BY JOHN STEELE
TORONTO - Ottawa's drive against the resistance of the Quebecois nation to their national oppression took a new twist March 26, when federal Conservative party leader Jean Charest resigned his position in order to lead the Quebec Liberal party into the next provincial election expected this year.

Charest, who has the backing of Ottawa and ruling class politicians throughout the country, aims to prevent another Quebec referendum on sovereignty by defeating the bourgeois nationalist Parti Quebecois government in Quebec City. The PQ government, led by Premier Lucien Bouchard, is committed to holding the third Quebec sovereignty referendum since 1980 if it wins the majority of seats in the Quebec national assembly.

In the last referendum in October 1995, Canada's capitalist rulers suffered a serious political defeat when the "Yes" to sovereignty forces came to within 1.6 percentage points of winning and the majority of Quebecois, who number six million out of Quebec's population of seven million, voted "Yes." Since then, Ottawa has failed to weaken the desire of millions of Quebecois for their own country.

As a result, the tone has sharpened in ruling class circles over how to "save" Canada from the "unpatriotic separatists" who want to "wreck" it. Canadian nationalist rhetoric and flag-waving directed against the Quebecois has intensified, closely related to Ottawa's participation in Washington's war drive against Iraq and military buildup in Yugoslavia and Central Europe.

This chauvinist campaign aims to prevent working people inside and outside of Quebec from supporting the struggle of the Quebecois for independence, justice, and equality. Some politicians and others have suggested that in the event of a sovereign referendum victory, Ottawa should use armed force to keep the federal state intact.

A example of this was the March 17 lecture on "Quebec Whistles Dixie" by Princeton University historian James McPherson. It was delivered to an overflow lecture at the University of Toronto. McPherson, an "expert" on the 1861-65 U.S. Civil War, argued, "The causes of the U.S. Civil War bear an uncanny similarity to the situation in modern-day Quebec." McPherson claims that Ottawa, by fighting against Quebec independence, promotes a progressive and enlightened "civic nationalism." Those fighting for Quebec sovereignty, he says, are narrow-minded "ethnic nationalists" with a backward and reactionary outlook similar to that of the southern slaveholding confederacy that fought to secede from the United States.

McPherson's lecture was published in the March issue of Saturday Night magazine. The nationally-circulated English- language Globe and Mail published a summary of the talk. It will also be rebroadcast nationally on CBC Radio One's Ideas May 6, and published in March in a 90-page booklet.

To explain the truth about the Quebecois struggle, and counter this chauvinist, anti-Quebecois campaign, which serves only to buttress the rule of Canada's billionaire capitalist families, the Communist League and the Young Socialists sponsored a series of weekend classes for working- class fighters and youth. The classes were given at an international socialist educational conference in Seattle, a Feb. 28-March 1 weekend class series in Toronto, and a March 22 class series in Montreal. The class presenters were Communist League Central Committee member Michel Prairie, and Montreal Young Socialist leader Jason Phelps, who is a member of the United Steelworkers of America.

Decades resisting national oppression
"The need for their own country is the conclusion that millions of Quebecois have drawn after decades of struggle against the institutionalized national oppression they experience at the hands of the federal government," explained Jason Phelps in his class presentation.

"The majority of the workers at the factory where I work are Quebecois, but the boss is an English-speaker," said Phelps. "However, our union contract is written in French and it says that written communications in the plant must be in French."

Phelps explained that 25 years ago most union contracts were written in English. The right to work in French was won through massive struggles of workers, youth, and others. Today this right is codified in Quebec's Law 101 adopted by the Parti Quebecois government in 1977. The federal government has used the Supreme Court to weaken this law on several occasions.

"The Quebecois nation has been forged in the struggle against oppression based on their language, which is French," said Phelps. "The Quebecois national consciousness has its roots in the resistance to the forced assimilation policy of the government that was put in place after the defeat of the 1837-38 bourgeois democratic revolution," he continued. "The rebellion was spearheaded by revolutionary workers and farmers who lived in what is now Ontario and Quebec.

"Their demands included the equality of those who spoke French and English," said Phelps. "But, the defeat of the revolution led to institutionalized discrimination against those who spoke French. This oppression was at the heart of the Canadian confederation formed in 1867.

