JACQUES PARIZEAU
1930—2015
Parizeau will loom in the histories of Confederation for how close he came to unmaking it.
• It might make him spin in his grave if it were carved on his headstone, but Jacques Parizeau was undeniably one of the great Canadians of his day.
Maybe not a good Canadian. He considered himself exclusively Québécois, and his greatest desire was to break up the country.
But Parizeau, who died Monday at age 84, was nonetheless a man of greatness: great ambition, great works, great erudition, great dreams, great schemes, great wit, great appetites, great presence.
And great was his fall when it came.
Parizeau’s death was announced just after midnight Tuesday by his wife, Lisette Lapointe.
“Immense pain tonight. The man of my life is gone,” she posted on Facebook.
Parizeau will loom in the histories of Confederation for how close he came to unmaking it. But however greatly it chagrined him to his final breath, he died as he was born — a Canadian.
He was one of the great builders of the modern Quebec that sprang from the Quiet Revolution of the early 1960s. He liked to joke that the Quiet Revolution for all intents and purposes was perpetrated by three or four cabinet ministers, two dozen civil servants and 50 chansonniers
Parizeau, then in his early 30s and an economist reputed for audacious brilliance, was high in the rank of bureaucrats who brought it off. Landmark institutions such as Hydro-Québec, the provincial civil service structure and the powerhouse Caisse de dépôt provincial pension fund bear Parizeau’s imprint.
When he entered frontline politics after a decade of serving nominally federalist regimes, under premiers Jean Lesage and Daniel Johnson, Parizeau came out as a separatist and formally joined the Parti Québécois.
He invested the PQ with a fiscal credibility it sorely lacked until then.
He became Quebec’s most powerful finance minister of the half century — no less than his Ontario counterpart of the day hailed him as the country’s only professional finance minister in his time. He was acclaimed PQ leader following party founder René Lévesque’s retirement and the fleeting interregnum of Pierre Marc Johnson, then elected premier of Quebec in 1994.
Barely more than a year later came the most fateful night of his life, the night of the referendum, when it all crashed down on him.
It was Oct. 30, 1995, when the sovereignty movement lost its best and what seems to have been its last chance to prevail in the lifetime of its founding generation.
The closeness of the vote — 50.6 per cent No to 49.4 per cent Yes — stirred a rage in Parizeau that resonated in his bilious concession speech. “We are beaten, it is true,” he said in the bombshell passage. “But by what, basically? By money and ethnic votes.”
It was at once the worst and most memorable speech he ever made and remains a burden he carries into posterity. Even many sovereignists were appalled by its naked ethnocentricity.
The next day, Parizeau resigned as premier and hard line separatism followed him into decline under PQ leaders less given to go as resolutely — and recklessly — for broke.
In his later years, he was venerated by the dwindling separatist faithful as the movement’s eminence grise, and lampooned by pundits as its mother-in-law, given to scolding his successors with mischievously inopportune public advice.
Parizeau was born Aug. 9, 1930, a son of wealth and privilege. His father, Gérard Parizeau, built one of Quebec’s great family fortunes and one of the province’s leading financial houses from a broomcloset brokerage he started in the 1930s.
His great-grandfather was a founder of the Montreal Chambre de Commerce and his grandfather a celebrated doctor and Chevalier of the Legion d’honneur.
Parizeau staunchly adhered to the formalities of his class. His courtly mannerisms gained him respect and even a certain awe, but discouraged the visceral affection Quebecers bestowed on Lévesque and later Lucien Bouchard.
In his studies, he took precociously to the “dismal science” of economics, and earned his first degree at the École des Hautes Études Commerciales.
Parizeau was married twice to two remarkably strongwilled women. The first Mrs. Parizeau was Polish-born Alicja Poznanska, whom he met while studying in London. She had a distinguished career in her own right as an author and pioneering criminologist.
After her death in 1990, he married the stylish Lisette Lapointe, who was both wife and political accomplice, a constant public presence at his side; the premier’s official residence during Parizeau’s term was popularly known as “l’Elisette,” a dig at her hightoned flair.
Much has been made of a 1967 train ride he took across the country to attend a conference in Banff, Alta. Parizeau cast it as his road to Damascus, saying that his musings on the dysfunctional state of confederation along the way made him see the sovereignist light.
Perhaps the best of Parizeau’s political years over their five-decade span were those early ones as a backroom quiet-revolutionary, when he was instrumental in designing the modern Quebec state and elaborating the vision of that state as the vehicle for French Quebec’s social and economic emancipation.
He calculated that this would pave the way for Quebec’s political emancipation as an independent country, but it turned out to be the greatest of several miscalculations that belied his popular repute as an economic wizard.
He opposed the James Bay hydro project, plumping instead for atomic power — on the eve of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant meltdown. He nationalized the General Dynamics asbestos works at a usuriously inflated price at a time when the rest of the world twigged to the discovery that asbestos causes cancer.
In an ironic coda to his political career, Parizeau came once more to the fore during the 2003 provincial election campaign with an ill-judged speech in which he chuckled unrepentantly over hi s “money and ethnic votes” indiscretion.
It gave Jean Charest vital ammunition for his winning performance in the televised leaders’ debate and sent the PQ campaign into a tailspin from which it never recovered. In the next election, it did even worse.
However unintentional, it was a great thing for Canada.
His courtly mannerisms gained him respect and even a certain awe