Word: partie
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...murdered a Cabinet minister, kidnaped a British diplomat, and set off so many explosions, both verbal and physical, that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act, Canada's equivalent of martial law. Even today the nation's most eccentric voice of disaffection, the nonsensical Rhinoceros Party, is based and enjoys its greatest following in Montreal. Though the independence-minded Parti Québécois has controlled the provincial legislature for eight years, Quebec has long voted overwhelmingly Liberal in national elections...
Capitalizing on this impulse, Provincial Premier René Lévesque, 62, and his Parti Québécois have always taken separatism as their driving ambition and rallying cry. The party stormed into power in 1976, as teachers, intellectuals and unionists−drawn from among the 5 million French speakers, who predominate among the province's 6 million residents−rallied behind the secessionist cause. Before long the new provincial government had enshrined French as Quebec's only official language and forbidden the use of English-language signs even in predominantly English-speaking neighborhoods. Thus...
Mulroney, by contrast, took pains to acknowledge the sensitive issue of Quebec's independence, even if he never exactly addressed it. Late in the campaign, he attracted widespread support from the Parti Québécois (three Tory candidates were onetime separatist activists). He shrewdly cultivated alliances with such local power brokers as former Labor Negotiator Lucien Bouchard and Senator Arthur Tremblay. And his ads invariably identified him as the "Boy from Baie Comeau." In the end, Québécois simply found Mulroney the stronger candidate. "The French in Quebec aren't Martians," says McGill...
Trudeau, washed into office on waves of Trudeaumania, was put in place in the hope that he would keep a smoldering Quebec in confederation, and, in that, he succeeded, even as he also alienated the west. The separatist Parti Quebecois, once a serious threat, is now a spent force, reduced to a 23% following in the latest polls. In the future, it seems likely that the more vengeful clauses of their language legislation will be revoked. I dream that some day it will be legal again for an English-language bookshop in Montreal to mount a bilingual sign...
...attached to a Canadian Armed Forces installation near Ottawa. Canadian authorities have not speculated on Lortie's motives. But the tape left by the man at CJRP threatened to "destroy" the provincial government, which has espoused separation from the rest of Canada. The recording railed against the ruling Parti Québécois 's pro-French language policies, declaring: "I [have] waited for just the right moment. It's at hand now. The government will be destroyed...