Career and politics in Montreal

I started off by finding myself the same kind of employment that I had had in Toronto, working for several years in the shipping departments of various different companies. One of them was another jobber like the one I had worked for before in Toronto, where I stayed for several years, first on a full time basis and later part time when I started going to university.

I soon met quite a few people who were under the influence of the Quebec sovereignty movement, which was most often associated with the Parti Québécois (PQ). Although it was supposed to be a separatist party, the PQ did not so much favor pure independence as the rather more moderate idea of achieving only some sort of partial political sovereignty, coupled with an ongoing economic association with the rest of Canada. I, however, was still heavily influenced by international socialism, so I was not yet ready to get involved in any nationalist movement.

While I was still working manually, I also started attending classes in the evenings at the University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM). At first, I found it difficult to decide which field of study to enter, since I was interested in practically every discipline that had anything to do with what the francophone universities call the human sciences, meaning not only social studies (sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, etc.) but also history, geography and psychology. They are not like the humanities, however, since they are all considered to be sciences and not just extensions of the literary arts. Eventually, I decided to focus on history, precisely because it is not at all limited to any particular aspect of reality. Since everything that exists belongs in the past as soon as it is studied, at some level history includes everything, even the epistemological history of how all the different arts and sciences came into being. The history of the discipline of history writing itself (historiography) is also included.

The next big event that affected my public life was the 1976 victory of the PQ in the Quebec provincial elections, that being the first time in recent history that any officially separatist party had been elected to power. I remember being invited to a celebration at a house belonging to a couple of people very active in the francophone media, where everyone was ecstatic about the PQ victory. In those days, however, I was still quite reluctant to commit myself to the idea of Quebec sovereignty, although I did have several fascinating conversations about it.

In the meantime, I was completing my BA in history at the university. I still have some of the course outlines, bibliographies and term papers from those early history courses, which also included three or four courses in political science. Much of the course material in those days was based on Marxist interpretations of everything, as well as being heavily influenced by Quebec nationalism. My professors during that period included Stanley Ryerson, the socialist academic I had met back at the peace center in the 1960s. Apparently, he was one of the leaders of the Quebec section of the Communist Party during the 1940s, when most of the French Canadian members quit, as well as later being a regional organizer in Europe.

Another one of my professors during the same period was Michel Grenon, a guy who often had a close rapport with his students, which is why the history department gave his name to the new student workshop after he died. I especially remember his description of how modern society deals with medieval legends like the one about Robin Hood, Sir Walter Scott turning him into a Saxon knight to make his robbing from the rich more palatable to the ruling class. A simple peasant bandit would have been so much less romantic.

In those days, courses in the human sciences were still being given in a former multistory factory that had recently been converted into classrooms. It was a dark and dingy old place. Whenever we showed up for classes, we had to wade through a small lobby chock full of literature tables set up by various radical socialist groups, very similar to the one I used to man back in Toronto.

I was still reasonably active in leftist politics during those same years, often getting my opinions published in various local newspapers. Some of the leftwing periodicals of the day also carried my contributions to the debate over radical professor Tom Naylor’s two-volume work on the history of Canadian business. Most of the dogmatic socialists found his version of business history to be less than useful. Among other things, this professor, a leftwing social democrat, felt that nineteenth century Canadian economic nationalism was not simply a straightforward pro capitalist ideology. Most of the radical socialist professors were claiming instead that it was just being used back then to trick working people into supporting the Conservative Party. Unfortunately, Naylor made several errors in this work, often proving his points by citing hundreds of historical documents, many of which did not really say what he wanted them to say.

During that same period, The Last Post, a monthly, left liberal magazine published a four page book review I wrote, called “Fascism with a Human Face?” This was a criticism of Quebec energy minister Guy Joron’s book attacking nuclear power and the consumer society. In that review, I wondered out loud whether the more radical elements in the ecology movement might not be doing more harm than good by trying to penalize everyone in society for the wrongheaded decisions of its leaders. I included a couple of paragraphs about the American crusader, Ralph Nader, who I saw as being “the highest profile ever erected in American advertising”.

