Word: quebecs
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While Laporte's murder completely discredited the F.L.Q. 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...
...nine months of 1977, Quebec suffered a net loss of 30,622 people. Some nervous English Quebeckers who decided to stay deposited their savings at banks in such U.S. border cities as Plattsburgh, N.Y., and Burlington, Vt. Last month a major uproar broke out when Canada's largest life insurance company, Sun Life Assurance Co. (assets: $5.5 billion), announced that it was moving its headquarters from Montreal to Toronto. After urgent personal pleas from Prime Minister Trudeau, Sun Life officials said that the firm and its 1,800 head-office employees would stay?for two more years...
...separatism? Why now? For the Parti Québécois, the answer is simple logic: a people with a common language, customs and culture should "naturally" form a nation-state. That conviction has been nourished by a sudden, popular expansion of French pride, in which Quebec became, if not a political state, most certainly a state of mind. It is summarized in a provincial-government slogan: "De plus en plus en Québec, c 'est en français que ça se passe " (More and more in Quebec, it's in French that things are happening). Quebec has sprouted dozens...
...real reasons behind separatist feeling in Quebec are more complicated than that. The rapid industrialization of the province has brought unprecedented mobility to Quebecois?and with it, uncertainty about whether their unique way of life can possibly last. The Quebecois birth rate, once the highest in Canada, has become the lowest: 15 per 1,000 people. The French-speaking proportion of Canada's population has dropped from 27% to 25% and is likely to decrease further. Since 1946, nearly 378,000 immigrants, mostly Greeks and Italians, have come to Montreal. In nine cases out of ten, the newcomers learned English...
Many Quebeckers fear the compelling force of North America's predominant language and culture. When French-speaking sons and daughters of the province learn English?as they frequently must to gain jobs or advance in them ?they begin to be weaned from their native language. Outside Quebec, Canada's scattered French-speaking minority regularly loses a large part of its younger generation to English-speaking North America. Says Quebecois Poet Fernand Ouellette: "In a milieu of bilingualism, there is no coexistence, there is only a continuous aggression of the language of the majority." Quebecois are particularly bitter because little...