebec, which a decade earlier had been heralded as the most part of the country, if not one of the most pro-American parts of the whole world. (6) My purpose in this article is to examine both the sources and the potential consequences of differential threat perception (DTP) within North America. I chose the concept DTP advisedly, for it is a punning allusion to another concept in international relations theory, one that has garnered wide if not total acceptance among scholars--namely, democratic peace theory (or DPT). For adherents of DPT, security communities among liberal democracies are virtually idiot-proof in the sense that no matter how bad relations might become between members of the community, there exists little if any risk that armed conflict could break out, or that even the threat of such conflict could be broached. Thus, that there might at times be tensions, even great strain, in relations between liberal democracies may be regretted, but it is hardly a major problem, since the downside risk of such tensions is structurally much less than it would otherwise be, were one or both of the disputants to be non-liberal democracies, or even worse, non-liberal non-democracies. …

Political uncertainty and stock market returns: evidence from the 1995 Quebec referendum

Abstract. In this study, we investigate the short run effect of the 30 October 1995 Quebec referendum on the common stock returns of Quebec firms. Our results show that the uncertainty surrounding the referendum outcome had an impact on stock returns of Quebec firms. We also find that the effect of the referendum varied with the political risk exposure of Quebec firms, that is, the structure of assets and principally the degree of foreign involvement. JEL classification: G14, G15

Scottish Independence, The Quebec Model of Secession and the Political Future of the Scottish National Party

Quebec offers a useful model of secession for nationalist parties in Western democracies, in using the referendum process as the mechanism to secede through consent. This article examines the prospects of the Scottish National Party adopting the Quebec referendum model in post-devolution Scotland. It uses Quebec as a comparator to identify the constitutional and electoral constraints on the SNP's pursuit of an independence referendum and explore alternative roads to autonomy other than the referendum model. It also looks at the effect of choosing independence versus fiscal autonomy on the internal conflicts within the SNP.

Semantics and Sovereignty, or Is there a coherent post-sovereignty stance? Evidence from Québec and Scotland

The problem of sovereignty IN 1997, in anticipation of a further referendum in Quebec, the Canadian federal government referred to the Supreme Court the question of whether Quebec had the right to secede and under what conditions. The Court's solomonic judgement was that Quebec did not have this right in law, but that if it wished to do so Canada would be obliged to negotiate in good faith. The principal conditions were that there should have been a referendum in which Quebeckers had declared their wish by a clear majority on a clear question. For a short while, both sovereignists and federalists claimed vindication, until it became clear that the Court had shrewdly avoided the substantive issue raised by its judgment, namely what is a clear question and what is a clear majority. In 1999 the federal government sought to fill the gap in its bill C22, the so-called clarity bill in which it made clear that the only question that it would recognise was one that posed the question of sovereignty as one of complete separation and that a clear majority would be something more than fifty per cent plus one of those voting. As a tactical manoeuvre, this put the sovereignists on the defensive and some of the more ebullient federalists were able, yet again, to pronounce the end of Quebec separatism; such euphoria has in the past proved short-lived. Even as a tactical manoeuvre, the bill could be criticised for tying the federal government's own hands in advance and ruling out all manner of compromise solutions. More fundamentally, however, it ties a resolution of the Canada-Quebec question to a form of national sovereignty and absolute independence that has rarely existed and, in modern conditions, is ever more elusive. Sovereignty is a much debated and difficult concept. The term is used in at least two ways. One is a formal meaning, according to which a sovereign state recognises no superior authority in the global system, or competing authority within the state's territory. External sovereignty has often been traced, rather misleadingly, to the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 following the Thirty Years' War; for most of Europe it was asserted only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The assertion of internal sovereignty was also a lengthy process, key steps including the Reformation, absolutism from the seventeenth century, and the French Revolution. It is often assumed that this formal sovereignty, being absolute, cannot be alienated. So countries joining the European Union, for example, are seen to share or pool their authority, but to retain the right to resume whatever powers they choose. Similarly, governments devolving powers, as in the UK, can take them back. The other meaning of sovereignty is substantive and refers to the ability of states to act autonomously. In this sense, sovereignty is a variable and can be shared, gained and lost over time. The formal claim to sovereignty can be contrasted with a reality of constraint and the needs of co-existence. In this sense, the sovereign state dates from the second half of the nineteenth century, when states extended their penetration into society, built bureaucratic apparatuses and assumed the power to regulate trade and the movement of people, and really came into its own after the Second World War. Such is the weight of statist assumptions in modern social science that it is easy to forget that neither of these conceptions of sovereignty has ever completely held the field. State historiography has tended to present history teleologically as a progress to the integrated, sovereign nation-state, which itself is imbued with positive normative connotations. In regions with a history of imperial domination, and in minority nations within larger states, there is a competing history, stressing original rights, shared authority and diffused sovereignty.1 In Quebec, the doctrine of the two founding nations reflects this concept of shared sovereignty and of the state as a compact. …

Political Uncertainty and Stock Market Returns: Evidence from the 1995 Quebec Referendum

In this study, we investigate the short run effect of the 30 October 1995 Quebec referendum on the common stock returns of Quebec firms. Our results show that the uncertainty surrounding the referendum outcome had an impact on stock returns of Quebec firms. We also find that the effect of the referendum varied with the political risk exposure of Quebec firms, that is, the structure of assets and principally the degree of foreign involvement.

Constituency Homogeneity, Economic Risk and Support for Quebec Sovereignty: A Research Note

This article presents a test of the argument that vulnerability to economic dislocation, primarily as it is represented by economic homogeneity in communities, exercises a constraint on levels of support for Quebec nationalism. The guiding hypothesis is that residents of economically vulnerable ridings will be reluctant to accept the risks attached with political moves toward independence. The authors employ data on the level of support for the Bloc Québécois in the federal elections of 1993 and 1997, and the proportion voting "Yes" in the 1995 sovereignty referendum in Quebec, in the province's 75 federal electoral districts as their measures of support for sovereignty. Results suggest that there is a relationship between the geographies of potential economic vulnerability and the level of nationalist support, particularly evident in the 1995 referendum voting and the 1997 election. Calculations involving perceived economic vulnerability and risk remain as powerful defenders of the political status quo in Quebec.

Gertrude J. ROBINSON (1998), Constructing the Quebec Referendum. French and English Media Voices

Gertrude J. ROBINSON (1998), Constructing the Quebec Referendum. French and English Media Voices

Critical Practice in Community-Based ESL Programs: A Canadian Perspective

In this article I examine a number of conceptual priorities for critical practice and their potential application in community-based English as a Second Language (ESL) programs. I begin by outlining a brief history and development of community language programming in Canada and Toronto. Based on these origins, I argue that community-based ESL pedagogies should be informed by educational discourses that are more socially and ideologically focused. I then discuss key concepts such as community and identity and their relevance to classroom concerns, after which I propose that community ESL be conceptualized as a form of critical practice, comprised of both a transformative and reflexive dimension. These 2 dimensions of critical practice are then explained and developed in respect to a lesson on the 1995 Quebec referendum on sovereignty and the related issue of how notions of citizenship are addressed in ESL. From this example of community-based ESL, I conclude with a few generalizations and suggestions for other language programs.