While citing family reasons, Bouchard's statement to the media said he was stepping aside because he had failed "to increase the sovereignist fervor" of the population and that Quebecois had "remained astonishingly impassive in face of federal attacks" over the last years.

Bouchard added that he wasn't interested in continuing to fight a wing of the Parti Quebecois (PQ) over a major controversy sparked by statements of a PQ figure who blamed immigrants and Jews for the defeat of a 1995 referendum on Quebec sovereignty. The PQ is a bourgeois nationalist party that defends sovereignty of the French-speaking province.

Federalist media and politicians across Canada jumped at the opening to sound the death knell for the Quebec independence movement. "My efforts were in vain," "Separatism in retreat," "A victory for federalists," were the front page and editorial headlines in the next day's Globe and Mail and National Post, the two English-language national dailies in Canada.

Many of these articles fail to note that for more than a decade all opinion polls and votes in the province indicate at least 40 percent of Quebecois support sovereignty. And Quebecois continue to face national oppression as a result of systematic discrimination based on the fact that they speak French and are denied their democratic right to self-determination.

There is a crisis among the bourgeois and petty bourgeois forces that have dominated the leadership of the Quebecois national liberation struggle since the 1960s and '70s. This partly flows from the fact that they have been unable to extract any significant new concessions from Canada's rulers or to stop Ottawa's unceasing attacks on the Quebecois.  
 
Austerity drive
The PQ was formed in 1968 out of a split in the Quebec Liberal Party under the impact of growing mass struggles against the national oppression of the Quebecois. The Liberal Party is the most important party of the Canadian ruling class in Quebec. The PQ governed Quebec from 1976 to 1985, and since its reelection in 1994.

Bouchard, a lawyer by profession, was Canada's ambassador to France during the 1980s, before becoming a senior cabinet minister in Ottawa in the Conservative Party government of Brian Mulroney.

In 1990, he slammed the door on the Mulroney government over his opposition to the so-called Lake Meech Accord. This accord was aimed at getting the Quebec government to accept the 1982 Canadian constitution, which stripped Quebec of powers it had historically enjoyed. Later the same year he formed the Bloc Quebecois (BQ) with other federal politicians from Quebec, former members of the Liberal and Conservative parties. In the 1993 federal election the BQ won a big majority of the electoral seats in Quebec and became the official opposition in Ottawa.

Bouchard was elected leader of the PQ and Quebec premier in 1996, replacing Jacques Parizeau.

Parizeau resigned amidst controversy two days after the 1995 sovereignty referendum over statements where he blamed the electoral loss on "money and the ethnic vote." That referendum lost by a small margin, plunging the Canadian ruling class into a crisis on the question of Quebec from which it has not yet emerged.

"My efforts to rapidly relaunch the debate on the national question remained in vain," Bouchard said as he resigned. If there was discontent in face of federal government attacks, he added, "it was hardly reflected in the results of the last federal vote"--a reference to the BQ's loss of six seats in last November's federal election.

The "winning conditions" of the Bouchard government were centered on what he and other capitalist politicians called "fiscal responsibility" including the elimination of the governmental spending deficit over the last four years. The PQ claimed this was the way to demonstrate the credibility of a sovereignist government to international financial circles.

To achieve this the PQ government carried out an austerity drive that hit working people in Quebec the hardest. This included cuts in social services such as public health and education, which were at the center of the gains of the mass struggles of the 1960s and 1970s against the national oppression of the Quebecois. These moves undercut popular support for the PQ and the BQ in the province.  
 
The 'Michaud affair'
A sharp debate over anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant remarks made by Yves Michaud, a well known PQ figure, had been at the center of politics in Quebec since mid-December. Bouchard's resignation came against the backdrop of the so-called "Michaud affair."

Bouchard denied that the Michaud controversy was a factor in his resignation, but this was unconvincing given the importance he himself had accorded it in his text.

On December 13 in comments before a Quebec government commission studying the state of the French language, Michaud singled out Jews and immigrants for their "ethnic votes" against the independence of Quebec in the 1995 referendum--essentially repeating Parizeau's infamous charges. Michaud and others who echo his views advance their reactionary views by playing on the violation of self-determination that occurred when people other than Quebecois who live in the province were allowed to vote in the referendum.

