Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Quebec, Canada's French-speaking, largely Catholic province, had not, in the long post-Confederation history of the country, exhibited much in the way of revolutionary ferment. It harbored radicals, of course, among them members of the Communist Party of Canada and the social democratic Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. Anarchists were as evident in Montreal as they were in other metropolitan Canadian centers, but they were by no means a major political force. The province had long been governed by fairly conventional and often quite conservative political forces; Maurice Duplessis and his Union Nationale Party in the 1930s and 1940s are indicative of the ways in which the Quebec state, aligned with the clergy, brokered an arrangement within Canadian federalism. This ceded to the Ottawa-based centralized federal government the power to charter national economic policy, while the local Quebec state controlled the hegemonic institutions of everyday life, among them those bodies that ordered educational, legal, cultural, and religious activities. As a consequence Quebec remained, into the 1950s, a bastion of traditionalism, with church and state linked and the influence of the countryside and its parishes evident in ways that would have seemed quite antiquated elsewhere in Canada. This began to change in the late 1940s and 1950s as Quebec experienced a wave of secularization. An ... log in or subscribe to read full text