"The resistance of the French majority to the divide-and- rule policies of the British-backed rulers was later reflected in consistent and often massive opposition by Quebecois to participation in Ottawa's imperialist wars, including World War II."

Phelps noted that a substantial industrialization of Quebec occurred in the first decades of the 20th century, leading to the formation of a modern Quebecois working class. This explains why by the beginning of World War II, the oppression of the Quebecois had become increasingly explosive. Quebecois workers earned 10-25 cents an hour less than workers in Ontario and worked 4-12 hours longer per week. In 1941 the Quebec infant mortality rate was 75.9 per 1,000 births. In Ontario it was 45.6. The tuberculosis rate was qualitatively higher in Quebec than Ontario. The illiteracy rate was double. Out of 27 libraries in Quebec only nine were French-language. Stores signs in downtown Montreal were mostly in English. In major department stores like Eaton's it was difficult to get service in the French language. Hospitals and other social services were inferior for Quebecois. The Quebecois were also placed in a political straight jacket by the federal government, which refused to recognize them as a nation with the right to self- determination, up to and including independence.

Phelps described how the explosion of union battles across Canada before and after the Second World War, which consolidated the industrial unions, continued on into the 1950s in Quebec, long after it had ended in the rest of Canada and the United States. Massive struggles of newly- organized hospital workers, teachers, and other government employees reached their peak in the 1960s and 1970s, dovetailing with militant community and student mobilizations. The demand for the right to live, learn, and work in French was raised by hundreds of thousands of fighters who simply refused to "speak white" any more. The Quebecois fighters strongly identified with the Black civil rights movement against the racist system of segregation in the southern United States and the anticolonial revolutions particularly in Cuba and Algeria.

Dynamic of national struggle
Canada's capitalist rulers were terrified at the uncontrolled character of the nationalist and union mobilizations and the difficulty the new and weak union bureaucracy had in keeping it in check, Phelps added. Above all Ottawa feared the tendency for the struggle to evolve toward independent working-class political action and to win support among working people in the rest of Canada.

"In October 1970, following the kidnapping and killing of a Quebec government minister by the FLQ (Quebec Liberation Front), Ottawa used the pretext of an `apprehended insurrection' to declare the War Measures Act and ordered the Canadian army to occupy Quebec," said Phelps. "Hundreds of students, nationalists, union activists and leaders, socialists, and others were picked up in the dead of night and jailed for weeks without charges. The troops occupied Montreal during a civic election when a newly-formed union- based party threatened to gain wide support as a jumping off point for a province-wide labor party. The embryonic labor party movement collapsed under the weight of the military occupation and charges it was a front for terrorism."

But Ottawa's move succeeded only to temporally dampen the movement. By the fall of 1971, it was in full swing again. The union and student mobilizations culminated in a spontaneous province-wide general strike of tens of thousands in 1972 to defend union leaders jailed in the context of a fight by public sector unions for a $100-a-week minimum wage. The towns of Sept-Iles, Thetford, Sorel, and Joliette were occupied during several days by workers, the police were chased from the streets, and labor councils took control of aspects of life for a brief period.

The massive struggle by Quebecois against their national oppression had a big impact on the labor, student, and women's movements across the country. Quebec unions were at the forefront of the 1973-74 struggles for a sliding scale of wages against raising inflation and of the 1975-1976 fight against Ottawa's imposed wage freeze. The struggle launched in early 1970s by women in Quebec for abortion rights eventually led to the 1988 historic decision by the Supreme Court of Canada to void Ottawa's antiabortion law.

Through the 1970s however, a reformist trade union bureaucracy was consolidated. Acting as a transmission belt for the class interests and values of a newly developing layer of Quebecois capitalist families and professional middle class, it was able to channel the struggle of Quebec's workers and farmers behind the bourgeois nationalist Parti Quebecois that had emerged from a split in the Quebec Liberal party. The PQ was elected for the first time in 1976.

In 1980 the PQ government held a sovereignty referendum. Despite mobilizations in the streets, campuses, and factories it was defeated after a massive campaign of threats by Ottawa and economic blackmail by corporations threatening to leave Quebec.

