Canadian Unity

Report Outline
Coming Election in Troubled Canada
Canadian Quest for National Identity
Canada's Relations with United States
Special Focus

Coming Election in Troubled Canada

Threat of Quebec Secession as Campaign Issue

Canada's national election campaign is focusing attention on what has been described as the gravest issue to confront that country in a century of nationhood. It is the growing threat that the people of French-speaking Quebec will actually make up their minds to break away from the nine other provinces and declare French Canada a separate and independent country. Choices made by the voters in electing a new House of Commons on June 25 will help to indicate the strength of sentiment, among both French-speaking and English-speaking Canadians, for and against so drastic a move.

Quebec separatism has dominated the election campaigning of candidates of the two major Canadian parties, the Liberal and the Conservative. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the new prime minister and Liberal leader, has spoken out strongly against giving sovereignty, altogether or piecemeal, to his home province of Quebec. In contrast, his predecessor and political mentor, Lester B. Pearson, who was prime minister from 1963 until he resigned on April 20, 1968, was often accused of being “soft on Quebec”—making too many concessions to the restive province.

The attitude toward Quebec in the Conservative opposition is similarly scrambled, if not reversed. Robert L. Stanfield, the Conservative leader, has indicated a willingness to meet Quebec demands short of independence. The man he replaced as party leader last year, former prime minister (1957–63) John Diefenbaker, gave short shrift to nationalist aspirations in Quebec.