The Politics of Quebec—Today and Tomorrow

MR. MACDONALD:

On January 10th, 1910, the first issue of Le Devoir made its appearance on the streets of Montreal. Today it ranks as one of our leading vehicles of informed opinion. It was once said of The Times of London that "the history of The Times is the history of the times". Equally, it might be said that the history of Le Devoir is the history of sixty eventful years in the life of the Province of Quebec.

The quality of a newspaper is determined, ultimately, by the professional standards of its writers. The integrity of its views must be the responsibility of its editors. The strength of its purpose reflects the determination of its publisher. In the case of Le Devoir, its quality, its integrity, and its purpose reflect, in large measure, the contribution of our guest today, the distinguished publisher, Claude Ryan.

We extend to you, Sir, our congratulations on your "diamond jubilee". Like a diamond, we trust that your newspaper will continue to be rare in its distinction, hard in its cut and thrust, sparkling in its prose and commentary, and forever a symbol of the continuing engagement between the French-speaking and English-speaking people of Canada.

Claude Ryan is a Montrealer by birth and education, having studied social work at the School of Social Service in the University of Montreal. He made a brief pilgrimage to Rome and a departure from the world of secular affairs to study Church History at the Gregorian University in 1951-52.

His entry to the public scene in the Province of Quebec began with his appointment as National Secretary of L'Action Catholique Canadienne, a position he occupied through the stormy, post-war Duplessis era and until 1962. He then played an important part in the secularization of education in Quebec when he served as Chairman of a Study Group on Adult Education, commissioned by the Department of Youth in the Government of Quebec. This was during the years 1962 and 1963, when the Lesage Government was undertaking the not-so-quiet conversion of the Department of Youth into a Department of Education.

Trading social action for journalistic persuasion, he joined Le Devoir as an editorial writer in June 1962, becoming Acting Manager and member of a three-man Editorial Board in 1963. He reached the peak within a short space of time, when he was appointed Publisher of Le Devoir and General Manager of L'Imprimerie Populaire Limitee, in May 1964. Before the heart and core of Toronto began to be transformed, it had been said that, in Montreal, you went up the mountain to admire the view, while in Toronto you went down in the subway to avoid it. Whether or not it is your practice to climb Montreal mountain, Sir, you have certainly scaled the heights of the newspaper world.

Were Mr. Ryan not well known for his modesty, I would tell you of his numerous forms of public recognition, such as:
- the National Newspaper Award for editorial writing in 1964;
- the National Press Club Award in February 1965;
- the Canadian Council of Christians and Jews, Human Relations Award in 1966;
- membership in the Canadian News Hall of Fame, in 1968;
- the Jewish Labour Committee of Canada, Human Rights Award in 1969.

However, to spare his embarrassment, I will not tell you of those things.

Monsieur Ryan, il y a tres peu de gens qui croient pas seulement a la valeur de notre double heritage, mais qui besognent constamment pour sa preservation et son epanouissement. Quant a nous autres, nous sommes tres reconnaissants que ceux sont capables de faire ces efforts portent un fardeau extremement lourd. C'est tres evident, Monsieur, que vous vous comptez parmi ce petit nombre.

Sir, there are a small number of Canadians who are not only fully bilingual, but also truly bicultural. There are a relatively small number who not only believe in the intrinsic worth of our dual heritage, but also strive for its preservation and fulfilment. Those who do carry heavy burdens and we are all indebted to them. You, Sir, are one of those people. For that reason, above all others, we welcome you today, we thank you for your continuing concern for national unity, and we invite you to discuss with us "The Politics of Quebec--Today and Tomorrow".

MR. RYAN:

Mr. Chairman, I should first like to express my thankful appreciation for the kind invitation which you have extended to me.

I had long known Mr. Ian Macdonald to be a competent economist and a dedicated Ontarian who likes to appear relaxed and detached when he has to deal with dangerous Quebeckers like the Parizeaus, the Levesques and the Ottawa bureaucrats. I was glad to find out recently that Mr. Macdonald's serenity and apparent detachment may owe something to his affiliation with a club whose very name should remind us that the greatest human creations are, after all, mortal.

Your President has invited me to discuss the politics of Quebec--today and tomorrow. He aptly selected, as you no doubt realized, a topic which lends itself to any kind of treatment. And he had to do it for me because, as the good journalist that I hope to be, the very last thing which I want to append to any written piece of mine is a title. And it always comes at the very last moment, often to the despair of the printer.

