Early history to 1860

The origins of Quebec go back to 1534–35, when the French explorer Jacques Cartier landed at present-day Gaspé and took possession of the land in the name of the king of France. Cartier brought with him the 16th-century European traditions of mercantile expansion to a land where a few thousand Indians (First Nations) and Inuit (the Arctic people of Canada known as Eskimo in the United States) had been living for thousands of years. Permanent European settlement of the region began only in 1608, when Samuel de Champlain established a fort at Cape Diamond, the site of present-day Quebec city, then called Stadacona. A half century later the French settlement had a meagre population of some 3,200 people.

Although New France began with the founding of three cities—Quebec city in 1608, Trois-Rivières in 1616, and Montreal in 1642—it eventually included a vast inland territory incorporating Nova Scotia, Cape Breton Island, and Newfoundland and extending southwest all the way to Louisiana. In the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), which confirmed France’s defeat in the War of the Spanish Succession, Great Britain acquired all of Nova Scotia (except for Cape Breton), Newfoundland, and the lands around Hudson Bay. The remaining territory of New France, except for Louisiana and the islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence, was ceded to Great Britain in the Treaty of Paris (1763).

Within a decade of having acquired nearly all of France’s North American colonies, Britain faced a revolution of independence by its original 13 colonies. In 1774, hoping to retain the loyalty of their new subjects in the French and Catholic colony of Quebec by gaining the support of its clerical leaders, the British passed the Quebec Act. The act granted Catholics freedom of religious practice, legalized the French seigneurial system, recognized the French civil code, and reextended the boundaries of Quebec into the Ohio and Mississippi valleys to satisfy the fur traders and maintain alliances with the Indians. This strategy worked, and a vast majority of French Canadians remained neutral when American forces led by Gen. Benedict Arnold invaded Quebec in 1775. While losing its original American colonies, Great Britain retained Quebec and Nova Scotia. The influx of several thousand British loyalists into Quebec, all of whom demanded land and representative government, forced the British to again alter the constitutional arrangements. The poorly conceived Constitutional Act (1791) divided the colony of Quebec along the Ottawa River into Lower Canada (Quebec) and Upper Canada (the future Ontario). It also provided for an elected assembly and for appointed executive and legislative councils. In short order, the majority French Canadian society ensured that members of its increasingly nationalistic professional middle class, educated by the Catholic Church, came to dominate the elected assembly. The Canadian Party defended the seigneurial system, denounced the Catholic Church for collaborating with the British, criticized the emergence of commercial capitalism, and demanded responsible government—full rule by the majority in the elected assembly. Members of the British merchant, bureaucratic, and military classes were reduced to a rump, but this minority British Party retained full control over the appointed executive and legislative councils.

By the 1830s the increasing control of British merchants over the commercial and financial life of Lower Canada, the emergence of an agricultural crisis as wheat production (the only cash crop) collapsed, and the rise of a politically dominant French Canadian professional middle class resulted in a severe political, social, and economic crisis. The society had become ungovernable. When the British authorities refused to grant the assembly sweeping powers, the secessionist Patriot Party (formerly the Reform Party) sought to take the colony of Quebec out of the British Empire and create a new Republic of Quebec. The secessionist movement, led by a weak and indecisive Louis-Joseph Papineau, culminated in the unsuccessful rebellions of 1837–38. Papineau fled to the United States only to return in the late 1850s. The British military forces crushed the rebels (a few were hanged and others exiled in Australia) and instituted military rule. According to a report written by Lord Durham in 1839, the source of the rebellion was “two nations warring in the bosom of a single state.” Durham recommended the union of Upper and Lower Canada, massive British immigration, municipal reform, and the institution of responsible government.

Fearful that the French Canadian majority would dominate the new colony created by the Act of Union in 1841, the British refused to grant responsible government and ensured British control over the elected assembly by granting each of the colony’s two administrative regions, Canada East (the former Lower Canada) and Canada West (formerly Upper Canada), 42 seats. Pressured by French Canadian and British political reformers from Canada West and Canada East, and hoping to transfer the rising administrative costs to the colonies, British authorities granted responsible government in 1848, much to the dismay of the old British Party, which preached annexation to the United States. French Canadian members of the government shared power, including the power to tax and spend. They supported funding of the transportation revolution, notably the building of the canals that made the Great Lakes accessible via the majestic St. Lawrence River and the construction of the very expensive Grand Trunk Railway from Sarnia to Levi, on the south shore of Quebec city. In return, they pushed hard for and won the right to use their own language in the assembly and gained full control over educational, social, and municipal institutions in Canada East.