At about the same time, I also wrote a series of short articles for a tiny leftist newspaper, Le Journal Choc,  put out by a little group of Québécois who had quit the Quebec section of the international socialist movement completely for nationalist reasons. My articles covered such topics as the energy crisis, the situation in Cambodia and the monetary crisis. I also contributed a friendly criticism of one of their books on the wave of industrial plant closings taking place in Quebec at that time, which they felt could only be solved by the national liberation of the Quebec people from English Canada. In another unrelated article, I criticized the Zionist movement again, including material taken from Ben Hecht’s book about the deals made in Hungary between the Nazis and the Zionists, a book that was still banned in Israel since its original publication back in 1956.

About the same time I joined several hundred thousand other Canadians by taking a short vacation in Cuba, the first time that I had ever visited a semitropical, third world country, not to mention a communist (state capitalist) country. All the passengers got a good break when Cubana Airlines was unable to fly us out on the scheduled day and we ended up visiting more of Havana for free, courtesy of the Cuban government. Other summer vacations included my first trip to Europe, as well as several visits to different parts of Quebec and Ontario, where I insisted on going to important historical sites as well as seeing the usual tourist attractions. In Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula, for example, I visited some of the installations used by the Robin family of robber barons for processing cod caught by extremely poorly treated fishermen.

Back in Montreal, I started supporting a Quebec committee that was formed right after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia to overthrow the Maoist regime of Pol Pot. This group even included one of my old friends from the Canadian Party of Labor. For several months, I helped that committee organize various activities to uphold the Vietnamese side in the Cambodian situation, such as bringing Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett to speak at a public meeting in Montreal. However, my participation in that political lobby meant that I was at least indirectly supporting a proSoviet communist  country that had invaded and occupied a proChinese communist country. But what was important to me at the time was that the Vietnamese had prevented the Khmer Rouge from continuing an internal genocide that had already resulted in the killing of about one quarter of the population, amounting to 1.7 million people. At the United Nations, the government of Canada, along with all the other western governments, nevertheless preferred the 1975-1979, ultra communist regime to the proSoviet Vietnamese government. This was during the period when the Chinese empire began collaborating with the American empire against the Soviet one.

As soon as I got my BA in history, I enrolled in the master’s program as well, which included the writing of a 140 page memoir, or short thesis, that I did not complete until 1984. My studies were assisted somewhat when I got a master’s grant from the university foundation. My thesis topic was about the American influence on Canadian economic nationalism in the mid nineteenth century, a subject that I chose after having taken a seminar on the economic depressions of the nineteenth century with the same professor who became my thesis director.

That was when I discovered for the first time how important the debate had been back then, all over the world, between economic nationalism and economic liberalism. I soon found out that my approach toward economic nationalism, based on the idea that it was often just as theoretically developed as the competing varieties of laissez faire economics, on the one hand, or Marxist economics on the other hand, was not any more appreciated by the pro capitalist professors than by the pro socialist ones. They were also not very impressed when I tried to buttress my argument by pointing out that a few nationalist writers of the period, such as Scottish Canadian John Rae, had received praise for some of their economic analyses by none other than British liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill. In the academic world, the prevailing approach has always been that economic nationalism can be reduced either to a deviant form of economic individualism, or to a deviant form of economic collectivism. It is seldom seen as an independent doctrine in its own right.

Quite a few people that I met in those days, not only in the university but also in the political movements in which I was involved erroneously thought that conservative politicians have always been in favor of the so called economic liberalism that had been founded back in the eighteenth century by Bernard de Mandeville and Adam Smith. This was taken to mean that conservatives back then were forever opposed to any kind of government intervention into the economy. Likewise, most people I knew also thought that only liberal minded, or leftwing socialist, politicians supported such government intervention.

In fact, quite the opposite was true, most conservatives having originally opposed economic liberalism and supported government control of the economy, which was first called mercantilism and then later on, neomercantilism. The reason why the founders of economic liberalism originally used that term to describe laissez faire was because they wanted to liberate, or free, private enterprise from what they thought was the stultifying effect of government control over the economy during the mercantilist period of history, just prior to the industrial revolution. However, economic nationalism has continued to attract widespread support as a strategy, advocated at various different times and in various different places, by all sorts of political movements, from the extreme right all the way over to the extreme left. It has never been exclusively associated with any particular part of the political spectrum.

