Home | Contacts | Classifieds | Archives | Media Kit | Email Us |
With the departure of Stéphane Dion and the accession of Michael Ignatieff as the Liberal Party of Canada's new leader, important questions loom about the future of the Liberals as the party which has historically derived much of its power in Quebec. What happens now as the Grits undergo what is shaping up to be a decimation of their French-language supporters and leadership?
While the Liberals are trying to rebuild with a new chief who for the first time in memory is not from Quebec, more and more votes in the province are ending up with the Bloc Québécois. What happens to the bilingual/bicultural model of federalism that was championed by the Liberals as a means of convincing Quebec it had a meaningful place in a federalist Canada?
Bilingualism and biculturalism
The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism was established in 1963 by Liberal Prime Minister Lester Pearson to inquire and report on the state of bilingualism and biculturalism in Canada and to make recommendations as to what steps should be taken to develop a Canadian federalist model based on equal partnership between the two founding peoples, taking into account contributions made by other cultural groups.
Throughout the 1960s, Canadians had seen the rise of Quebec nationalism. Canada's failure to establish equality of the French and English languages within government institutions was seen as one of the main reasons for the rise of the Quebec independence movement. Among the sweeping changes the commission recommended was that Ontario and New Brunswick should become officially bilingual, that parents should be able to send their children to schools in the language of their choice in regions where there is demand, and that English and French should be declared the officials languages of Canada.
Pierre Trudeau's influence
Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, probably Canada's first truly bicultural leader, made it one of his highest priorities to implement the commission's recommendations. The most important of these was making Canada an officially bilingual nation, through the introduction in 1969 of the Official Languages Act. It was also recommended to the provinces that they make reforms, and some did. While officially Canada became a bilingual nation, Trudeau was also responsible for extending biculturalism in multiculturalism.
However, the Liberals, who had for decades been strongly associated as the federal party closest to Quebec has now fallen on hard times. As the Bloc's support in this province has risen since its founding in 1990, there has been a corresponding decline for the Grits. The idea of federalism under the Liberals was to bring French Canada into the federalist fold by sharing power out generously to Quebec and appointing many of its leaders to high ranks politically. There were many converts from Quebec to federalism as a result.
'French Power'
The phenomenon of French Power, as the influence of French Quebecers in Liberal cabinets came to be known, saw a long list of politicians serve under Trudeau, including Jean Marchand, Jean Chretien, Gerald Pelletier, Marc Lalonde and Andre Ouellet). Arguably, Stéphane Dion was the one of the last in a long line of zealous Quebec federalists whose roots can ultimately be traced back to Trudeau or his immediate followers. But with Michael Ignatieff now leader, Canada's two mainstream federalist parties are both led by anglophones from central and western Canada.
The somewhat surprising results of the Dec. 8 Quebec general election, in which Jean Charest's Liberals failed, despite a promising campaign, to obtain a stronger majority, have been interpreted by some observers as a side-effect of the debacle taking place in Ottawa between the western-centered Conservatives and the eastern establishment Liberals. More specifically, it's been suggested that Quebec's francophone voters reacted to Prime Minister Stephen Harper's bashing of the Bloc Québécois and its Quebec nationalist penchant, by voting en masse defensively at the last minute in favour of the sovereignist Parti Québécois.
No more PMs from Quebec
Despite a long line of Liberal and Conservative prime ministers from Quebec over nearly 40 years, it's notable that there hasn't been once since Paul Martin's Liberals were defeated in 2006. "French Power will always exist. No Canada can exist without the support of this province," Trudeau told the Quebec wing of the Liberals in 1984, a few months before his retirement, echoing a widely held view that no one can govern Canada without Quebec's support. However, it remains to be seen if the country can indeed be held together without the tacit the support of this province.