For many members of Quebec’s Jewish community, it is getting increasingly difficult to sleep at night.
They are reeling, their future here in serious doubt, after a string of incidents and racist comments made by leading advocates of removing Quebec from the 128-year-old Canadian federation.
Further generating a sense of anxiety for the Jewish community – and for the broader population backing federalism – a new group, comprised of right-wing nationalists, has been created to advance the separatist cause.
The separatists lost an Oct. 30 referendum on the issue by the slimmest of margins – some 50,000 votes out of an estimated 4.67 million ballots cast.
The organized Jewish community was heavily involved in the campaign against the separatist option.
But the campaign, marked by repeated slurs against the ethnic minorities in Quebec, left the Jewish community distinctly uneasy.
In one instance, Lucien Bouchard, the leader of the separatist Bloc Quebecois in Parliament, called on the province’s white women to have more children in order to protect Quebec’s culture.
In another, Quebec Premier Jacques Parizeau, on the night he conceded the referendum victory to the federalists, blamed the loss suffered by his forces on money and “the ethnic vote.”
A day later, Parizeau resigned, a move that will become effective early next year when a new leader of Quebec is chosen.
That leader is expected to be Bouchard.
Despite expectations that Quebec would witness a period of racial healing after the vote, the referendum’s aftermath has not proven to be the time of reconciliation for which many had hoped.
In the latest incident, Pierre Bourgault, a writer and former consultant to Parizeau, charged in an interview published Nov. 30 in the French-language daily Journal de Montreal that it is the province’s Jewish, Greek and Italian communities who are racist, not the majority of French-speaking Quebecers.
Leaders of the three communities, representing some 400,000 members, banded together several years ago to form a coalition with the goal of promoting national unity and of expressing their solidarity with the federalist cause.
The Jewish community is represented on the committee by Canadian Jewish Congress, which soon reacted to Bourgault’s statements.
“Pierre Bourgault’s remarks on ethnic communities are reprehensible, intolerant and reflect a profound disregard for democratic values as well as the fundamental right of all Quebecers to freely express their political opinion,” said Max Bernard, chairman of the Community Relations Committee of Canadian Jewish Congress, Quebec region.
Similar statements criticizing Bourgault and calling for greater social harmony were issued by the Hellenic Congress of Quebec and the National Congress of Italian Canadians.
Morale among those supporting the federalist cause has been extremely low in recent weeks.
Many federalists feel that Bouchard’s forthcoming assumption of power in Quebec will result in a victory for the separatists the next time a referendum is held – and that, it is widely believed her, will take place within the next two years.
Additional fears are being prompted by the recent entry of a group of right- wing nationalists into the separatist camp.
The group, the Quebec National Liberation Movement, is headed by Raymond Villeneuve, who as head of the Quebec Liberation Front in the 1960s was convicted of involvement in a separatist bombing campaign.
In a newspaper interview earlier this month, Villeneuve said his new group would seek to ostracize the foes of separatism.
He also said his group’s goals include seeking a moratorium of immigration to Quebec, launching an “unrelenting struggle” against Canadian domination and against the “internal enemies” of Quebec, and the creation of an all-French school system.
Although the ruling Parti Quebecois refuses to sanction the group, which had renounced violence for the time being, this has done little to ease the fears of those who remember the 1970 October Crisis.
At that time – prompted by the liberation front’s kidnapping of Quebec politician Pierre Laporte and British High Commissioner James Cross – then- Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act.
Martial law was declared, soldiers patrolled the streets of Montreal and hundreds of civilians were detained in prison without charge.
Laporte was later found strangled to death in the trunk of a car; Cross eventually was released unharmed.
The members of the liberation front responsible for the kidnapping were imprisoned.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