Even in relatively recent times, very conservative governments in Gaullist France, in postwar Germany and Japan, and in dozens of other countries, upheld their own versions of economic nationalism. This was a fact that ought to have been well known and understood by people in the know, particularly in the universities. Even in the USA, economic nationalism has not just been confined to liberal politicians like Franklin Roosevelt, but has also been supported by conservative politicians like Dwight Eisenhower. On the other side of the political spectrum, since it abandoned the Marxist Leninist liturgy, the leaders of what is still officially called the Communist Party of China now oscillate between equal doses of economic nationalism and economic liberalism.

The kind of free enterprise, anti nationalist, capitalism being promoted by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s was called neoliberalism, which initially created quite a bit of confusion in the USA because of Roosevelt’s 1932 campaign slogan promoting “the new liberalism”. This has led to a peculiar situation in which the definition of the word “neoliberalism” is not always clear, though the current tendency is to make it into a straightforward synonym for laissez faire and for libertarianism. The authors of a book published back in the 1980s, that became for awhile the definitive history of contemporary Quebec, managed to use the word neoliberalism in both ways (for and against government intervention) in the very same chapter. I was one of the graduate students helping them do research for that book, but I felt at the time that this double definition must have been awfully confusing to younger students just starting out.

During the earlier part of that period, I was still doing manual labor, but then I started also getting university jobs as a corrector of exams and a monitor of seminars, before becoming a part time history instructor working on my own. Those were the days when the younger universities were desperately in need of teaching personnel, in which even the full time professors had initially been hired before they had completed their own master’s degrees. Later on, a lot of pressure was put on those same people to upgrade their qualifications by adding a PhD degree, but some of them managed to hang on all the way to retirement without having more than an MA. My first course was about the history of the industrial revolution in the west, for economics students. Most of the full time professors were more interested in doing their own research, or in giving classes to genuine history students, so the industrial revolution course, as well as several others, were left to the part time instructors to give.

By the time that the first Quebec referendum took place (1980), my opinion about the sovereignty movement had changed radically. After years of having read stories in Le Jour, the Parti Québécois newspaper, and in several other sources sympathetic to the cause, I ended up writing an article published in Le Devoir, another francophone daily, favoring the idea of independence from an economic perspective. My article was called “A choice between competing economic ideologies”, in which I presumed that the government of an independent Quebec would resist the kind of economic imperialism that the Bank of Canada had come to promote in its monetary policy.

Back in the 1970s, double digit inflation had become a huge problem in the industrial countries, greatly undermining the profit margins of big time investors. It was caused by a variety of phenomena, that included world domination by the US dollar and the refusal of many large firms to sufficiently depreciate the value of capital stock significantly diminished by their competitors adoption of more efficient industrial technologies. To eliminate that inflation, the world’s most important central banks decided to raise interest rates enormously, from about 5% to about 20%, between 1979 and 1981, and kept them very high until the end of the decade. This worked quite well against inflation by making it much more difficult to borrow money. But it also caused a worldwide recession, massive unemployment in many different countries and a huge increase in government debt. The Canadian national debt, for example, rose from 79 billion dollars in 1979 to over 500 billion in 1989. Nothing that has been done since that time to reduce that debt has ever succeeded, mainly because several new financial panics in the private sector have continued to drain the public treasury, all over the world.

For awhile, this interest rate monetarism became an integral part of the neoliberal counter revolution in economic policy, along with free trade, the privatization of previously nationalized firms and the deregulation of the banks and the stock market. During the 1990s, however, monetarism was abandoned in favor of much lower interest rates, while the rest of the neoliberal program continued unabated. Unfortunately, the world recession of the early 1980s became just the opening shot in a series of similar recessions that seemed to be deliberately provoked by the world’s largest private investors to make sure that they could take full control of every part of the world economy away from the state bureaucrats. Back then, I thought that the federal government of Canada, along with its British and American masters, had abandoned national sovereignty altogether, as well as ditching all previous attempts at decreasing the gap between the social classes.