Michaud said that in some predominately Jewish and immigrant polls not a single voter supported independence. He called this voting pattern an "ethnic vote against the sovereignty of the Quebec people.... They should excuse themselves for being so anti-Quebec." He also defended Canon Lionel Groulx, a leading Quebec intellectual from the 1930s until his death in 1967, known for his anti-Semitic and pro-fascist actions and writings.

A news article in the Montreal daily La Presse reported quotes from other presentations the day Michaud spoke, including a speaker who suggested that those "who don't want to say hello in French should be" subject to verbal abuse and another who said, "When Tamils serve us in English in corner grocery stores...it is a call to direct violence."

According to La Presse, these remarks were met with sustained applause by many of the 100 people present, an indication that rightist forces had organized to intervene at that session of the commission, the last in Montreal, and had given it a very different tone.  
 
Sharp polarization in the PQ
The reactions to Michaud's remarks were on the front pages for several days. Newspapers printed articles and letters, both for and mostly, against. "I found it just revolting," Sylvie Vézina was reported saying about Michaud's anti-Semitic comments. "This is completely racist. I had the impression of going back 20 years."

"For us," said Daniel Baril, an ex-president of the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Quebec (University Student Federation of Quebec) "the multi-ethnicity of Quebec is a fact." Baril was a signatory of a letter denouncing Michaud's anti-immigrant remarks signed by a group of young people of various political stripes. Bouchard immediately distanced himself from Michaud. "I am in total disagreement with Mr. Michaud's remarks," he said. "I deplore them, I condemn them and I totally dissociate myself from them." On December 14, the provincial Quebec National Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution condemning Michaud's remarks.

But Michaud stuck by his statements and his announced intention to run as PQ candidate in a coming by-election in the provincial electoral riding of Mercier in Montreal.

A full page ad, "Statement of solidarity regarding Yves Michaud: The National Assembly and Liberty of Expression," was published December 19 in the Montreal daily Le Devoir. It was signed by more than 30 figures in the broad sovereignist milieu, including former premier Parizeau; Fernand Daoust, former president of the Quebec Federation of Labor (FTQ), Quebec's largest union federation; Denis Lazure, a former PQ cabinet minister; well-known Quebecois artists; and other PQ officials, including former candidates.

Several of these figures are associated with the so-called "radical wing" of the PQ, whose trade mark over the years has been calling for a rapid third referendum, the banning of other languages than French on public billboards, and coercive measures aimed at imposing French on immigrants

While the ad claimed to denounce the National Assembly's motion because it was an attack on free speech, it also said that Michaud is "one of the most eminent and most respected citizens of Quebec...who only regretted the relative stalemate in the integration of certain groups of immigrants and repeated the character of the vote in the 1995 referendum."

Two days later a statement by Marc Laviolette, president of the Confederation of National Trade Unions (CSN), the second largest trade union federation in Quebec, denounced "all those who believe that it is by crawling on our knees that we will gain the sympathy and the esteem of these new arrivals." The statement added that the "problem isn't what Yves Michaud said. It is what the Liberals and the PQ members did...if Lucien Bouchard is ashamed of his [people] he should know that the CSN is proud of them."

The federalist politicians and media were also quick in using the Michaud affair to smear the Quebec national movement as intolerant, anti-immigrant, and anti-Semitic. Thomas Walkom, National Affairs Writer for the Toronto Star, wrote January 13, "This isn't to say that Quebec in the 1930s was more anti-Semitic than, say, Ontario. But Quebec nationalism probably was."

In his statement of resignation, Bouchard said he had been "surprised by the protests following the unanimous adoption of the resolution by this [National] Assembly on the unacceptable character of the remarks which launched this strange and dangerous debate" but that he had no interest whatsoever in continuing the debate.

Michel Prairie is the Communist League candidate in the Montreal riding of Mercier for the coming by-election. Grant Hargrave is a member of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees in Montreal.  
 
 
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