Stagg Editorial- December 1995

REFERENDUM MELTDOWN

Now that the Canadian side has just squeaked through with a narrow victory in the latest Quebec referendum, it is time for some reflection on the events that brought Canada to this political precipice. Many have been quick to draw connections between the Separatist leader Lucien Bouchard and the late Premier of Quebec Rene Levesque. However, a more apt comparison and connection may be between Bouchard and the former and little-lamented Quebec autocrat and Premier Maurice Duplessis.

A potent brew of parochialism and demagoguery kept Premier Duplessis in power until 1959. He left office only on his death. Bouchard in marshalling the dark forces of Quebec self-delusion brings back echoes of the 1950's when Duplessis ruled Quebec with an iron hand and a policy handbook that incorporated considerable intolerance to minorities. Bouchard's comments concerning the "white races" certainly fit into the Duplessis mould.

The sweep of Canadian history need only go back to 1990 to find the origins of Lucien Bouchard as Quebec's latest Francophone messiah. Of course the Anglophone messiah, Clyde Wells politically engendered out of the same Meech Lake cesspool.

In the aftermath of the Quebec referendum some political savants are postulating that an inevitable messianic meltdown of nuclear proportions is bound to take place when the two self-appointed saviors collide. Perhaps a convenient place for point zero might be Schefferville, Quebec, on the Labrador border, the former stomping grounds of their common nemesis, Brian Mulroney.

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