So I tossed in my lot with the PQ and became a poll captain on referendum day. I was sent out to a poll in the western section of Montreal, an anglophone bastion in which, as it turned out, only two people voted Yes for sovereignty-association. Undoubtedly among the hundreds of No voters was the second person in line at my poll, none other than Ian Sinclair, the president of Canada’s largest private company, Canadian Pacific. Many of the other poll captains in anglophone districts ended up invalidating quite a few No votes, on the grounds that some voters X were not properly marked in the space provided, but I only had a few invalid votes in my own poll.

Thus began a period of my life in which I was involved with Quebec nationalism. In the long run, this was not any more satisfying a decision than the ones that I made when I had participated in some of the rival kinds of socialist groups. It was, however, the first time I had ever become involved in a mainstream party that had actually managed to get itself elected to government. Nevertheless, even though the PQ was not really seeking Quebec independence, but only partial political sovereignty and economic association with Canada, the voters refused to let them do even that. The PQ lost the first referendum by a wide margin (about 60-40) and fifteen years later, by a much narrower margin, after I had left the movement.

Still, sovereignty itself turned out to be only another kind of political ideal, like socialism, communism and democracy, which in fact has never been able to function as it was theoretically supposed to function, in the real world. In the first place, as the more radical varieties of the nationalist movement in Canada had already pointed out, Canada as a whole was not much more than a neocolony, or economic satrapy, of the USA. This situation became even more obvious after the signature of the North American free trade deal in the late 1980s, also advocated by the partisans of laissez faire. I initially thought that a sovereign Quebec could at least begin to offer some kind of resistance to monetarism and to the whole neoliberal movement that went with it.

Eventually, however, I realized that even the USA, with its huge army and several thousand nuclear weapons, was still highly dependent on other parts of the world, particularly since it started relying on such countries as Japan and China to finance a large part of its colossal debt. In today’s world, any country trying to exercise its sovereignty finds itself up against all kinds of opposition, a fact that regularly infuriates nationalists of all stripes, the “neo-imperialists” trying to run large economic empires as well as the “anti-imperialists” from the dominated countries. In fact, one of the most spectacular examples of declining nationalism took place long after monetarism disappeared, when in 2008 a few thousand brokers and bankers forced dozens of supposedly sovereign countries to go much more deeply into debt, to many of those same financiers, in order to save the world economy from complete disintegration.

Back in the 1980s, however, the sovereignty option still looked very attractive to me, as the socialist ideal had been during the 1960s and the 1970s. The PQ government during its first mandate had also succeeded in passing a number of laws that seemed worthwhile, particularly the ones with a social democratic flavor, such as rural zoning or the anti scab law. At the time, I had no insight into the fact that the party’s initial loss in the referendum debate would lead to a period of intense demoralization during its second mandate, as well as much later on, after the second referendum defeat. Recently, I discovered that André d’Allemagne, one of the more hardline founders of the PQ coalition, had eventually figured out why the Québécois never managed to vote for any kind of independence. According to him, this was essentially because they had been so thoroughly colonized over the preceding centuries that they could not seriously contemplate actually growing up and functioning as adults in the real world.

Shortly after joining the Parti Québécois, I got involved in an even bigger way by becoming a candidate for the party in a subsequent election campaign. This took place not long after the first referendum defeat, and the PQ’s provincial government was supposed to have been sent to the trash bin of history as a result. Instead, they ended up surviving for a second term, as well as winning several more elections many years after that. My candidacy came about because I was living in a section of Montreal that was mostly English speaking. The local PQ riding association knew that it had no chance of winning the seat, but wanted to present an anglophone candidate in order to put the lie to the theory that only French Canadian Quebeckers could possibly support the separatists.

The president of the riding association was particularly anxious to prove this point because in his professional career, having to do with the stock exchange commission, he was largely involved with anglophones. In fact, during that election there were several English speaking candidates, such as Henry Milner, the head of the already existing Anglophone Committee for Sovereignty-Association, and Robert Dean, a very well known union organizer. This last person got elected at that time, but only because he represented a riding that was largely francophone, as did David Payne, who was elected to office not only during the second PQ mandate, but who also managed to stage a local comeback much later on.