Confederation to the 1920s

The British North American colonies were faced with a number of pressing problems by the mid-1860s, and a new constitutional arrangement became imperative. The population of Canada West had surpassed that of Canada East, and the colonies were caught in political deadlock. Liberal politicians in Canada West wanted out from under French control of the government and were anxious to turn the western territories owned and controlled by the Hudson Bay Company into a vast hinterland for Toronto. The accumulated debt of the colony, notably due to canal and railway construction costs, threatened financial ruin. Finally, the British wanted out of Canada because colonial administration was too costly and free trade promised to supply Britain with cheaper natural resources and foodstuffs. Three years of debate and negotiation produced the British North America Act in 1867 (now called the Constitution Act, 1867). The British Parliament created a quasi-autonomous federation, the Dominion of Canada, comprising Quebec (formerly Canada East), Ontario (formerly Canada West), New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. The French Canadian community, a minority within the larger federation, was granted control over the provincial government of Quebec through which it could design and administer social, economic, and political programs reflecting its traditions and values. The Canadian Parliament and the Quebec legislative assembly and council, as well as the federal court system, were designed as bilingual French-English institutions.

Beginning in the 1850s, Montreal occupied an important role as Canada’s dominant financial, commercial, transportation, and industrial metropolis. For this reason, Quebec was quickly integrated into both the western European and North American economies. The rapid growth of Quebec’s French Canadian rural population, supplemented by immigrants, provided a large pool of surplus labour for a wide range of primary and secondary industries. In 1879 industrialization was accelerated by Canada’s policy of protective tariffs, as well as by the construction of three national transcontinental railways, which opened up the Northwest Territories and parts of northern Quebec and Ontario for settlement. Where Quebec society differed from that of the rest of North America was in its ambivalent response to rapid industrialization and urbanization. Because the process was initiated and controlled by Montreal’s British Canadian and American financial, commercial, and industrial bourgeoisie, a cultural division of labour quickly emerged. The industrial labour force was largely composed of unskilled and semiskilled Francophone Catholics, and the captains of industry were Anglophone Protestants. In the late 19th century a French Canadian upper middle class emerged, but its scope was limited to small and medium-size businesses, including financial institutions, located largely outside the Montreal region.

Both of Quebec’s principal political parties—the Conservatives, who dominated the legislature in the 19th century, and the Liberals, who held office between 1897 and 1936—supported the industrialization of Quebec’s economy. There were strong links between the political class and the business leaders, both English- and French-speaking, as the province competed with Ontario for domestic and foreign investment. While Montreal was the headquarters of the national banks, the insurance corporations, and the railway companies, Ontario—because of its proximity to the United States, their shared language, and the vast amounts of hydroelectric power at Niagara Falls—attracted the lion’s share of direct U.S. investment. A struggle developed between Montreal and Toronto, which would slowly but inevitably gain the upper hand as the 20th century progressed.

The cultural division of labour became a major concern of French-speaking Quebec’s traditional petit-bourgeois leaders and officials of the Roman Catholic Church. These cultural and religious nationalists feared that members of the rapidly expanding French-speaking Catholic working class would lose their religion, language, and culture as they earned their living in English-language Protestant factories and commercial enterprises. Leading French Canadian nationalists Henri Bourassa and the abbé Lionel-Adolphe Groulx argued vigorously that the province’s Francophone society must remain predominantly Roman Catholic and rural. They denounced French-speaking politicians for neglecting the needs of the rural communities and for selling out Quebec’s natural resources to foreigners.

Yet, remaining isolated on farms and in rural villages and rejecting much-needed factory jobs was not a realistic alternative for the vast majority of French Canadians. Realizing that industrialization was inevitable, moderate church leaders created a range of Catholic organizations and institutions, including labour unions, professional associations, and agricultural cooperatives, that allowed French Canadians to gain some control over the new economic and social order. The church also retained control of education and rejected attempts by politicians and businessmen, both French and English, to reform the traditionalist school system. While Quebec’s industrial economy diversified and expanded during and after World War I, Francophone children were deprived of the necessary education and training skills to take advantage of the new opportunities. French Canadians and their society became economically and socially inferior in a province where they constituted the majority.

In the interim, it was far easier for French Canadian nationalists to convince their compatriots that Canada’s English-speaking and Protestant majority was depriving them of their political and constitutional rights. Bourassa led the campaign to convince British Canadians to perceive their country as a bilingual and bicultural nation-state. He argued that Canada should declare its independence from the British Empire and become a full-fledged member of the international community. When Britain declared war on Germany in 1914, Canada was obligated to participate. French Canadians felt deeply betrayed by Prime Minister Robert Borden’s Conservative government’s decision to impose conscription in 1917. They abandoned the national Conservative Party and turned to the Liberal Party, which dominated politics in Quebec for most of the 20th century. The consequences at the provincial level were somewhat more convoluted.