To be true to this old practice of mine, which often infuriates luncheon convenors, I have decided to modify the title somewhat and to speak more specifically about what I would call some unwritten laws of Quebec's politics.

It has long been the custom for Quebec speakers addressing English-Canadian audiences outside of Quebec in the last ten years to try and interpret to their listeners the so-called new aspirations of their province. So many unforeseen developments had occurred in Quebec that we felt the need to interpret to Canadians in other provinces the significance of these changes in terms of the Quebeckers' view of their own future.

This job has been well-enough done, I believe. The rest of Canada now knows. If it does not approve of a lot, it knows a lot better about the aspirations of Quebec.

It is perhaps time, Mr. Chairman, that we should take leave of the lofty and somewhat voluntarist approach of the last decade and start again to discuss the Quebec "problem" in a more factual and detached style. Such is the mood in which I have prepared the observations which follow.

1970 will be, as Mr. Bertrand keeps reminding us (without giving any further precision), an election year in the Province of Quebec. So the question naturally arises who is going to win that election?

I should like to be a prophet. I should like to be able to predict with any authority the outcome of that vital election. But I dare not venture too far in this direction. It is rather easy at a leadership convention to predict who is going to emerge as the winner, because you have contacts with the delegates, you have a limited constituency to explore; and, if you are a good journalist with widespread contacts, you can end up with a rather good batting average. When it comes to general elections so many mysterious factors are at work that you have to be a little more careful.

I would not, then, take the risk of inflicting upon you this kind of superficial approach. I would not run the risk of being reminded of any stupid prediction in The Globe and Mail or The Toronto Star next summer.

I shall, rather, try, with your permission, to describe some vital though unwritten laws which seem to govern the politics of Quebec. These laws are not to be found in any text book. Not every observer of the Quebec scene will accept them. They are intangible. They are not eternal.

I knew rather little about them before I joined that great school of political education that Le Devoir has always been, not only for its readers but also for its editors. But they seem to me to be more lasting, more important in their consequences, than the mere mention of so-called statistical scientific data which more often than not leads to no clear conclusions.

When I joined Le Devoir in 1962 Mr. Fillion, the then publisher of the paper, told me that they had only one reservation about their new editorial writer and that I probably had in turn one reservation about the leadership of Le Devoir. "You probably feel," said Mr. Fillion, "that we are too nationalistically inclined. We feel in turn that you are not enough of a nationalist to be a fully reliable associate editor." And he concluded wisely, "Let us hope that the cross-fertilization of the two approaches may help produce something better in the years ahead."

The first thing I have learned in my job is that provincial politics are far more vital to Quebeckers than they are to Canadians residing in other provinces. The people of New Brunswick, Ontario and Alberta are deeply attached to their respective provinces. But they all agree that they have one national government located in Ottawa and that the latter must be considered as the senior, more important government.

I was reading in the Toronto papers yesterday about Mr. Robarts hinting that after all the troubles he has had recently with it, he might as well turn medicare over to the federal government. Such words would be sheer political heresy in Quebec, even if they were meant as a joke.

The last one hundred years have taught Quebeckers that the Government of Quebec is the only one that they can hope to control in any stable and unequivocal way. It is the only one which they have been able to mould in line with their temperament and natural inclinations. It is the only one which they can trust one hundred per cent to defend their fundamental cultural interests in times of acute crisis and misunderstanding.

The late Daniel Johnson used to say that Quebec is the national home of French-Canadians and that the Government of Quebec must be considered in consequence as the national government of the French-Canadian people.

There was some exaggeration, some rhetorical exaggeration, in that statement. But I wish you to believe that it appealed to a deeply-rooted dimension of the French-Canadian political consciousness and that Mr. Johnson never encountered any serious trouble in Quebec for having made it.

The heart of the average French-Canadian Quebecker is naturally oriented towards Quebec. It is his reason that has kept attracting him in the direction of Ottawa. This helps us understand that the political phenomena which we have observed in the last decade, in particular the emergence of political separatism in the Province of Quebec, have deeper roots in the political psychology of Quebeckers than has, for instance, the separatism that has emerged of late in the western provinces.

I used to say before I joined Le Devoir that political separatism was as remote from the French Canadian mentality as the thought of an eventual reunion with France. I would now qualify this statement by saying that French-Canadians for practical reasons would not now opt for separation but that they would probably refuse to close the door to that option for the future.

