The Marxist Quarterly Autumn 1965

Current Studies of Quebec

THE STATE OF QUEBEC by Peter Desbarats, McClelland & Stewart, 188 pp., $4.95.

TO THOSE WHO approach Quebec gingerly or hot with prejudice, this "journalist's view of the Quiet Revolution" is meant as a partial catalogue of grievances suffered by Canadians who speak French and reside in Quebec. It will be an eye-opener for fanatic Franco-phobes who have tended to arbitrarily dismiss the French fact in our midst.

A signal service by the author is to avoid the current penchant for describing Quebec's status either as a "society," a twin "culture," or one of "two majorities" that inhabit Canada. M. Desbarats says:

Quebec is not, like the other provinces, a part of a greater Canada, at least not in the eyes of its French-speaking citizens. It is a nation unto itself, a nation which has never acquired the exterior trappings of nationhood.... Other provinces are part of a larger nation.

There are some interesting statistics provided underlining the problem. Thus of 700,000 Quebec citizens whose mother tongue is English, more than 436,000 live on Montreal Island and its adjacent Ile Jesus.

Three out of every four English-speaking Quebec citizens live in Metropolitan Montreal.Thc English make up 13 per cent of the population but they are 25 per cent of the population on the Island of Montreal.

These facts, when linked to the ever-present English domination of the financial and commercial world, with the best jobs going to English-speaking people, and the necessity of French Canadians being bilingual to get a job, while such a requirement is not essential for English-speaking persons -- all add up to a considerable and tangible oppression, particularly-felt in Montreal.

Setting out Quebec's complaints, the author reveals the role of the Anglostocracy in the world of industry and finance. Although French Canadians make up one-third of Canada's population, only 6.7 per cent make up its economic elite, a fact drawn from Professor John Porter's studies (Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 1957). There follow interviews with unnamed industrialists and Montreal Anglocrats whose backward views on the roots of the French problem are bared.

Those few French-Canadian capitalists who made a place in the sun for themselves, after Wall St. and the English-Canadian capitalists helped themselves to the

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lion's share, are quoted as being ill at ease with the Anglocrats' indifference to the explosive power of separatist and national feeling. One of them says: "They (the English) have to join with the moderate French Canadians and try to curb the revolution."

What these status quo French Canadians fear like the very plague is the mixture of national sentiment with socialist thinking. One observer of this development comments:

It is hard for a French Canadian over forty to understand that the typical young French Canadian wants to free himself from foreign economic control, from capitalist control, and from Church control—all at the same time.

The State of Quebec is a warning to English Canada. It seems to say: seek out the "responsible French-Canadian element, make the necessary concessions, or you will lose everything -- your vested economic interests, as well as your political power." Some people are dismissing this type of warning as exaggerated. Note the reaction to the preliminary report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, which was described as "alarmist" in some English-Canadian quarters.

Peter Desbarats is in reality one of those important liaison men for the English capitalists -- with one foot in Quebec and the other in English Canada. In his chapter on politics and Quebec-Ottawa relations, the men around Lesage, etc., he illustrates how the principle of "cooperative federalism" is applied in the daily Pearson-Lesage relationship, for example on the pensions issue. These are revealing chapters of the book and worth reading.

M. Desbarats is a great admirer of the new flock of politicians, civil servants and officials at the helm of state in Quebec:

Responsible French Canadians are speaking in the plainest terms today, expressing aspirations which are not only contemporary but shared by all Canadians. English Canada should not delude itself with fears of "surrender" to Quebec's demands. It should not listen to the extremists but to the men who are actually running the province and who represent a Quebec that is more pragmatic and reasonable -- with all the Anglo-Saxon connotations that can be given to these words -- than at any time since the Conquest.

And later, he writes:

...the stability of the province depends in part on the new class of politicians, civil servants and businessmen who have risen, despite great obstacles, to positions of power in Quebec today.

Much as M. Desbarats fears being classified as one of the vendus or those selling Quebec down the river, his words will certainly earn him such a label among those who consider Premier Lesage to be "le roi nègre" of French Canada. In his thankless pursuit of middle ground M. Desbarats re-

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fers to the moderates (presumably including himself in this category):

One of the major tragedies of the split social structure in Quebec is that people who attempt to take an independent line, differing from their own group's commonly accepted policy, are suspected immediately of being traitors. There is no neutral ground...

But of course, mais oui. M. Desbarats was given four months off his regular job on the Montreal Star (a Conservative Anglostocratic journal) and as columnist for the Southam newspaper chain to write his book -- the better to enlist support in English Canada for those who are working out new and better devices to continue the subjugation of French Canada, be they a repatriated BNA Act in lieu of a new Constitution, partial bilingual or economic concessions, or a fictitious independence in the name of "cooperative federalism" instead of the real thing.

M. A. DUVERNAY

 

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-- This OCR was prepared by Kathleen Moore in August 2014 for the legal research purposes of Habeas Corpus Canada. --