I want you to think back to your first memory of a historic event.
You can even comment down below with it, I’d be curious to hear.
This is mine.
It was near Halloween 1995.
I remember being at a restaurant, and everyone was watching the sports bar TVs pretty close.
But, it wasn’t for a big Maple Leafs or Blue Jays game, but an election, kinda.
I was six at the time and I remember asking my mom what was going on.
She was nervous and told me one of the Canadian provinces, Quebec, was voting on whether or
not it should stay in Canada.
She worried about the country’s future, and the future of French Canadians that remain
like us.
It was a long story that got us to that night, going back to the beginning of European colonization
of Canada.
So, with the many requests to talk about Canada this year, I decided to do my patriotic duty,
and talk about the time it almost fell apart.
Let’s talk about the referendum of 1995.
Let’s start from scratch.
What’s today Canada has been the home to many indigenous nations and tribes for millennia,
from the Pacific to the Atlantic to the Arctic.
The first Europeans to settle what would become Canada were the…
Vikings who landed in Newfoundland in the 11th century.
AFTER THAT The French arrived several centuries later, building a large, though sparsely populated
colony called Nouvelle-France, or New France.
They held onto this territory until the 18th century, when France and England engaged in
a massive war.
In Canada and the UK, it’s called the Seven Years War, but Americans call it the French
and Indian War.
The French lost, and the peace agreement included a transfer of all French American territory
minus Haiti and the islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon to the British.
This new British territory, now called Quebec, was French speaking, and Catholic, and ruled
by Protestants who speak English.
The two cultures did not get along.
The problem increased even more when loyalist refugees from the American revolution settled
in the land we call today the province of Ontario.
Oh hey, there’s me.
This relationship between French and English in Canada was a rocky one, with the occasional
uprisings, and one attempt as a Quebec revolution.
The French majority of what we call Quebec was dominated by an English-speaking ruling
class.
The French were often second class citizens, and more or less servile workers to a British
upper crust.
Quebec nationalism began in this period as a hyper-catholic movement to throw off their
protestant oppressors.
They opposed conscription in the First World War and disliked the now independent...ish
Canada’s ties to Britain.
Nationalism hit a new phase though in the 1960s.
A decade of increasing education and political awakening for Quebecois baby boomers led to
a growing French speaking nationalist change historians call the Quiet Revolution.
A number of huge cultural developments occurred in this period.
What’s important for this video is this revolution sparked a strong anti-Canadian
nationalist feeling.
And sometimes it got extreme.
At one point, a terrorist group called the Front de Liberation du Quebec kidnapped two
politicians and killed one in October of 1970.
Prime Minister Trudeau, no, not him, his Dad, Pierre- Ellliot Trudeau, imposed martial law.
I could go into it more, but I think that’s the subject for a later video if you want
it.
The game changed when former reporter René Lévesque entered the picture.
He helped found a new provincial political party called the Parti Québécois with others
looking to separate Quebec from the country.
Their goal was independence, but with economic ties to Canada, such as a shared currency.
They called this plan sovereignty-association.
In 1976, the PQ won a surprise victory with a promise for a sovereignty association referendum
within their first term.
During that first year, they passed legislation like the to this day controversial Bill 101,
which enforces the French language.
They pop up in the news time to time for enforcing this law in strange places like telling an
Italian restaurant they couldn’t use the word pasta.
It’s still a sore spot in the province, and I don’t want to make too many enemies
today.
Trudeau combatted every step Lévesque took to urge Quebec towards independence.
AGAIN NOT HIM HIS DAD.
Trudeau was a Quebec politics veteran, and pretty much blocked a referendum the entire
time he held office.
The opportunity came in 1979 when the Progressive Conservatives took over the federal government.
Yes, Americans, even our conservatives are progressive, or they used to be.
This party doesn’t exist anymore, but again A STORY FOR ANOTHER TIME.
The New Prime Minister was the Albertan MP, Joe Clark.
