This stared out as a comment on Christopher’s post about his recent visit to La Belle Province, but it got so long and convoluted I decided not to clutter the comments there with its length.
I worked in Canada from mid 1969 to late 1978 living first in Ottawa then nearby across the Ottawa River in the Province of Quebec. I worked for a subsidiary of Bell Canada (the telephone company) and my wife worked, first in the public service (Department of Finance) then on Parliament Hill for a couple of MP’s.
There had been festering discontent in Quebec regarding separation for years, probably ever since Confederation (1867) even the choice of Ottawa as the capital (1857) was flavored by the divide and was one of those many English compromises that almost worked. Choosing Toronto (the largest and a very English city) would have put the capital too close to the US border and memories of “Manifest Destiny” and the unpleasantness of 1812 were still a factor, choosing Montreal would seem to be giving control to the French, also remembered for their recent aggression in Europe, so Queen Victoria herself announced that the capital would henceforth be Ottawa (formerly Bytown, named after Colonel John By who built the Rideau canal system as a defense against the US in 1812). Ottawa was conveniently located almost exactly halfway between Toronto and Montreal and as a wag of the day reported was “a slumbering sub-arctic lumber village”.
The discontent smouldered on right through the post war years fed by the rhetoric of a continuously renewed group of vocal separatists, notable among them later were Pierre Trudeau, Pierre Lalonde, Robert Bourassa and a feisty chain smoking French monoglot named Rene Levesque, more about all of them later. It all came to a bit of a head during the visit of Charles de Gaulle to Montreal during 1967 for the opening of Expo. The general, for reasons known only to himself, though senility may have been a factor, decided to end his speech with a loud invocation “Vive Le Quebec” he shouted to the adoring crowd, that was OK, then “Vive Le Quebec Libre”, that was not, and the then Prime Minister (Lester Pearson, a fine man) summarily shuffled Mon General off back to France with the comment (in English) “The citizens of Canada do not need liberating” and the implied “and certainly not by you”. A year or so later Pearson was gone and in his place the Liberal party of Canada had elected Trudeau as the Prime Minister, he of course brought along Lalonde and a crowd of other Quebecers including Robert Bourassa (soon to become premier of Quebec) and Jean Chretien later to follow him as PM.
Early on Friday, Oct. 16, 1970, I was eating breakfast in our apartment on the eighth floor of an apartment building two blocks from Parliament Hill when it was announced on the radio that the PM (Trudeau) had invoked the War Measures Act (hereinafter WMA). I had never heard of it. The radio announcer explained that by invoking this law, Trudeau had given himself the power to arrest anyone he wished and to hold any people he wished in jail indefinitely without charging them with a crime, he had declared himself the dictator of Canada.
Was there fighting in the streets and blood in the gutters? No. Were there politicians swinging gently in the breeze from street corner lampposts? No. But several days before, a fringe separatist group, the Front de Liberation du Quebec (FLQ), had kidnapped two high government officials: Quebec Labor Minister Pierre Laporte and British Trade Commissioner James Cross and were threatening them with death (irony here, as Cross was a decorated British Army officer who had won distinction in the war during the liberation of occupied France (Vive le France Libre?). Trudeau panicked and without consulting with the RCMP or the Army (who both later said they would have resisted the action) had his private secretary (Lalonde) draft the Quebec Government’s request for the war measures and had the premier of Quebec (Robert Bourassa) sign the document at midnight (any of these names sound familiar?)
Where was I? Ah! Yes breakfast. The building we lived in was also home to a few “notables” one of whom was Edgar Benson the then Minister of Finance and at the time my wife’s bosses, bosses, boss. He lived up above the tenth floor (high rent country). I left our apartment and waited for the elevator to take me down to ground level and the parking area, the door opened and standing in the lift was a very young soldier in full war gear nervously fingering the safety catch on an automatic machine pistol strapped across his chest. Benson obviously had been provided some hasty protection and I suppose so had we. I managed a “Good Morning” but got no response. What his instructions (rules of engagement, these days) had been I could only imagine. “You! Stand in that lift and if anybody does anything suspicious, shoot them, OK?” I tried very hard not to do anything that would be even remotely construed as suspicious. Aspiring engineers at large corporations wore clean white shirts and ties and leather shoes with polished toes back then, not grubby tee shirts and flip flops, plastic pocket protectors were optional. So I probably passed a basic visual sanitary test. When it stopped I exited the lift with haste and was in my car and away before any bullets started flying. I worked way out west of the city on Corkstown Road, which in the distant past had led to Corkstown, back then a squalid collection of hovels wherein lived the hundreds of laborers mostly imported from County Cork in Ireland who were employed in the building of the aforementioned Rideau Canal (Navigators they were called because they built navigation canals, navvies in the jargon of my West Country youth)
Trudeau claimed there was an “Apprehended Insurrection” in Quebec, an astounding piece of political doublespeak that I remember to this day. This previously vocal separatist now turning on his fellow travelers like a rabid dog.
