Word: partied
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Sovereignty for Quebec was the rallying cry that helped carry Premier René Levesque and his Parti Québécois to power eight years ago. When Levesque declared last week that the goal of independence had to give way to bread-and-butter issues, he split his party and possibly jeopardized his eight-seat majority in Quebec's provincial parliament. Five cabinet ministers resigned, two legislators bolted, and half a dozen others threatened to quit the party. The defectors included Finance Minister Jacques Parizeau and Social Affairs Minister Camille Laurin, an author of the law that imposed...
...highest tax rates in Canada, he wanted to prepare for the provincial elections that must be held by spring 1986 by focusing on economics and getting along with the popular new federal government of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. But at a convention in June, the Parti Québécois had voted to make independence its main campaign issue. Abandoning that cherished goal, Parizeau said last week, would be "sterile and humiliating...
...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...