‘A REMARKABLE MAN’
Former premier never gave up his dream of Quebec independence
When it comes to his political legacy, history will probably show Bernard Landry was a better co-pilot than a pilot. Yet, in the last years of his life, Landry would often express regrets at having resigned the leadership of the Parti Québécois in 2005 after obtaining a low confidence vote from the party rank and file. “I should have reflected at least one night before resigning,” Landry told an interviewer in 2015. “I loved that job. I am heartsick. It was hard.” It was the way he felt but it did not change what was an otherwise full and robust political career devoted to what he liked to call the “Quebec cause.” He titled his own biography just that: La cause du Québec. Landry died at home at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday of pulmonary fibrosis. He was 81. Landry spent the last months of his life confined to his home in Verchères and using an oxygen tank. His wife, Chantal Renaud, was with him. He is also survived by three children from a previous marriage, Julie, Philippe and Pascale plus his grandchildren. Quebec’s 28th premier, he governed from March 2001 to April 2003 after taking over the job following the surprise resignation of Lucien Bouchard in January 2001. Landry’s term as premier ended when he lost the election to Liberal Leader Jean Charest, an event that weakened his leadership permanently in the eyes of many péquistes. But his attempt to “adjust” history at the end of his life — Landry would claim it was his entourage that pressured him to quit after obtaining a 76.2 per cent confidence vote at a party meeting — overshadowed the valour he showed the day things turned sour between him and the membership, as so often happens in the world of PQ politics. Arriving on stage before hundreds of PQ members, Landry said he was quitting, ending a 40-year political career, for the greater good of the party and sovereignty itself. “I am a man of the cause,” Landry said that night in Quebec City when he tossed it all away. “I am not individualistic.
I do not wish to be second in command of the Light Brigade. Our troops don’t want to be sent to the slaughterhouse.
“I think in my heart and soul that I could not serve society as I would like to with this level of support.” For much of his life, starting as a student leader and into his professional life, Landry regularly argued the greater cause of the Quebec nation (la patrie or homeland, he would say) was more important than any one person’s career including his own. And while he lacked the personal charisma of personalities like Bouchard (but shared the same short fuse when challenged), Landry played other key roles in the PQ’s history — in the party and particularly when it came to the business of governing well. As some observers noted, Landry, the master technocrat, oozed competency, often carrying several portfolios at the same time. As Bouchard’s finance minister, Landry became the first person in almost four decades to balance Quebec’s books and cut taxes. As premier, one of his biggest accomplishments was negotiating a new development agreement with the Cree nation known commonly as the “Paix des Braves.” In the party, Landry worked tirelessly to build bridges in minority communities — anglophones and allophones — during a time when nobody else in the PQ was bothering. Being fluent in French, English and Spanish helped. But economic development was always his top priority, mainly because he saw it as a key tool to convince reluctant Quebecers that the province could flourish as a country. Born March 9, 1937, Landry grew up in St-Jacques-de-Montcalm in the Joliette region. He was given a classical education, studying at the Séminaire de Joliette, where he also founded its first student council. He joined the Canadian Officers’ Training Corps and became an officer in the reserves, part of the Le Regiment de Joliette, the 83rd Infantry battalion. Landry would remain an officer in the reserves for years. He showed traces of his military training — the rigour, discipline and determination to take command — all his life, notes Graham Fraser, author of the definitive history of the PQ. On the election trail and even as premier, he would be up with the birds for a brisk morning walk, often on the celebrated Plains of Abraham and regardless of the cold. In the late 1950s, Landry left the Séminaire to study law at the Université de Montréal. Again he gravitated into the student movement. In December 1962, at age 25, he ran for student council president. His slogan reflected his real ambitions: “In the service of the students and the nation.” His belief in state interventionism was clear in those early days when he pushed the council into “nationalizing” campus vending machines. Landry graduated in 1963 and married Lorraine Laporte, who later became a prominent Quebec judge. She died in 1999. Admitted to the bar in 1965, Landry practised law in Joliette and Montreal until 1976. But he hovered in political circles at the same time. One of his first jobs was working for a prominent Liberal minister in Jean Lesage’s cabinet, René Lévesque, who hired him as a