The next morning the radio news headline was “Soldier dies in Ottawa”
He was jumping off a truck outside our building at the changing of the guard that morning, he dropped his rifle and it went off blowing his brains all over Elgin Street, I was there in my car waiting to get out of the parking lot, I was late for work that day. He was, I think, the only casualty of the whole debacle.
The WMA among other things allowed:
(a) censorship, and the control and suppression of publications, writings, maps, plans, photographs, communications, and means of communication;
(b) arrest, detention exclusion, and deportation;
(c) control of the harbors, ports, and territorial waters of Canada and the movements of vessels;
(d) transportation by land, air, or water and the control of the transport of persons and things;
(e) trading, exportation, importation, production, and manufacture;
(f) appropriation, control, forfeiture, and disposition of property and of the use thereof.
I don’t remember many of these actions taking place, they certainly never “came for me” but the people were justifiably upset, nothing was done, except some angry muttering, it was after all Canada. Negotiations with the kidnappers took place, at the Expo site if I remember right (it was declared Cuban territory for the talks), the hostages were released and the kidnappers freighted off to Cuba (their wish and not to Gitmo either). By Christmas it was all over.
Shortly thereafter my wife left the Finance Department and went to work for Flora Macdonald (not that one, the new MP for Kingston and the Islands, a constituency located at the southern terminus of the aforesaid Rideau Canal), who had defeated Edgar Benson in the next election. By the way, does anyone else know that Flora Macdonald (the bonnie Prince Charlie and Isle of Skye one) later moved to South Carolina and spent the rest of her days there as a well respected married lady? More importantly does anyone care?
Four years later we had bought a house across the river in Quebec. Bourassa (a Liberal) had then lost the premiership of Quebec to Rene Levesque (PQ, and an unreformed separatist) in a hard fought election in which the districts nearest the Ontario border (including ours) had voted that they might prefer someone else. Levesque still won handily and as a reward got some serious federal money from Trudeau for capital improvements in the province, probably as a bribe to keep him quiet for a bit. The Quebec road authority came and tore up the whole length of the main road of the little town we lived in, then they tore up the road-bed down to the dirt, then they left and did not come back for four years. Politics, Quebec style. You could not make it up.
Just in closing “La Belle Province” was the motto on all license plates issued in Quebec in the seventies, now it is “Je me Souviens” and yes, I do.
Boadicea's Chariot 
Sounds positively dystopic!
Interesting after 10 years there you left, presumably to take a job in the USA, where you stayed and took out nationality.
I’d like to hear your views on the relative merits of the two countries and why you never chose to stay there.
I’ve never lived there, just observations being so close to the border and most of my friends are Canadians who have decided to live down here. Interestingly Canadians that have bailed out strike me as ultra realists, more than either of the nationalities in their own milieu. That is why I like them, utterly pragmatic on the whole.
Québec is by far the most corrupt region in the “Old Commonwealth” plus USA. Each Km of road costs 30pc more to build in la Belle Province than it does anywhere else in Canada. Virtually every prime minister of Québec has been tainted, if not felled, by corruption. Québécois politicians are also infamous for switching loyalty to any side that favours them financially. Had the pre-Quiet Revolution consensus survived it would have been a left/right matter, but in Québec’s post-LeSage years the political centre had shifted so far to the left that it became a matter of independence/federation. Save for the fact that even the most ardent supporters of le Québec Libre are willing to quiet down for an extra envelope of cash or dosh for their local projects.
Canada is a hybrid country formed from the saner parts of the former British North America and the remnants of la Nouvelle France. The federation was a product of necessity, not any sort of great desire. British North Americans and French North Americans did not care much for each other, arguably they still don’t, but their dislike for each other was markedly less severe than their shared distaste for any potential union with whatever was south of them. With the War of 1812 still fresh in their collective memory and the Mexican-American War reminding them that the USA was not to be relied on to act with integrity they came up with some rude compromise. Far from an ideal union but one that has managed to function none-the-less.
Politics aside I’ve found that the Québécois do have real grievances. Many anglophone Canadians, especially in the west, seem to resent the very existence of Québec, at least a francophone Québec.
It took until 2006 for the Canada’s Parliament to even acknowledge symbolically that Québec constituted a nation within Canada, a group with its own history, language, culture, and traditions. Anglophone travellers in Québec also tend to have an attitude of linguistic entitlement. They don’t care if Québec-ville the capital of a culturally and linguistically French region that pre-dates Anglophone settlements in the country, they bark orders in English at them with impunity. If Québécois did the same in, say, British Columbia or Alberta the same individuals would make snide and condescending remarks. The Québécois in many ways are still treated as second-class citizens yet they remain mostly loyal to Canada. (The 1995 referendum was controversial as the wording of the question was highly misleading and many who voted “yes” favoured autonomy, not outright secession)
Hello Mrs. O. But for a few twists of fate we would probably have stayed in Canada, my wife and I both become Canadian citizens in the mid-seventies and fully intended to stay there. We had done pretty well financially and had a comfortable lifestyle and lots of friends.
In any comparison I would be comparing the Canada of the seventies with the US of today, hardly fair to either of them.
