Jacques Parizeau

Jacques Parizeau, born in 1930, premier of Québec (1994-1996) and organizer of that province’s 1995 referendum on sovereignty. Parizeau was born in Montréal, Québec, the son of an influential Québec family. He was educated at the École des Hautes Études Commerciales, the business school of the Université de Montréal, where he majored in economics. He also studied at the London School of Economics, where he received a doctorate in economics in 1955. In the early 1950s he attended the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris, France.

Parizeau held a teaching position at the École des Hautes Études Commerciales from 1955 to 1989, during which time his political career took shape. During the 1960s Parizeau served as an advisor to the Québec government and helped define the outlines of the Quiet Revolution, a series of political, economic, and social reforms. A major achievement of the Quiet Revolution was the consolidation of electrical power generation in Hydro-Québec, a publicly owned utility company. Parizeau played an important role in the nationalization of utility companies to form the backbone of Hydro-Québec.

In 1969 Parizeau joined the Parti Québécois (PQ), the political party dedicated to the achievement of Québec’s independence from Canada. From 1976 to 1984, he was minister of finance in PQ governments under the leadership of René Lévesque. In this position, he oversaw the nationalization of the asbestos industry and the promotion of investment in Québec-based businesses. In 1984 Parizeau broke with Lévesque over the latter’s plans to put the quest for Québec sovereignty on hold. Lévesque argued that the government should focus on economic recovery and negotiating a new constitutional status with the federal government. Parizeau disagreed, maintaining that the PQ should not step back even temporarily from its commitment to outright sovereignty. Shortly thereafter, in 1985, the PQ government was defeated.

In 1988 Parizeau won the leadership of the PQ on a strongly pro-independence platform. The PQ again lost a provincial election in 1989, but debate over the sovereignty issue continued. In 1990 Canadians refused to approve the Meech Lake Accord, a constitutional agreement that would have granted Québec the status of a distinct society. Although the term distinct society was never defined, most Canadians did not favor a special status for Québec. Many in Québec were upset by the failure of the Meech Lake Accord. Parizeau, however, argued that any such agreement with the federal government was bound to be insufficient. His argument was partly responsible for the failure of a similar constitutional package, the Charlottetown Accord, in 1992.

In 1994 the party returned to power, largely on the strength of Parizeau’s arguments that sovereignty for Québec was economically feasible. Parizeau saw the 1994 election as a straw vote on sovereignty, and, buoyed by his victory, he waited only one year to hold a formal referendum on the issue. On October 30, 1995, Québec voters were asked whether their government should negotiate independence from Canada. They said no by the very narrow margin of 50.6 percent to 49.4 percent. Despite the loss, the PQ under Parizeau had come far closer to victory than had the PQ under Lévesque in 1980 when a similar question had been put to the people.

Immediately after the results became clear, Parizeau blamed his narrow loss on what he referred to as “money and the ethnic vote.” Many Canadians condemned the remark as racist, and other PQ members quickly tried to distance themselves from Parizeau. To critics of the PQ, the comment raised the specter of dangerous ethnic nationalism, which they saw at the heart of the PQ agenda. Defeated in his dream of leading Québec to independence and under intense criticism, Parizeau resigned and was succeeded by Lucien Bouchard in January 1996 as head of the party and premier of Québec. Bouchard had been the head of the Bloc Québécois, a party pursuing the same goals as the PQ in Canada’s Parliament, and had campaigned hard for passage of the referendum.

In May 1997 Parizeau published his memoirs, titled Pour un Québec Souverain. He wrote that French politicians had advised him, if he won the referendum, to skip negotiations and declare independence almost immediately. It was unclear whether he would have done so, but his reputation as a hard-liner convinced many that he would have. Canada was then in the midst of a general election campaign, and opponents of the Bloc Québécois used the revelation to question that party’s trustworthiness. Bouchard and his fellow Bloc leaders, they argued, must have known that immediate secession was being considered. In the election, the Bloc lost ten of its seats in Parliament and came in third, thereby losing its status as the official opposition.