Re-examining the roots of Quebec's 'Quiet Revolution'

Conrad Black has had many passions in his life, one of them, many people forget, was his love affair with Quebec in the 1960s.

While still in his twenties, Black moved from Toronto to Quebec City to study law at Laval University and to learn French.  

That was the year of Expo 67 in Montreal and Quebec was in the early stages of what has been called the Quiet Revolution, a period of heady social, political and economic change that began, many say, with the election of Jean Lesage's Liberal government on June 22,1960, 50 years ago.  

Black would go on to write speeches in English for the man who succeeded Lesage, Union Nationale premier Daniel Johnson Sr., and he became co-owner and publisher of a weekly newspaper in the Eastern Townships, the beginnings of what would become his media empire.

He also stumbled into a life-long vocation — historical research and writing, in this first case motivated by a desire to tell the full story of the formidable ex-premier Maurice Duplessis, who had run Quebec for close to a generation.  

In 1977, Black published his 737-page history of the life and times of Duplessis, having become convinced that he was an important and misunderstood transitional figure on Quebec's road to modernization.  

With what some would call the 50th anniversary of the Quiet Revolution upon us, CBC Producer Jennifer Clibbon interviewed Conrad Black, via email from Coleman Correctional Complex near Orlando, Fla., where he is currently appealing a sentence for fraud and obstruction of justice relating to the sale of his U.S. media holdings.

Clbbon: When you arrived in Quebec, Jean Lesage and his Liberal government had just been voted out after six years of far-reaching reforms. Could you describe your impressions of what was going on?   

Black: It was clear from the previous election, 1966, that there was great resentment of the heavy-handed authority of the new civil service that the Lesage government had imposed on the province.

There was a clear division between those who thought the tax increases, secularization and bureaucratization required were unjustified, and those who thought them a sensible investment for Quebec's future.  

There was also the question of rising nationalism.

Overtly separatist parties took nine per cent of the vote in the 1966 election and, following the Liberal defeat, René Lévesque only took about a year before he threw down the mask and acknowledged that he was an independentist, as had been widely assumed.

Obviously, this was going to become a tense struggle.

What, in your view, were the greatest achievements — and failures — of the Lesage government?  

Black: I think the Lesage government's greatest achievements were building on Duplessis's accomplishment in forcing the St. Laurent and Diefenbaker governments to concede Quebec's concurrent right to direct taxes.

Also, the successful, and fairly priced, takeovers of the balance of Quebec's hydroelectric power companies in 1962 on behalf of Hydro-Quebec; and an increase in the post-secondary places available in the province's education system.

The greatest failures were that the education and health-care systems were handed over to radical teachers' and nurses' unions.

Essentially Quebec had the same teachers teaching the same curriculum in the same schools, and the same nurses performing the same tasks in the same hospitals.

Both at 10 times the previous cost when they were mainly members of religious orders.  

The resulting costs led to sharply higher taxes, which caused immense discontent, and the added strength of the public sector unions spread into the private sector and drove a great deal of investment capital away from Quebec. 

Lesage and his ministers didn't reckon on the cost of their reforms, or the implications of tax increases and chaos in the public sector and industrial unions.  

While in Quebec, you developed a fascination with Duplessis. How did this come about?  

Black: It quickly became clear that Daniel Johnson Sr., for whom I had great admiration, had immense respect for Duplessis, about whom I had the usual English-Canadian view that he was a corrupt and primitive dictator.  

With a little research, I discovered that Quebec had made the greatest economic and social progress in its history under Duplessis and that his era was the only one in which the average per capita income of Quebec actually gained on Ontario's.  

He had the most advanced pension regime and daycare system in Canada, and built most of Quebec's universities, 3,000 schools, and the autoroute system, while reducing taxes and provincial debt.  

He extended electricity to rural Quebec, and, of course, took back from Ottawa, Quebec's rights over direct taxes.  

The story of your enterprising research as you drove around rural Quebec and pieced together a portrait of Duplessis is fascinating. What did you learn from this?   

Black: I went to a colloquy about Duplessis at the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivieres, where Robert Rumilly, the aged quasi-official historian of the Union Nationale and author of the 41-volume Histoire du Quebec, debunked a leftish panel that had spent 90 minutes criticizing Duplessis. 

I spoke to him afterward and he gave me a letter of introduction to Aurea Cloutier, who had been Duplessis's father's secretary, and then Duplessis's, from 1923 until his death in 1959, his entire public career.

She showed me his papers, irregularly packed in random boxes in the basement of his house in Trois-Rivieres, where his sister lived.  