He was a bit more into Ottawa playing a smaller role, and so he didn’t interfere in Quebec.
On June 21st that same year, Lévesque announced Quebec would hold a 1980 referendum.
The Parti Quebecois published a fancy policy document outlining a new partnership between
Canada and an independent Quebec, at the same time some goofs in Ottawa caused a call for
another federal election, with Trudeau… taking back the reins as the leader of his
Liberal party.
The person he put in charge of dealing with the referendum was Jean Chrétien.
Write his name down, he’s important later.
Here’s where the story gets very…
Canadian.
The question put on the ballot for the Quebec referendum was *clear throat*
"The Government of Quebec has made public its proposal to negotiate a new agreement
with the rest of Canada, based on the equality of nations; this agreement would enable Quebec
to acquire the exclusive power to make its laws, levy its taxes and establish relations
abroad — in other words, sovereignty — and at the same time to maintain with Canada an
economic association including a common currency; any change in political status resulting from
these negotiations happen with popular approval through another referendum; on these terms,
do you give the Government of Quebec the mandate to negotiate the proposed agreement between
Quebec and Canada?"
So yeah, that didn’t pass.
60% of the Quebecois voted it down, and Lévesque promised they would be back next time gadget…
next time.
The government followed the referendum with an attempt to “repatriate” the Canadian
constitution.
Oh, didn’t you know in 1980, the Canadian constitution was still in the United Kingdom?
Yeah, I know.
This also meant a new round of constitutional talks.
Quebec wanted a bunch of veto powers over new amendments that the rest of the provinces
did not want just one province getting.
This process was intense, and at one point it resulted in the premieres, or leaders of
the provinces making a deal with the federal government when Lévesque representing Quebec
left for the evening.
An agreement Quebecois sometimes refer to as the night of long knives.
As a result of this deal, Canada repatriated the constitution without any support from
Quebec.
At this point, Quebec was less sovereign than before the Parti Quebecois’s election in
1976.
In 1984, Canada decided to get onto the 80s conservative train and elected the Progressive
Conservatives or PCs back into power.
Man wouldn’t it be weird to explain to Americans we had a PROGRESSIVE conservative party who
were called PC?
Bah, anyways, the new Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s campaign promises included finding
a way to work with Quebec’s objections about the constitution.
Lévesque said he’d try to cut a deal, which split the Parti Quebecois, leading to his
quitting politics in 1985.
The PQ then lost power in Quebec to a provincial version of the Liberal party that was against
separation.
Mulroney and the new Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa would make the deal instead.
The Premieres all tried to work out an agreement in 1987, but for various reasons, including
snubbing Canada’s indigenous peoples, most considered these meetings massive failures.
They tried to label Quebec as a ‘distinct society’ within Canada, but had no firm
description of what that meant.
They sent it out as a referendum to Canadians, who voted it down in dramatic fashion in 1990
due to lack of knowledge of what this was about, and more than a little anti-french
prejudice.
Quebec fumed over this whole debacle, and soon after, a member of Mulroney’s cabinet
named Lucien Bouchard, with a few other Quebec politicians started a new separatist party
at the federal level with the goal of separating Quebec into its own country.
They called the party the Bloc Quebecois.
The government tried to cut a deal again in 1992 with a new agreement called the Charlottetown
accord.
It contained a lot of the stuff from the last meeting, as well as some new discussions about
what Canadian federation meant.
It failed miserably too.
The game would then change again in 1993.
Brian Mulroney, sensing the PC party was in trouble, bravely resigned and handed the party
and country over to Kim Campbell.
She was our first and so- far only female Prime Minister (I’m pulling for you Niki),
and served for all of...5 months.
The Liberals were back after a huge upset in the 1993 election.
Yeah, we got the 2 party system too.
The new Prime Minister was Jean Chrétien.
Remember him?
He was the guy in charge of the federal managing of the LAST referendum.
