Quebec and French relations - 3 November 1995

I wonder how many people reading the papers this week remembered that hot day in July of 1967, when we woke-up to hear that the prime minister of Canada had virtually thrown the president of France out of the country. The prime minister was Canada's most famous postal or statesman, Nobel Prize winner Lester Pearson the French president was the unique, the formidable – Mr Churchill used to say the insufferable – Charles de Gaulle. Even though the Second World War had been over for more than 20 years de Gaulle was still, to put it mildly, a controversial figure among the Western allies.

In the 1960s as president of the Fifth Republic, he had two almost belligerently publicised aims: to show France to be capable in the atomic age of asserting its independence of the United States as a military power, and to block every proposal coming either from Britain or Europe for Britain to join the European community.

The year before he went on his visit to Canada, he withdrew France from the fledgling Nato, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation of which incidentally Canada's prime minister Mr Pearson had been one of the principle architects. This act of course forced the United States to shutdown the Nato military bases it had in France, so when de Gaulle flew to Canada, hands across the sea were making rude gestures at each other. Came that day visiting the mainly French speaking province of Québec when President de Gaulle ended one of his majestic speeches with a ringing defiant phrase practically a war cry, "Vive la Québec liebe!" Long live a free Québec.

Frankly, so long ago, that was a new thought to most of us outside Canada, what did it mean? I recall a visiting reporter from England asking me was the province of Québec governed by a local dictator? Decidedly not, it was as democratic as all the other provinces and as free from dictation by anybody including the British crown as any other member of the, by then fairly loose confederation known as the British Commonwealth. What de Gaulle was urging was nothing less than Québec's independence as a separate country from Canada. That was enough for prime minister Pearson. De Gaulle was meant to move onto Ottawa for a welcoming reception before the Canadian parliament. Lester Pearson made it clear no welcome would be available. De Gaulle went home.

The French press of course made the usual noises of outrage, but I don't suppose de Gaulle was inclined to echo them. He probably felt well pleased with himself. He could better say, "Mischief thou art afoot." In fact, something most of us didn't know but Canadian's knew all too well and the people of Québec most of all, de Gaulle had made a public act of nourishing a movement that had been planted 200 years ago. There are Québecers who know their history and will say there never was a time when Québec didn't resent its being lumped with the other provinces as part of a united Canada.

Now of all the nations that in the 17th and 18th centuries challenged England for control of North America, France was the most impressive, the one that suffered the most crushing defeat. But also, as Québecers are the first to remind you, she was the first and Québec was the first settlement in North America before many Englishmen had stirred his stumps and yearned for the new world.

Only 12 years after Columbus's first voyage, fishermen from Brittany were working the cod banks of Nova Scotia and while we, along with the Portuguese and Spanish, were poking at the Atlantic coast to find that greatly touted route through to the Orient, the Breton started what was to be for a century or more the great continental industry: furs. They did not neglect the prestigious catch of the many rivers they'd come on. The French mapped the river systems of the entire Eastern seaboard the Midwest and the Mississippi basin. The Breton trapped and skinned every fur bearing animal in sight.

A half dozen intrepid explorers pushed what the French called the Kingdom of the North, far into today's Midwest. They were determined to hem the British colonists in east of the Appalachians. They travelled, they occupied one third of the North American continent from New Orleans to the Canadian border. They took in and hoped to have as their own, what today would comprise most of 13 large states. It was to be the nucleus of the great French empire that would rout the British. They named it Louisiana.

Napoleon had a rehearsal for this grand design in Haiti, where he lost 30,000 of his crack troops, the flower of the French infantry, to, it has always been said, the brilliance of a black general a master of gorilla warfare. It was also true that at least a half of Napoleon's troops were lost to a far ranging epidemic of Yellow Fever. Either way Napoleon abandoned his plan to solidify new France in North America and conquer all of it. And in the luckiest transaction in American history, he sold the whole of that triangle of acreage – more than twice the then existing lands of the United States – at four cents an acre. That was the end of any possible French conquest of North America.

But 40 odd years before, when in the far north, the French forces had been beaten by the British and surrendered both Québec and Montreal, the British government was concerned to do right by the 60,000 French speaking, now British subjects in the new province of Québec. In an act perhaps as enlightened as anything done later by the British or Canadian governments, it passed a special act allowing Québec to be governed by French civil law alongside British criminal law. This was done to protect the Roman Catholic Church and to allow what didn't happen in Britain or the rest of Canada then, to allow Roman Catholics to hold public office. Now all this was done by 1774 and a lively politician, today imagining Québec's future, would surely have guessed that long before now, Québec would have become an independent nation. Well as we know it hasn't.

English and French are both official languages throughout the whole nation and all items of public print from traffic signs to book matches must be printed in both languages. By now almost half the entire population of Canada is Roman Catholic, Québec 80 per cent. Québec was given special consideration of her culture and the heritage of French law right through the 19th and 20th century until a fateful year, 1982 when Canada adopted its own sovereign constitution and Québec reverted to equal status with the nine other provinces. Two years before that, Québec's rising indignation resulted in a referendum to see how the whole of Québec felt about becoming independent of Canada. The separatists lost badly.

Since then, the Canadian government has tried to pass special concessions to Québec, to give it a status distinct from that of the other nine. Parliament has rejected them. There have been other failing referendums, but last year, the separatists party came to power in Québec and while we were all being told they'd never get what they wanted, they mounted a new and determined campaign, and last Monday they tried again. As we all know, they lost again, but this time by a hair's breadth, by only 50,000 votes in four and a half million. If there's one thing all the Canadian commentators agree on it is that we have not by any means, heard the last of the independents movement. I know Canadians have much knowledge and good judgement, who now believe it is bound to come.

Some American commentators who usually know about as little Canadian history as Englishmen do, went into instant anxiety if not panic, at the thought of the effect on trade across the border – that famous undefended border – which American's have always boasted about, have always looked on as a triumphant sign that feeling and custom between the two countries are so close they might well be citizens of the same country. And for the same reason, there's a kind of compliment in the fact that Americans know so little about Canadian history. It's as if they didn't know much about the history of Arkansas because it's one of them.

Canada and the United States combine to form far and away the biggest trading partnership in the world, 275 billion dollars worth of goods and services. There's no tariff but soon there might have to be. What happens to the cost on this side of the border, of the five billion dollars worth of imported timber? American mills would have to close. Canada sends to the United States 15 million tourists a year and the one's who flood Florida come mostly from Québec. How about American access to northern Québec's power projects and so on and so on.

But surely neither Wall Street nor timber firms not travel agents would fail to workout an economic relationship with Québec as they might with any other newly independent nation. The fact that, for the first time in 200 years, it would turn Canada into two nations is an emotional wrench that Americans are not likely to feel, but Canadians will. And certainly when you listen to the more serious of the separatists, the less bloodshot orators, you can realise the enormous emotional power of their historical memory. They can recite great names for their exploring and pioneering past. They have Champlain and Joliet, Cartier, La Salle. Whereas Americans if challenged, could name only La Salle, Cadillac and Pontiac, but then only as names of automobiles. To Canadians, to all Canadians these names are as resounding as to Americans are the names of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Lewis and Clark. I think it's doubtful in the next year or two whether their memory and what they stood for and what they lost will be forgotten or forgiven.

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