The Great Depression to the 1950s

The collapse of international trade and industrial capitalism in the 1930s had a profound and lasting impact on the French-speaking community of Quebec. Believing that the economic crisis had proven them right, French Canadians helped create a coalition of Liberal and Conservative politicians and nationalists to establish the National Union party, led by Maurice Duplessis, who obtained the support of the Roman Catholic Church leaders and became premier in 1936. His government, abandoning momentarily the nationalist agenda, gave substantial financial assistance to hard-pressed farming communities and hounded organized labour while supporting continued industrialization. Duplessis strongly objected to Canada’s participation in World War II. Although defeated in 1939, he was reelected in 1944 and remained premier until his death in 1959, owing to the support of big business, the Catholic Church, rural voters, and nonunion workers.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of educated French Canadians—neonationalists who redefined themselves as Québécois and neoliberals committed to the Keynesian social service state—set in motion an ideological revolution. They began to make reform proposals in the 1950s. Both groups rejected traditional French Canadian nationalism and its antiquated portrayal of Francophones as a minority Roman Catholic and rural society. These intellectuals also rejected the traditional nationalist regime of Duplessis, its antidemocratic alliance with an overly clerical and autocratic Roman Catholic Church, its antiunion legislation, and its open invitation to U.S. corporations. Neonationalists proposed the creation of a modern, secular Quebec state run by and for the French-speaking majority. The state, not the Catholic church, would be responsible for the survival and expansion of Québécois society. Acquiring a modern bureaucracy, the state would finance and control a full range of social services, reform the outmoded Catholic-run educational system, and establish a Francophone-controlled industrial labour movement.

Progressive Liberals also proposed the creation of a modern, democratic, and interventionist Quebec state, but they wanted it to be the servant of every citizen of Quebec, regardless of language, ethnicity, colour, class, religion, or gender. They called for an integrated, secular, and progressive educational system. Most importantly, they wanted to block the creation of a Francophone nationalist state committed primarily to collective, rather than individual, rights.

The “Quiet Revolution” to the present

Under the Duplessis administration, none of the neonationalist or liberal reforms were implemented. In the interim, the social and economic transformation of the Québécois community continued apace, thus creating the opportunity for rapid institutional change should a more sympathetic political party take office. The Quebec Liberal Party chose a former federal minister, Jean Lesage, as its new leader in 1958 and adopted a new political platform comprising elements from both the neonationalist and neoliberal platforms. Following Duplessis’s death in 1959, Lesage and the Liberals formed a government with a slim majority in 1960, and the “Quiet Revolution” began. Supported by an emerging new middle class of well-educated Québécois, the Lesage government created a modern, secular Quebec state that took control of all social, health, and educational institutions, opening thousands of jobs for educated Francophones. The government also created and managed numerous Crown corporations, including Hydro-Québec, where French was the language of the workplace. Many Québécois used this experience to create private companies that became part of Quebec, Inc., a consortium of large Québécois corporations. To finance all of these expensive reform programs, Lesage and his successors demanded and received a greater share of federal personal, corporate, and estate taxes. Quebec also opted out of many of the Canadian government’s shared-cost programs and received additional tax points. Quebec garnered the largest share (nearly 50 percent) of the equalization transfers made by Ottawa to Canada’s have-not provinces.

The Quebec government’s pursuit of additional tax revenue and jurisdictional power over domestic and foreign matters posed a serious political challenge to an already decentralized Canadian federation. Right- and left-wing secessionist political movements emerged in the mid-1960s. They coalesced around René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois, which was founded in 1968. Following defeats in the elections of 1970 and 1973, the Parti Québécois, promising a referendum on secession, was elected in November 1976. The Parti Québécois’s first legislation was Bill 101, the Charter of the French Language. Responding to this very serious threat to national unity, the Canadian Liberal government, led by Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, prepared itself for the provincial referendum on secession that took place in May 1980. Garnering 60 percent of the vote, the federalist forces led by Trudeau defeated the secessionists. Trudeau acted immediately on his promise to renew the federation. The Canadian Parliament, with the support of nine provinces and a majority of Canadians, acted to “patriate” (a uniquely Canadian term meaning roughly to Canadianize) the country’s founding document, the British North America Act of 1867, which originally had been enacted by the British Parliament. The resultant Canada Act of 1982, augmented by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (a bill of rights), provided the country with a new constitution. Lévesque’s Parti Québécois rejected the new constitution on the grounds that it diminished Quebec’s power over language and education and that it did away with Quebec’s constitutional veto.

