Word: montreal
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...provincial leaders will gather in Ottawa to discuss means of righting the country's grave economic problems, which include a galloping 8.5% unemployment and 9.5% inflation. But underlying the talks will be a nervous awareness that Canada's 111-year-old confederation is in danger and that, as Montreal Novelist Hugh MacLennan puts it: "This country we have taken for granted might be lost...
...MacLennan described the historical relationship between French-and English-speaking Canadians as "the two solitudes." Roman Catholic, French-speaking, stamped by a different culture and tradition, the mostly rural Quebecois lived a separate life from that of the province's Protestant, English-speaking minority, which centered its activities around Montreal and the nearby Eastern Townships. For the Anglophone elite, the hub of Quebec life was Montreal's fashionable Sherbrooke Street, within easy distance of the banks and big businesses that they dominated almost exclusively. For the French-speaking upper class of lawyers, intellectuals and politicians, it was the history-drenched...
...bigger than France and Spain combined. As in the rest of Canada, most of the province's population huddles along a narrow ribbon in the south; the vast majority of Quebecois live within 50 miles of the St. Lawrence, and 82% live within 200 miles of Montreal (pop. 2,758,780). Quebec is rich in iron, copper, zinc and timber, and produces 80% of the non-Communist world's asbestos. Its 450 rivers give it huge reserves of hydropower. Vast hydroelectric projects, like the $16.2 billion James Bay complex now under construction (see map), have made Quebec...
...early '60s that resentment against Anglophone domination led to the first stirrings of radical separatist feelings, embodied by the tiny Quebec Liberation Front (F.L.Q.). Terrorist F.L.Q. members planted bombs in mailboxes outside homes in Montreal's affluent Anglophone suburb of Westmount. Separatism received a huge burst of publicity in 1967, when the late Charles de Gaulle gave his notorious "Vive le Québec libre!" speech at Montreal's city hall. Around the same time, portions of Quebec's 850,000-member union movement turned to Marxist ideology, launching widespread strikes and demonstrations. In 1969, when Montreal police and firemen went...
...radicals, it did not demolish moderate, democratic separatists?like René Lévesque and his Parti Quebecois. Slowly and steadily, the Péquistes continued to gain ground, helped considerably by the sloppy government of the dominant Quebec Liberal Party. Then came the 1976 election. At the P.Q. victory party in Montreal's Paul Sauvé Arena, 6,000 supporters embraced, wept and roared out the words of a modern Quebec chanson, "Tomorrow belongs to us ..." The message was not lost on Quebec's 800,000 English-speaking citizens?or on the rest of Canada...