The Growth of Quebec Nationalism and the October Crisis:

This lecture will be quite short as I have chosen to use a number of documentary clips instead to highlight the changes that Quebec underwent in the 1960s and early 1970s.

The Quiet Revolution (or La Revolution Tranquile) started in 1960 with the death of Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis. Duplessis and his party, the Union Nationale, had ruled Quebec essentially unchallenged since the 1930s (with only the odd Liberal interlude). Entire books have been written about the nature of Quebec society under Duplessis (more than what can be considered in a brief lecture); however, a few general points can be made.

There was also, during the 1950s, a growing sense among Quebec's intellectual elite that Duplessis had been holding back Quebec by his adherence to tradition. During the Great Depression, for example, Duplessis had encouraged a back to the land program in the belief that Quebeckers were, in essence, a rural people who were happiest and most productive as farmers. It was a policy that ignored the increasingly urban nature of Canada's population  and its economy. However, the Union Nationale government opened land in northern Quebec to agricultural settlement and encouraged Quebeckers to move north.

Men such as Pierre Trudeau, Rene Levesque, and historians such as Guy Fregault, and Maurice Seguin began to write articles and appear on Radio Canada (the French branch of the CBC) attacking what they saw as the stagnant nature of Quebec society. They argued that Quebec had to break with its past and modernize if it was to take its place not only in Canada but North America.

The death of Duplessis, and the Liberal win in the Quebec election of 1960 marked the beginning of what historians have termed the Quiet Revolution. The campaign slogan of Jean Lesage's Liberal party, "Il faut que ca change" ("Things have got to change") spoke volumes about what would happen in Quebec over the next fifteen to twenty years. 

First, the number of farms in Quebec dropped incredibly fast as people moved into the cities. Quebec had been an urban province for some time, but this phenomenon became more common in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1951, for example, 19.5% of the population lived on farms. This had fallen to 5.6% by 1971. 

This move to cities, however, had the affect of making young Quebeckers realize that a glass ceiling existed for them: English. Montreal was an English city even though Anglophones were a minority. Prominent English families controlled the largest businesses, banks, industry, and sat in the top executive positions in the province. It was a situation that would lead a future terrorist, Front de Liberation du Quebec member Pierre Vallieres, to write a book entitled White Niggers of America: in his view the French were the oppressed of Canada held in place by an Anglophone elite.

This reaction against Anglophones would turn violent for some as the FLQ began to explode bombs in predominantly English parts of Montreal, and eventually resorted to kidnapping Pierre Laporte, a Quebec cabinet minister, and James Cross, the British trade Commissioners, in order to have their demands met for change. This will be outlined more in the documentary and the discussion we will have afterwards.

The language ceiling, however, became a rallying point for other Quebec nationalists. It is during the Quiet Revolution that one can begin to see the emergence of Quebec nationalism as it exists today: a desire to either separate from Canada or to secure for Quebec greater provincial powers in order to protect its unique 

It was also a time that saw the Liberal government in Ottawa, under Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson (1963-1968) start to consider decentralizing power as a means of countering this growing sense of Quebec nationalism. Pearson was, in many ways, a product of an earlier period of politics. He could speak French, poorly, and had no real understanding of Quebec. This weakness led him to form the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (the B&B Commission) in 1962 to investigate the state of Quebec's relationship with the Rest of Canada. It was a commission that did what most Canadians who paid attention already knew: Canada "without being fully conscious of the fact, is passing through the greatest crisis in its history." The Commission, however, offered little as a means of solving it.

The Pearson government introduced bilingualism into the federal government as a means of appeasing Quebec nationalists, and making them feel welcomed in the national government. However, by this point the Lesage government was asking for much more (as outlined in the lecture on the constitution) which the government was not about to allow.

Quebec was not about to accept anything less as an element of the Quiet Revolution was a general feeling within Quebec that the province needed greater autonomy due to its unique culture, language, and history. Control over social policy and the ability to opt of federal programs (with the money still earmarked for Quebec) was simply an element of this new mentality. The creation of Hydro-Quebec was symbolic of the same mentality applied to natural resources: Quebec cannot become a fully developed and independent nation/province without control of its natural resources. The latter led to a process of nationalization of natural resources that Duplessis' government had let go to English investors for almost nothing.