Quebec’s constitutional struggle with the federal government remained largely dormant until 1987, when Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney negotiated a deal with the Quebec Liberal government of Robert Bourassa. The result, the Meech Lake Accord, recognized Quebec as a distinct society and gave the government and legislature of Quebec the right to preserve and promote its uniqueness. It also gave Quebec and the other provinces expanded powers, including a veto over all changes made to Canada’s central institutions. However, the Meech Lake Accord was not ratified by all 10 provinces within its required three-year limit because of opposition in Manitoba and Newfoundland.

Canada’s constitutional wars continued when Bourassa, with support from Mulroney, threatened to hold another referendum on secession in October 1992 if his government was not offered an acceptable set of constitutional proposals by the federal government and the other provinces. Months of negotiations produced the Charlottetown Consensus Report, which called for enhanced autonomy not only for Quebec but for the country’s aboriginal groups. The proposal was rejected by Canadians in a national referendum by a margin of 55 to 45 percent. Mulroney resigned, and in the 1993 election the Conservative Party was shattered. Bourassa, ill with cancer, also resigned. His successor, Daniel Johnson, lost the 1994 election to Parti Québécois leader Jacques Parizeau, who promised to hold a referendum within the year. However, under pressure, Parizeau backed away from a referendum on outright secession. Instead, Quebecers were asked if they supported the concept of sovereignty partnership between an independent Quebec and the rest of Canada. In 1995 a powerful campaign for the “yes” vote nearly won the day for the separatist cause, as the referendum was defeated by fewer than 55,000 votes. Parizeau stepped down and was replaced by Lucien Bouchard, a founder of Bloc Québécois.

Prime Minister Jean Chrétien was shocked by the narrow margin of victory. His government passed a resolution recognizing Quebec as a distinct society and a bill stating that the Canadian government would never ratify another major constitutional amendment without the approval of Quebec’s National Assembly. He also referred Quebec’s referendum law to Canada’s Supreme Court; it stipulated that the Quebec assembly had the right, under international law, to make a unilateral declaration of independence following a simple majority vote on secession. In August 1998 the Supreme Court justices, in their landmark Quebec Secession Reference decision, ruled that Quebec did not have, under domestic or international law, the right to secede unilaterally. The justices then opined that if Quebecers voted on a direct question pertaining to secession only, with a clear majority, the Canadian government would be obligated to negotiate secession with Quebec. The court made it clear that the negotiations would encompass all matters, including borders, and that there was no guarantee that they would succeed. They concluded that the Quebec state could proceed to take all the risks inherent in an illegal declaration of independence.

The vast majority of Québécois accepted the Supreme Court’s controversial decision, thereby preventing the Parti Québécois government from employing it as a catalyst for a third referendum on secession. Quebecers reelected Bouchard’s Parti Québécois to a second term in 1998. At a convention in May 2000, Bouchard pledged to promote with renewed vigour the cause of Quebec’s independence but refused to set a date for another referendum. He retired in 2001, citing his failure to make advancements toward sovereignty. Bouchard became the leader of a movement against another referendum on secession on the grounds that the Québécois society had far more urgent demographic, social, and economic problems to resolve to ensure its long-term viability, prosperity, and sustainability. In 2003, however, Parti Québécois and Bernard Landry, who had succeeded Bouchard as premier, were ousted from office by the Liberal Party and its leader, Jean Charest, who promised to restore the health care system and to lower taxes for the middle class.

In November 2005 Parti Québécois elected as its leader André Boisclair, a charismatic 39-year-old who had been a member of the party’s executive committee from 1985 and a member of the provincial assembly since 1989. The vast majority of the Québécois lost confidence in him, however, a result of what many considered a lack of political judgment and in response to a personal scandal (before his election as leader he had admitted prior cocaine use). As a result, Charest’s Liberal government, despite failing to deliver on its two key promises, was reelected in 2007, though with only one-third of the seats, mostly in Anglophone and Allophone ridings. Mario Dumont’s Democratic Action Party, which represented the interests of small-town rural Québécois and disgruntled middle-class suburbanites, garnered one-third of the seats from both the Liberal Party and Parti Québécois. In the wake of Parti Québécois’s second defeat, many Québécois appeared to have no desire to be drawn into a third referendum on secession. Like Bouchard, most Québécois came to understand that it was necessary and urgent to resolve the many demographic, social, and economic problems confronting their society before confronting the risks inherent in seceding from the Canadian federation. Québécois also gambled that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative federal government would grant the province of Quebec special constitutional status within a more decentralized and asymmetrical Canadian federation, thereby making secession unnecessary. A failure to deliver on this promise might well revive the secessionist movement, leaving Canadians once again facing a challenge to the political and territorial integrity of their nation-state.