"The defeat of the 1980 sovereignty referendum took place on the eve of the deep 1981-82 recession, and the very beginning of a 15-year retreat by the labor movement across the country in face of the austerity drive of the bosses and their government. The downturn hit the Quebecois hardest and national oppression began to deepen as the employers moved against the gains won in past struggles" said Phelps. "In this context, in 1982 Ottawa was able, without Quebec's consent, to impose on it a new federal constitution that undermined a number of its historic rights.

"In contrast, the October 1995 sovereignty referendum coincided with a rise in working-class resistance in Canada, the United States, and other imperialist countries such as France," said Phelps. "This growing resistance was reflected in the fact that the `Yes' side almost won the referendum. Once again, for sure, the struggle for Quebec independence will be on the front lines of the fight against Canadian imperialism."

Fight for workers and farmers gov't
Communist League leader Michel Prairie reviewed how the participation of communists in the fight against national oppression had "irreversibly transformed the communist movement in Canada."

"There was no communist organization in Quebec in the early 1960s," said Prairie. "In response to the explosive character of the class struggle and the radicalization of Quebecois youth, the League for Socialist Action, the then- predecessor organization of the Communist League, sent some of its members from Toronto to Montreal in 1964 to open a branch, learn French, and participate in the union, student, and national struggles.

"Through their participation in the struggle, communists reached the conclusion that the Quebecois were an oppressed nation," said Prairie. "They advocated that all working people across Canada support the Quebecois fight for national self-determination.

"In 1970, one month before Ottawa sent the army into Quebec, communists took a position in support of the fight for Quebec's independence and fielded a candidate for mayor in the Montreal municipal elections," Prairie continued. "They decided to campaign to convince working people everywhere to support the fight for Quebec independence because winning support for this struggle is a precondition for forging working-class unity in this country.

"The fight for the independence of Quebec is an integral part of the fight to replace capitalist political power in Ottawa with a workers' and farmers' government," Prairie explained.

"It has mobilized hundred of thousands of workers and youth in powerful mass struggles against the most decisive enemy of all working people in Canada - the Canadian imperialist state and its government in Ottawa. Today this struggle is a major obstacle for the ruling class in its austerity drive against workers across the country. It also hampers Ottawa's Canadian nationalist flag-waving efforts to convince workers to support its imperialist foreign policy, including the use of Canadian troops against working people in places like Bosnia, the Middle East, and against the Albanian independence movement in Kosovo."

Prairie described the lessons communists drew from their sectarian decision to call for abstention in the 1980 Quebec sovereignty referendum. This error was made on the grounds that the referendum was organized by a capitalist government led by the bourgeois nationalist Parti Quebecois. "As communists, we understand that the fight for Quebec independence won't be won in the ballot box, but in the factories and in the streets by the action of millions of workers, farmers, and youth," said Prairie. "But when millions of working people draw a line between themselves and their oppressors in Ottawa-as it was the case in 1980-we have to throw ourselves in the battle as it actually happens, without condition. This is why we campaigned for the "Yes" side in the 1995 referendum.

"The continued resistance of new generations of Quebecois to their national oppression is a fighting example to all working people," Prairie pointed out. "This resistance is a weapon that can be used to overcome the divisions along national lines imposed on us by our class enemies and their hired politicians in Ottawa, in whose class interests it is to keep Canada a prison house of nations.

"Understanding this is a life and death question for other oppressed people like Canada's 1 million Native people, who face intense racism and national oppression at the hands of the federal government." said Prairie. "Despite violent repression by the cops and the army, their fight for self- determination has never been broken.

"Because the PQ government does not defend Native rights, Ottawa cynically poses itself as a champion of Native self- determination against Quebec City," Prairie explained. "But Ottawa is the main source of Native oppression and discrimination in Canada. Native officials who call on Ottawa to use the army to defend Native rights in an independent Quebec do not defend the interests of Native people. They side with the oppressors of Native people in Canada against the struggle of another group of oppressed." Prairie explained that the struggle of native people for self- determination is integrally linked to the struggle of the working class as a whole against capitalist power in Ottawa, including the fight for Quebec independence.

"Understanding this working-class line of march is the bedrock for the Communist League's strategy of building a unified, centralized, communist party based in the industrial working class and its unions," said Prairie. "It is only with this kind of leadership organization tying together in a single fist working-class fighters from Quebec and the rest of the country that victory against the oppressors and warmakers in Ottawa will be possible."

John Steele is a member of International Association of Machinists Local 2113.  
 
 
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