1993 could be considered a… setback for the Progressive Conservatives.
They went from a majority of seats to two.
Not 2 percent…
2 seats.
The conservative collapse was so complete the Bloc Quebecois was actually the official
opposition or the government’s second largest party.
Here in Canada, we have something called question period, where the opposition gets to ask questions
of the government.
Lucien Bouchard used it to troll the shit out of Chrétien pretty much every day.
Then in 1994, Quebec had another election, and the Parti Quebecois got back into power
under a new leader Jacques Parizeau.
So we have a separatist party as opposition in Ottawa and a separatist government in Quebec,
and everyone’s super pissed off.
You can imagine where this went.
The plans for referendum 2 were underway.
This referendum would be a bit different.
Because of new free trade agreements like NAFTA that were all the rage in the 90s, the
separatist leaders didn’t see it necessary to have the sovereignty-association plan like
in the 80s.
This was a full-on separation.
Debates occurred between hardline separatists, and softer ones, and they came out with a
referendum question that has to be even more Canadian than the first:
“Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign after having made a formal offer
to Canada for a new economic and political partnership within the scope of the bill respecting
the future of Quebec and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?”
Quebec was set to go to the polls on October 30, 1995.
The campaign was a little bananas.
The French President Jacques Chirac said he’d recognize Quebec if they voted for independence.
Saskatchewan secretly discussed plans of declaring independence or asking the United States for
annexation.
Lucien Bouchard, the leader of the Bloc Quebecois, caught, i shit you not, a flesh eating bacteria
and lost his leg.
He then showed up to separatist rallies on crutches after he recovered.
The Aboriginal people of Quebec got super mad that they weren’t being consulted in
this whole thing.
Quebecois soldiers got pamphlets telling them to abandon their posts and report to Quebec
City in the case of a yes vote and it even came out Bill Clinton was having meetings
where he considered what the American stance would be, and whether to let Quebec into NAFTA
and NATO.
Now that you’re all caught up, let’s go back to that October night when I was six
years old and in a sports bar with my mom… ok that sounds a bit weird in retrospect.
The vote was razor-thin.
94% of Quebecois people came out to the polls, and by 50.58% to 49.42% the referendum failed.
English Quebecers, and allophones, or people who speak neither English or french as their
first language, voted 95% against it.
The indigenous peoples of Quebec voted against it more than 90%.
Parizeau, who hadn’t prepared a concession speech blamed “money and the ethnic vote”,
and pretty much poisoned the movement as kinda racist.
One guy was so upset by the loss he broke into the prime minister’s house with a knife
but Jean Chretien's wife Aline stopped him.
It was a pretty close call for our country.
Today, the separatist movement’s at an all-time low, with millennials not seeming as into
it as their boomer parents.
The Bloc Quebecois still exists, but is tiny compared to the 90s.
The Parti Quebecois still exists, but aren’t in power.
They also seem more interested in telling Muslim women what they’re allowed to wear
rather than another referendum.
The nationalist vote is splitting into two new left and right wing versions, but that’s
still a long ways off.
But what if?
I don’t want to indulge in too much alternate history here, but it’s a pretty big question
political scientists have thought a lot about.
They fall into two major camps.
One argues Quebec and Canada would expedite the process of separation, making large compromises
to make the separation as painless as possible.
The other camp argues the opposite, that the negotiations would take so long, by the time
they worked out a deal, all the desire to go through with it would’ve fizzled out.
The referendum was a close call, and though I didn’t appreciate that at the age of six,
it makes me pause today and look around.
I’m very much a hybrid of French and English, and French speaking people are around the
entirety of Canada, not just Quebec.
I think what makes the nationalist movement misguided in my eyes, is a lack of appreciation
that having both English and French parts is what makes Canada and Quebec, Canadian
and Quebecois.
It reflects my patriotism that my first Canada video is about it almost falling apart.
Happy sesqui…
sesquicenten… happy 150th birthday Canada.
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