It was obvious that these papers were a considerable historical find that had never seen the light of day, though Rumilly had been using them.  

I made an arrangement with Rumilly, whereby I drove us around Quebec interviewing the survivors of the Duplessis era. I provided the transport and he arranged the meetings.  

I had the good fortune to meet many of these people in the very extremes of old age. It seemed to me indicative of the gentility of traditional Quebec, a sudden trip in time, backwards, 50 years.  

Even more so was the meeting with Ernest Laforce, founder of the colonization movement, a back-to-the-land movement during the Depression.

He was then in his mid-90s and had accompanied Sir John A. Macdonald in his election campaign in Quebec in 1891, as a baggage boy, but observed a lot and spoke with the prime minister many times.

It became clear, talking to all these people, including many opponents of Duplessis, what an immense folkloric figure he had been in Quebec and how thoroughly he had dominated the public life of Quebec from 1935 to 1959.  

And yet, his era wasn't called "La grande noirceur" (the Great Darkness) for nothing. What, in your view, were Duplessis' great flaws?   

Black: As for La grande noirceur, it was a complete fraud. As Claude Wagner, a leading figure in the Lesage government said to me: "We had to believe we were bringing light to the province, so we had to believe that there was only darkness there before." 

It was the agreed-upon umbrella beneath which sheltered the Liberals and the separatists, and their academic and journalistic allies.  

Certainly, the Quebec public didn't believe a word of it: They gave Duplessis big majorities for a whole generation and then pitched out Lesage's self-styled equipe du tonnerre in favour of Duplessis's chief disciple [Daniel Johnson] at the first real opportunity.  

Duplessis was unnecessarily authoritarian and stayed too long, and his party could have eased into a new era relatively painlessly, as a seamless continuation of the changes he had already effected.

This was the intention of his chosen and talented successor, Paul Sauvé, as well as his ultimate protegé, Daniel Johnson.

Quebec's terrible misfortune was that these men, Sauvé and Johnson, who had most of Duplessis's strengths and few of his liabilities, lacked his physical strength and died in office at the ages of 52 and 53.  

With this, the right that had held the nationalist torch in Quebec through Henri Bourassa, Lionel Groulx, and Duplessis, passed to Lévesque and the left and there was no conservative restraint on the left.  

So the absurd language laws, which were all part of the Quiet Revolution — the language aptitude tests for six year olds, the language police and bans on bilingual commercial signs and so forth — and the industrial chaos, the tyranny of quasi-Communist teachers' unions, and the flight of people and capital from Quebec, all retarded the growth and damaged the credibility of Quebec.

They also hobbled Canada in the world with the spectre of the break up of the country.  

Today, some Quebec writers and commentators, who never lived through the Duplessis era, look back somewhat nostalgically What do you suppose they are nostalgic for?  

Black: My impression is that Duplessis is coming out now from under the cloud. 

Nostalgia for Duplessis is based on strong leadership, economic progress, protection of French Quebec, without chasing people and money out of the province, respect for minorities and the advance of Quebec jurisdictional autonomy without shaking the whole country to its foundations, as well as on Duplessis's formidable wit and personality.  

You wouldn't compare him to Landry and Charest, (whom I like personally).

Duplessis was remembered with respect by the average Quebecer. The academic-journalistic complex, composed of unambiguous separatists and federalists, attacked Duplessis for being neither, and fabricated all the rubbish about his having run a primitive regime.  

You have written important biographies of Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, too. Are there any commonalities that your biographical subjects share?   

Black: There isn't much in common between FDR, Richard Nixon, and Maurice Duplessis, apart from their occupation.  

The difference in scale between their activities and jurisdictions was immense. Though, as Malcolm Muggeridge observed, Duplessis did possess the intelligence and stature to be a national leader and, in some respects, was.  

What they had in common as subjects was that I thought there was a critical absence of a comprehensive interpretation of each of them.  

Roosevelt was whipsawed between his admirers who thought him a guileless altruist, making him more vulnerable to the other faction that has represented him as a cynical socialist who was duped out of Eastern Europe by Stalin.

I believed both versions were untrue and, I think, demonstrated that. 

Nixon, of course, is torn between tremendous controversies and his achievements. As a result, the relatively limited proportions of his mistakes have been rather lost sight of. He was one of the country's most successful presidents, before the Watergate affair, which was absurdly exaggerated, partly through his own mishandling of it. 

Duplessis, as you have seen, was someone who I think has been very substantially misrepresented. I have no doubt that something close to my take on all three will ultimately prevail, because my analysis is based exclusively on indisputable facts.

They all aroused intense emotions that have terribly clouded the appreciation of them.