Quebec-Ontario Relations: A Shared Destiny?

4. From French Canadian Solidarity to Shattered References

4. fRom fREnCh CAnADIAn soLIDARITy To shATTERED REfEREnCEs The Transformation of Québécois and franco-ontarian Identities mIChEL BoCk The current differentiation between Québécois and FrancoOntarian identities can sometimes lead even the best-intentioned observer to forget that there was a time, not so long ago, when such a distinction between these two groups would have seemed strange and meaningless . This period, characterized by the French Canadian national project, has posed something of a problem to the collective memory of both Quebec and French-speaking Ontario since the 1960s, when the heady intellectual and political atmosphere of the Quiet Revolution swept aside many of the old convictions and replaced them with new ones . In our resolutely modern age, the traditionalism of the French Canadian national vision engenders a kind of malaise, not only among present-day actors, but also among certain researchers, whose interpretations of Quebec and Franco-Ontarian history tend to significantly underplay the importance of the French Canadian identity, if not ignoring it outright (Bock 2008) . Yet as we will see, this traditionalism helped rally French Canadians in Quebec and Ontario behind a common national project and created a solidarity that transcended local, regional, and provincial cleavages for generations . The nature of this French Canadian project has been the topic of much debate among historians over the last half century . The debate itself reveals the full extent of the social changes that have swept French-speaking Canada and Quebec since the Quiet Revolution . 78 Quebec–ontario Relations –A shared Destiny? In the 1950s and 1960s, historians argued that the “economic inferiority ” of French Canadians had been caused by the traditionalism of the religious and secular elite, though there were serious differences of opinion as to the origins of the problem (Brunet 1958; Ouellet 1966) . In the 1970s and 1980s, a younger generation of historians who had come of age during and immediately after the major reforms of the Quiet Revolution used the newly developed tools of social history to reveal the deep roots of Quebec modernity . As demonstrated by Ronald Rudin (1997), these historians set about presenting Quebec as a “normal ” society whose historical experience matched that of other societies across North America and the Western world . Whereas earlier historians saw the traditionalism of French Canadian society as a constraint to be overcome in order for French Canadians to enter the modern age, their successors virtually ignored this traditionalism in favour of a new vision that placed modernity at the very heart of Quebec’s historical experience . In both cases, modernity is defined almost entirely in terms of urbanization, industrialization, economic progress, and the rejection of traditionalism . In both cases, the issue of the French Canadian diaspora and its ties to what had long been referred to as “the old province”— an issue closely tied to French Canadian traditionalism—went largely unheeded by researchers, who refocused their analysis on Quebec and its territory (Bock 2004) . Only since the 1990s has a “nouvelle sensibilité” (Kelly 2003) arisen among researchers interested in the Quebec/French Canadian national question, largely thanks to a generation of historians and sociologists who were born after the Quiet Revolution and never experienced the so-called “Grande Noirceur .” This new generation has sought to escape the confines of the old traditional/modern dichotomy, taking a fresh and perhaps more dispassionate look at French Canadian traditionalism through its cultural, institutional, and religious expressions . This phenomenon has been accompanied by a new wave of intellectual and political history that helped restore a certain respect for the national question after thirty years of disinterest by social historians . This study is rooted in this “nouvelle sensibilité .” In the following pages, we will show how the ties that linked Quebec and French-speaking Ontario prior to the Quiet Revolution stemmed from a traditionalist view of the French Canadian national “reference,” a concept introduced nearly twenty years ago by Fernand Dumont (1993), who defined it as an overall representation of a national identity founded on a common memory and giving meaning to a social organization as diverse, coherent, and politically autonomous as possible . For the purposes of this study, the Church and the countless institutions in its orbit provided French Canada’s social organization with its institutional and political structure, indeed its basic framework, at least until the 1960s (Gould 2003) . 4 . from french Canadian solidarity to shattered References 79 This study will be divided into five...