I was recruited (head hunted) for my first job in the US, it was not something that at the time was being sought. True, the company for which I worked in Canada (itself a subsidiary of a US Corporation) was in trouble financially but our thinking was that the opportunity in the US sounded pretty good and if it did not work out we could always move back to Ottawa.
There is a kind of philosophical point here too, I have always thought that if one grasps an opportunity when it is offered there MAY BE be regrets later, but if one does not grasp it there will ALWAYS BE regrets later. This had certainly been true concerning our move from the UK to Canada, I cannot imagine a circumstance where we would have been “better off” staying put. Another factor in my case was the baggage of a lowly upbringing, the idea that one could never have any large influence over one’s position was deeply ingrained, keep your head down, don’t rock the boat, nose to the grindstone, don’t risk your pension etc. (something very Welsh about all that). I was in my thirties before I realised that whatever success one has is truly portable, not the property of any employer and easily transferred to the next job. Enabling, is that one of the BS words they use today?
So we moved, ironically from big city Canada (Ottawa was even then about 500,000) to small town USA (Newark, Delaware population 50,000 winter, 25,000 summer and home of the University of Delaware) so another unfair comparison. No regrets, or very few, small town life here is not that which makes the news on TV, people are friendly and after thirty years friends are many, certainly made a lot more money here than I thought was possible although maybe I’m just getting better at looking after it. My Welsh mother always told her friends back home “They live like film stars” well, not quite but I’m not looking to move again. Just last year (after thirty four years) I finally sold one of my last links with Canada, what was our weekend home on the Rideau waterway, one should not rush these things.
Regarding pragmatism, no emotional ties to Canada and few to the US (my wife died here in 2008), some to Wales, not the place itself (heaven forbid) but more the idea of the place, there’s something vaguely druidic about that.
Thank you, LW, for a very interesting and informative post.
Thank you for the answer LW. Interestingly I feel exactly the same about Wales. It satisfies the soul.
However having had nearly ten years back there in the 80s I still have very much current friends who I miss like hell!
Were I by myself I would go back like a shot but I have to admit I would not transfer my assets!!! (And spend sufficient time out of the country!)
I sort of agree there is no way you can compare or equate your life in the two places. But again, interestingly you put your finger on one of the differences, it is a damned sight easier to accrue money here in the USA without being taxed up to the hilt. More of what you earn sticks than in either Canada or the UK. without having to indulge in dodgy offshore schemes etc. it appears that in the UK and Canada the only way to keep a modicum of what you make is to duck and dive like crazy.
Hello Christopher: Your description of Quebec corruption would read almost as well if one substituted Chicago or even Washington DC. I was going to suggest New Orleans or Louisiana in general for hotbeds of corruption but thought that smacked a little of Francophobia. I always got along fine with Quebecers and French Canadians in general. The majority of the people I worked with in Ottawa were bilingual French speaking, mostly from Quebec but some from the Maritimes and Manitoba. It seemed to me back then that they most disliked, or maybe more accurately distrusted, their English-Canadian countrymen. The Americans were considered rich and somewhat simple and the English poor and somewhat simple. I always claimed I was Pays de Galles so was accepted as being close to human. Outside Quebec they get little or no credit for establishing what was a huge and largely peaceable North American trading empire. The Quebec French and Metis in the shape of Voyageurs and the Coureurs-des-Bois were trading from the Arctic well into the Rockies and all down the Mississippi to New Orleans when Crocket and Bowie were still swatting mosquitoes fifty miles west of Washington DC and wondering how to get across the Appalachian Hills. Where most Americans think names like Sault Ste Marie, La Pointe, Detroit, Mackinac, Chicago, Milwaukee, Prairie Du Chien, St Paul and St Louis, spring from I do not know but it is pretty obvious they were not named by the Cherokee.
Sheona: Thank you for reading, a bit long wasn’t it?
Mrs. O. You are right, wealth is easier to acquire here and a whole lot easier to keep in this land, however I have been audited by the inquisitors of the IRS, most recently in about 1990, as usual we fought to a friendly draw, his parting shot was “Mr Wattage (real name withheld to protect the innocent) I think that you have as much tax shelter as any prudent man should have”. I got the message.
#7 Love it!
Fascinating stuff. Thanks.
PS Talking of M Trudeau: wasn’t his wife very ‘active’ socially?
LW: in Minnesota there is a broad understanding of the French role in regional history. Voyageurs National Park, Hennepin and St. Louis counties, Duluth,even St. Cloud was named after a suburb of Paris. The state motto is l’étoile du nord. While perhaps a bit dull, Minnesotans are quite fond of their history and tend to be relatively well-read in it. That a world might exist outside of Minnesota is difficult for many to grasp is an issue, though. (No, this should not be read as yet another swipe at Americans as a whole. Minnesotans are infamously parochial)
Janus: Yes she was of the left coast and spread her charms widely, from Ted Kennedy to Ronnie Woods if reports are to be believed. She did provide various issue and I hear that their eldest, Justin? is currently running for leadership of the Liberal party in Canada, plus ca change….
LW: yes, it is Justin Trudeau.
Is that Justin as in ‘Juste-an(g)’ or as in time? Surely not an anglisisation?