The Prime Minister of Quebec is in a very real sense the grass-roots leader of French-Canadians in the political arena. French-Canadians will admire and support the one among them who has enough stature to be sought and accepted as Prime Minister of the whole of Canada.

But they also remember when they study history the rather bitter ending of two previous experiences of the same nature. And I would gamble that, barring grave international circumstances which would momentarily supersede domestic considerations, they would, in the eventuality of an open conflict between Quebec and Ottawa, give their natural preference to the leadership offered to them by the Prime Minister of Quebec.

This explains the vital importance which Quebeckers attach to their provincial politics. For many of them provincial politics is the only politics which they understand and love. It is the only politics which makes them feel completely and irrevocably involved.

I can find no better proof of this assertion than in the virtual inability of the federal parties to generate in Quebec the kind of lively debate and normal opposition that go with the parliamentary system at its best.

We have in the provincial field two equally strong major parties and even a couple of somewhat embarrassing third parties. We have had only one party, except for two brief interludes, in the federal field, since the beginning of Laurier's rule back in 1896.

That should be a matter for reflection. It is not accidental that things should have developed that way. It is because there is something deeply-rooted in the mentality of the people.

An important corollary immediately derives from the first observation. Quebeckers, when they go to the polls, are mindful, like voters in all parts of the world, about taxes, economic development, social services, and the quality of education. But they also look with great attention to the ability of each party leader to stand up to the Ottawa Government in defence of the so-called prerogatives of Quebec.

Under the late Maurice Duplessis this unwritten law of our politics had been given a rather negative interpretation. Duplessis was a staunch defender of Quebec's autonomy against what he called the "encroachments of Ottawa." It was Mr. Lesage's great contribution to have given this concept a dynamic meaning, and to have turned it into an instrument for gaining important concessions from Ottawa and for implementing key reforms at home.

I don't know what role this law will play in the forthcoming election, but as things now stand, Mr. Bourassa, the new Liberal Leader, will enter the battle with a major handicap to surmount, because of all the things that have been said about the so-called preference that Ottawa had shown in his favour, whether this be true or not.

Need I underline also that this concept of autonomy interpreted in a dynamic way, if pursued as an end in itself, can only lead to the logical conclusion which men like Levesque and Parizeau have espoused? The responsibility of Quebec's leaders at this juncture is particularly great. They are playing with dynamite all the time. And I am afraid that there is no escape from this game except in the positive recognition of the forces which are at work in their people, and in a deliberate effort on their part to bring the people to a higher and more exacting vision of their future than that which is conveyed by narrow nationalism.

Another aspect of Quebec's politics is the great importance which French-Canadian voters attach to the personalities of the leaders. The most successful men of the last 25 years in Quebec's political life have been Maurice Duplessis, Jean Lesage, Daniel Johnson, Jean Drapeau, Lucien Saulnier and Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

You will easily grant that each of those men had a strong personality. But each was also, in his own way, a moderate; that is to say, a man with no rigidly preconceived dogmas as to how problems should be solved.

In Trudeau's case, for instance, I can say that thousands of voters who would have disapproved of many of his statements and attitudes if they had come from a different leader were swayed to his cause by his overwhelming personality.

This factor makes the next provincial election a particularly intriguing one. Of the three leaders who will be facing the voters the only one who has a strong, established personality in the eyes of the public is Rene Levesque. Both Messrs. Bertrand and Bourassa have yet to assert themselves in this respect. They are both respected men. But they have not yet established themselves in the minds of the people as strong men who can lead in difficult moments.

In Mr. Levesque's case his basic political option will most probably work against him, because the people also expect of their leader that in addition to being personally strong he should represent a position which is closer to a balanced view of reality than the one which is presented at the moment by Mr. Levesque and his supporters.

But this makes the next election an extremely intriguing one because the interplay of the leading personalities remains very undecided, very unclear at the moment.

How about the ethnic and the class factors in Quebec's politics? I should like to submit a couple of observations in this respect.

The National Union Party gained power in 1966 with only 41 % of the total vote. The Liberals, with 47 % of the vote, had obtained (I wonder if you made this observation) the same measure of popular support that Mr. Bennett got in British Columbia last August in his so-called "landslide victory", which gave him a huge majority in Parliament. He got exactly 47-48% of the total vote--the same proportion Mr. Lesage did in the Province of Quebec. But in Quebec Mr. Johnson's party was returned to power with a slim majority in the House.

