Parizeau was a giant in his province
Former premier failed in dream of leading independent nation
The tributes rained down Tuesday as news broke of Jacques Parizeau’s death at age 84. He was called a giant, a wise man, an architect of modern Quebec, the greatest Quebec economist of his generation.
He will be honoured with a state funeral, the provincial government announced, and his name will adorn the headquarters of the Caisse de dépôt et placement, the provincial pension-fund manager that he was instrumental in creating in the 1960s.
But all the accolades cannot hide the fact that on the one issue that mattered most to Parizeau — Quebec independence — he failed, something he candidly admitted in his final interview earlier this year.
“Were you the premier you wanted to be?” Radio-Canada’s Michel Lacombe asked him in February. “No, I would have wanted to win,” Parizeau replied in reference to the 1995 referendum.
“But apart from the question of sovereignty?” Lacombe persisted.
“Not apart from,” Parizeau said. “It is the only reason I entered politics. ... Life being what it is, I did a lot of other things, but the reason I entered politics was because I wanted to achieve Quebec sovereignty. I failed.”
Not only did he fail, but he reacted to the Yes side’s narrow defeat with such venom on referendum night that it indelibly tarnished the legacy his eulogists were burnishing Tuesday.
“We are beaten, it is true,” he said on the 1995 referendum night after learning the victory he thought was at hand had slipped away. “But by what, basically? By money and ethnic votes.”
In a 15-minute speech, he undid years of Parti Québécois work trying to portray its brand of nationalism as broad and inclusive rather than narrowly ethnic. To him, the votes that mattered were those of old-stock Quebecers.
“Let’s stop talking about ‘the francophones of Quebec.’ We will speak of nous,” he said. “By 60 per cent, we voted yes. We fought. We fought, and, nous, we succeeded in showing clearly what we wanted.”
The speech, to be followed the next day by Parizeau’s announcement of his resignation, revealed a disturbing anti-democratic streak, hints of which had been exposed that summer when Parizeau had a private meeting with European diplomats in Ottawa.
It leaked out that Parizeau told people at the gathering his plan to achieve sovereignty was so clever that once Quebecers voted yes, they would be like lobsters in a trap with no escape. A book last year by Chantal Hébert and Jean Lapierre, based on interviews with the major players in 1995, revealed that Parizeau was not even upfront with Lucien Bouchard, whom he had designated lead negotiator in the event of a Yes win. Parizeau had little expectation that the negotiations with Canada promised in the referendum question would yield anything and was gunning for a unilateral declaration of independence, the book concluded.
Parizeau had always been the clever one. A brilliant student at Montreal’s HEC business school, he earned a doctorate from the London School of Economics and became a professor at HEC at age 25. In the early 1960s, after a stint at the Bank of Canada, he went to work for Jean Lesage’s Liberal government in Quebec City, becoming part of what one newspaper called “the nationalist brain trust” behind the Quiet Revolution.
Even then, he understood the importance of masking radical intentions. “The important thing is to present something absolutely revolutionary in a way that is perceived as reassuring conservatism,” he told biographer Pierre Duchesne of the creation of the Caisse de dépôt.
He joined the Parti Québécois in 1969 and ran unsuccessfully twice before being elected in 1976 and being named finance minister in the first PQ government. After becoming PQ leader and being elected premier in 1994, he agreed to take a back seat to Bouchard in the referendum campaign when it became clear his professorial style was not capturing hearts.
The charismatic Bouchard propelled support for the Yes side to within 55,000 votes of victory, setting the stage for Parizeau’s infamous speech. He would remain a hero to the separatist faithful, but his referendum-night remarks hung over him like a dark cloud until the end. In 2003, he resuscitated his “money and ethnic votes” analysis for a college audience and helped torpedo Bernard Landry’s reelection campaign.
“If I die tomorrow, I would like history to remember that I belonged to that group of 20 people who made the Quiet Revolution,” he told Duchesne in 2003. But history tends to remember politicians more than mandarins, and in the political arena Parizeau was no builder.
If I die tomorrow, I would like history to remember that I belonged to that group of 20 people who made the Quiet Revolution.