technical adviser in his office in 1964. He worked at other government jobs and was there in 1968 when Lévesque left the Liberals to found the PQ. Landry tried twice to get elected as a PQ MNA, in 1970 in Joliette and 1973 in Joliette-Montcalm. He failed both times. He decided to use his free time beefing up his education — this time in Paris, where he studied economics. It’s a decision that later opened doors for him when the PQ won the 1976 election. Landry was elected in that same PQ sweep as the MNA for Fabre. As a politician with an economic background, Landry filled a much-needed void in the left-leaning PQ, which, at the time, was not exactly seen as pro investment and development. Lévesque rapidly made him minister for economic development in his first government. When the PQ was re-elected in 1981, Landry landed the same job plus external trade. Faithful to the leader in good times and bad, Landry would be one of the few to stick with Lévesque when party hardliners including Jacques Parizeau quit over the so-called “beau risque” era. That was when Lévesque, crippled by the 1980 referendum defeat and unwilling to campaign again for independence, tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a reform of Canadian federalism with the federal government. After Lévesque resigned in June 1985, Landry launched a campaign to replace him only to withdraw after it became clear Pierre-Marc Johnson would win. Landry would serve briefly as Johnson’s minister of finance but all this ended when the PQ lost the 1985 election. Landry stayed active in the PQ — he was party vice-president from 1989 to 1994 — but also took up a teaching position from 1986 to 1994 at the Université du Québec à Montréal. When the PQ regained power in 1994 under Parizeau, Landry was aboard the train, winning a seat in the riding of Verchères where he owned a 240-year-old historic home called “Bonheur” on the St. Lawrence River. Again he emerged as a pillar of Parizeau’s cabinet as second-in-command. Parizeau named him deputy-premier as well as minister of international relations, immigration and cultural communities. Landry played a key role in the lead-up to the PQ’s second attempt to secede from Canada: the 1995 sovereignty referendum. Parizeau, who always said he was not interested in governing Quebec as a province, was obsessively focused on winning even if there were plenty of indicators the party was headed for a second failure. Again Landry played a pivotal role, pressing Parizeau to put on ice his initial plan for a swift spring referendum. “I do not wish to be second in command of the Light Brigade,” Landry, then deputy-premier, told reporters in 1995, forcing Parizeau to review his strategy. “Our troops don’t want to be sent to the slaughterhouse.” As with Parizeau, Landry took the loss badly and looked like a broken man as he left Montreal’s Palais des congrès having watched his lifelong dream slip from the PQ’s hands a second time. Although most of the focus that famous night in 1995 was on leader Jacques Parizeau’s “money and ethnic votes” statement, Landry had his own minority moment when he walked into Montreal’s Intercontinental Hotel on the same evening and berated an immigrant hotel clerk. In an emotional outburst, Landry ranted about immigrants who had deprived the Yes forces of a victory. Landry later would apologize to the clerk, Anita Martinez, and stepped aside as the PQ minister responsible for cultural communities.
IMPETUOUS SIDE
The stories of Landry’s impetuous side are well known. In his time he would regularly call up reporters to lambaste them for things they had written that he didn’t approve of. His short fuse in media encounters was legendary. But he stayed on after Parizeau resigned in the wake of the referendum loss, replaced by Bouchard again in a secondary role. After Bouchard resigned as premier in March 2001, Landry moved quickly to take over, out-flanking potential opponents like Pauline Marois and François Legault with military precision. Around the same time, Landry remarried to singer and actress Chantal Renaud. But from the get-go Landry struggled to keep the raucous PQ under control and prepare for the next election, which he would lose to Jean Charest in 2003. He tried to stay on as leader of the opposition after the loss but Landry’s support inside the ranks was fragile at best despite major policy concessions to appease the hard-line wing of the party. In June 2005 party members expressed themselves one last time, inflicting a fatal wound on Landry by giving him a weaker leadership confidence score than Bouchard got in 1996. Landry returned to private life, working in a law firm and resuming his teaching career at UQAM. In 2008 he was promoted to grand officer of the Order of Quebec. In his spare time Landry dove into the role of political pundit on radio and television, freely criticizing his old party and its leadership. But he expressed sadness when key PQ MNAs decided to move on when it became clear the party was not going to win the next election. In the recent internal crisis in the Bloc Québécois, Landry was one of the few senior sovereignists to back up embattled leader Martine Ouellet.