Word: quebecs
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During the first week of his trip John Paul quickly turned characteristic Canadian reserve into enthusiasm, as he switched with ease from exhortative Pontiff to caring pastor. At an outdoor Mass for an estimated 250,000 worshipers at Quebec City's Laval University, the Pope urged a "missionary effort" to develop a "new culture that will integrate the modernity of America even while preserving its deep-seated humanity." At the shrine of Ste. Anne de Beaupré on the banks of the St. Lawrence River, he greeted a crowd of more than 3,000 colorfully garbed Indians and Eskimos...
This year, however, the province made a stunning about-face. During the past 67 years, the Progressive Conservatives, perceived in Quebec as the party of English-speaking Canada, had carried the province only once, in 1958; in the last election, they managed to win just one of Quebec's 75 seats. Last week they captured 58. The remarkable shift emphasized just how dramatically the political tide in Quebec has turned: after 25 years of mounting autonomist fervor, the urge to unmerge is subsiding. "On the scale of things outdated," wrote Lawrence Martin, a Montreal-based columnist for the Toronto...
Both nature and culture have long conspired to excite Quebec's yearning for autonomy. As Canada's largest province, with twice the area of Texas and a gross domestic product double that of New Zealand, Quebec is confident that its thick forests and clear mountain lakes afford it the resources to go it alone. As a pocket of Europe, American-style, graced with both fairy-tale cobbled streets and shiny futuristic shopping malls, the province seems already to belong to a different country from Newfoundland or the Yukon...
...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 a Montreal greasy spoon known as Irv's Light Lunch was rechristened Chez...
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...