To a journalist who was asking him a question about this, the late Daniel Johnson made this significant reply: "It is true that the English and the Jews voted overwhelmingly for the Liberals; but my Party won a solid majority with the French-Canadian voters."

This factor contributed to give the Johnson Government a moral legitimacy which escaped the attention of superficial observers.

The truth is, Mr. Chairman, that English-speaking voters behave in provincial elections in Quebec almost exactly like their French-speaking counterparts do in federal elections; with the only qualification that the impact of their votes is far less preponderant in determining the results of Quebec's elections than it has been for a couple of generations in helping determine the results of federal elections.

Both Messrs. Johnson and Bertrand have made great efforts in the last four years to help bridge this gulf. But their success so far has been extremely limited.

According to the dicta of political science the working class in Quebec should support a left-oriented party and the middle class vote ought to go to the party leaning more to the right. In Quebec you have exactly the opposite. The working people, both in the rural and the urban areas, have a definite preference for the National Union Party. The professional and managerial people are strong supporters of the Liberals.

In the next election the Liberals will lose a certain proportion of this support to Levesque's party because a large segment of the student body and the important new intellectual class will support Le Parti Quebecois, while they supported the Liberals in 1960 and in 1962. An indefinable proportion of the working people may be tempted to shift their allegiance to the Creditistes of Real Caouette. And this would be a loss for the National Union.

This brings us to an additional factor: the role of third parties in Quebec elections. Before 1948 and 1962 five general elections were fought in Quebec on a straight two party basis. But we had examples in 1944 and 1966 of third parties competing with the old-line parties.

In 1944--remember the Liberals were in power during the War years--we had an election. In that election Le Block Populaire Canadienne, the Creditistes and the CCF Party gained together nearly 25 % of the total vote and landed with about five seats in the House.

This allowed Maurice Duplessis' party to get into power again with only 38 % of the vote and a little more than 50% of the seats in the House.

In 1966 two separatist parties were in the race, Le Rassemblement pour L'Independence Nationale and le Ralliement Nationale.

Together these two parties got about 12% of the vote, but the RIN--that was Bourgault's party--whose strength was largely concentrated in the urban areas was very probably instrumental in causing the defeat of at least ten Liberal candidates.

Mr. Lesage had dismissed Bourgault's party as a nonentity a few weeks before the election. He was given four painful years in which to swallow back these presumptuous words which he had uttered during the electoral campaign.

On the basis of these facts it becomes extremely difficult to predict what will happen next time. My own personal hunch is that we might end up with a result somewhat similar in terms of votes given to each party to the result of 1944.

It is very plausible that with a strong leader like Levesque at the head of the "sovereignist" party, the voting age having been lowered to eighteen years, with the widely-spread discontent in connection with economic uneasiness and unemployment--it is very plausible that Le Parti Quebecois should show respectable strength and that the Creditistes should succeed in mobilizing their thousands of votes for their own candidates.

But it would be foolish and unrealistic at this stage to try and predict what this will give in terms of seats in the National Assembly of Quebec. Representation in the House, as you know, is still strongly weighted in favour of the rural areas and in favour of the traditional parties. This helps create a more confused situation.

In only one Quebec election since over thirty-five years has the impact of federal leaders been directly felt. That was in 1939 when the financial interests of Montreal made an alliance with the federal Liberals in order to get rid of Duplessis. The provincial Liberals had to pay dearly for that artificial triumph which brought Godbout to power in 1939. And they were left in the wilderness of opposition for sixteen years, between 1944 and 1960, in order that they should learn that law of Quebec's politics that they had forgotten.

They learned during those years that they cannot hope to win the confidence of the Quebec voters in the provincial field unless they can come up with a programme and a leadership that are solidly and predominantly Quebec in their orientation.

Nothing points at the moment to any direct intervention on the part of the federal Liberals in the forthcoming election. Mr. Trudeau has stated several times that he would not hesitate to step into the picture if he felt that separatism had become a central and threatening issue during the campaign. He apparently feels for the moment that the two leading parties do not pose such a problem and that Mr. Levesque's party has very little chance of making serious inroads with the Quebec voters in the next election.

This may be taken to mean that the next election might not be, after all, as decisive as some people have suggested. It might mean that the unwritten laws which have just been evoked may continue to dominate Quebec's politics for at least another decade.

Mr. Ryan was thanked on behalf of The Empire Club by Mr. J. G. Wasteneys.