Word: quebecs
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...headquarters of the Sun Life Assurance Co. in Montreal was once the largest office building in the British Empire, the secular cathedral of the English-speaking business elite in the world's second largest French-speaking city. Now it is a symbol of panic in the face of Quebec's threat to separate from the rest of Canada. Last week Sun Life's 1 million policy holders voted by a 5-to-1 ratio to transfer the headquarters to Toronto, Canada's bustling financial capital. Sun Life (assets: $5.5 billion) thus became the biggest company...
...background, white-gloved waiters are busily setting out plates of oysters on the half shell when the guest of honor, tiny Rene Levesque from Quebec, strides in searching for hands. Bleary Canadian reporters tumble in behind...
NATIONALIST SENTIMENT is diffused in varying degrees throughout the French Canadian population. Nationalism has been exacerbated in Quebec because of the persistent confusion between class antagonism and linguistic and national divisions. The English Canadians have historically dominated the ranks of the business elite, so when French workers conflict with management, they conflict with an English management. Class antagonism assumes the form of national antagonism, and reinforces the already present nationalist element...
...important contemporary source of nationalism is the provincial civil service. Created rapidly during the Quiet Revolution, it has channelled the empire-building impulse common to most bureaucracies in a nation-building direction. Because of the language barrier separating French civil servants from the English corporate world, Quebec's bureaucrats are less immediately sensitive to conservative business influence than are most other bureaucracies. The consequence of rapidly creating a nationalist and non-business oriented civil service is that the bureaucracy itself is a powerful motor force for Quebec's independence...
...Quebec's problem, like all longstanding historical ones, can not be reduced to any simplistic solution. Nationalism is still alive and well in Quebec, although it is not clear that independence of the P.Q. variety will in fact offer any substantive advantages to French Canadians that could not be obtained within the present federal system. Against the potential benefit arising from independence must be pitted the question of economic cost. That question has already received the bulk of Quebec's attention precisely because the substantive benefits of independence are far from clear. Unless these benefits can be clarified...