Québec and Canadian Studies in Britain: reflections of a pioneer

Québec 1961–3

The city of Montreal I arrived in with my young family on the evening of 8 September 1961 was a grey granite Scottish town of banks, insurance firms and rather grand department stores. Eaton's, Morgan's and the Bay marched in line towards their clientele in Baie d'Urfé, Pointe-Claire and Westmount. It was the exciting transformation of that city in less than a decade which was to inspire my teaching in Birmingham for twenty-five years from 1963. We had docked in a rosy pink Québec City at 6 a.m. and then steamed up the Saint Lawrence in glorious early autumn weather, greeted on the scarily shallow Lac Saint-Pierre by speedboats buzzing around the great white Empress of Britain and glad to be free of the wild motion off Northern Ireland in the tail end of a hurricane and the relentless tossing of the great grey Atlantic rollers. There was something magical about the warmth, the light, the colour, after the adventure of sea travel. It was the New World beckoning.

The death of Maurice Duplessis in 1959 after twenty-five almost unbroken years in power as Québec premier was opening up the way to a surprising outburst of modernisation, shaped by the shrewd policies of Jean Lesage, who came from federal politics untainted by the Duplessis years. We did not know it yet, but the economic and educational reforms would have, as their concomitant, an upsurge in nationalist feeling, sometimes violently expressed. One hundred and fifty explosive charges rocked the province in the two years we were there. Urban terrorists formed the FLQ (Front de libération du Québec) modelled on the Algerian FLN (Front de libération nationale). The more serious among them read the works of the prophets of decolonisation in Africa and the Caribbean, applying the psychological reflections of the Négritude movement, and those of the Portrait du colonisé of the Tunisian doctor Albert Memmi which was reproduced cheaply in Québec.¹ There were many arrests and some deportations. A number of concessions and constitutional adjustments to make Canada a country more comfortable for French speakers to live in, brought about by the federal government's Laurendeau–Dunton Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, were the positive outcomes of a turbulent time, but these did not prevent the further shaking of the certainties of Canadian democracy by the traumatic events of the October crisis of 1970. The Parti Québécois, formed in 1968 under the leadership of René Lévesque, a former minister in Lesage's government, provided the democratically acceptable antidote, giving a political visibility and political viability to independantist sentiment that resulted in the party's triumph in the provincial elections of 1976. It was, for me, the most enormous privilege to be present at this critical juncture in the making of modern Québec– and it was also, as it turned out, the happiest of chances for my future career.

I was welcomed to Macdonald College, the educational faculty of McGill University, in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, by the people who had invited me: Professor Reg Edwards, an Englishman and educational psychologist,² and Gordon McElroy and Chris Hawkins in the French Department. We were given an apartment in Cluster Cottages on the college campus. Macdonald also housed the Agriculture Faculty of McGill University under Dean Dion. I shared an office with a linguist, Bernard Spolsky, a New Zealander, who had lived in Israel and learnt Hebrew whilst doing his military service. I brought him a Hebrew newspaper once from Montreal only to be told that it was in Yiddish and he understood not a word. Downtown Montréal, with all that that bustling, cosmopolitan city had to offer, was half an hour away by the CPR railway or a little longer by bus. The campus is on the shore of a widening of the Saint Lawrence river, the Lac Saint-Louis. The mailman brought his skates in the winter to skate home down the lake. I offer this brief sketch...