My own campaign was a big event for me, to take up the cause of Quebec sovereignty after so many years in the socialist movement. Needless to say, my opponents in the riding as well as the local anglophone press made a big deal out of my having become a traitor to my own linguistic community, but as far as I know, no one did any research to find out about my socialist background. My main opponent, Reed Scowen, from the very federalist Liberal Party, was reelected by a large majority and continued to be a reasonably well known provincial politician for several years afterward. Curiously enough, however, he eventually decided to write a book about how English Canada probably would have been better off if it had decided to let Quebec separate after all. Roopnarine Singh, another candidate in the same riding, was an immigrant from India who went on to become the main organizer of the Canada Day parades in Montreal for many years after that.

Several times during the campaign, I had difficulty supporting the PQ government’s official stance on various issues, particularly during an election rally at McGill University for the English speaking candidates. I was up there on the platform next to premier René Lévesque, when someone in the audience started asking him a lot of difficult questions about why his government had suddenly starting cutting back on health and education spending after several years of increasing expenditures. His reply, having to do with what turned out to be the worldwide recession that I mentioned earlier, did not go down well with the student population, to say the least.

From a media point of view, my campaign was quite a success, since I managed to get interviews published on about twenty different occasions in most of the local papers. This was all very theoretical, however, since our riding association unanimously decided not to canvass very much in our local area. Instead, we sent several dozen, enthusiastic young supporters over to a more francophone riding in order to help a well known poet, Gérald Godin, get re-elected in a neighborhood that had a lot of recent immigrants, who were not supposed to like the PQ. This was quite a turnaround for him since he had previously been one of the almost 500 people arrested during the October crisis of 1970. I also helped him get a little bit better known among some of those immigrants by participating with him in a reconciliation conference.

During the election campaign, the part timers union at the university where I worked went on strike, in an effort to get more money and more recognition from the university as an integral part of the teaching staff. I ended up spending part of my campaign parading around in front of the university with a picket sign. We were engaged in a very uphill battle, however, since the university was supported not only by the government for which I was campaigning, but also by the full time professors. They had won their own strike a few years before that, partly with our support, but were not at all anxious to share their slice of the pie with any outsiders.

As I pointed out earlier, this was the period when the Bank of Canada, following the lead of the central banks in the UK and the USA, decided to control inflation by jacking up interest rates fourfold. This strategy caused a great deal of hardship in many countries, as well as the biggest debt crisis since the fourteenth century. A few months later, I published another article in Le Devoir, called “The Bank of Canada against the national interest”, followed soon after with “Monetarism in a sovereign Quebec”. I also published similar articles around the same time in The Gazette, an English speaking daily, such as “Low interest for those who produce, higher for rest?” as well as “Trudeau package will hurt economy of Quebec”. This last article elicited the enraged response of several anglophone federalists, such as David Berger, a federal member of parliament from the Montreal area, who were supporters of the kind of Canadian economic nationalism that prime minister Trudeau had been developing. By accepting the monetarist ideology, however, the federal government seemed to me to have abandoned any pretensions about Canada’s own economic independence.

My idea was that the Quebec independence movement could be used to fight monetarism instead. This naive impression was gained when I read PQ finance minister Jacques Parizeau’s budget speech, delivered shortly before the party won the 1981 election. In that speech, he attacked the monetarists as the “docteurs Diafoirus” of monetary policy, meaning that raising interest rates so much was like killing the patient with totally useless, seventeenth century medical remedies, as in Molière’s play “Le malade imaginaire”. This made me think that his government was genuinely interested in saving the Quebec nation from the vagaries of international capitalism.

Unfortunately, I was briefly drawn into toeing the party line by defending the government’s decision to begin cutting back on public expenditure, as a momentary retrenchment. This was a real error on my part, however, since every provincial government since that time continued to promote the general policy of cutbacks, no matter what its official ideology. Limitations on new spending were also to become one of the reasons why I felt obliged to leave the party several months later, particularly since those limitations always seem directed against health, education and infrastructure. It turned out to be easier for the government to slow down the growth in basic services for the entire population than it was to cut subsidies to the business community, or even to abandon the tax cuts that the PQ government had previously introduced to encourage the middle class to buy stocks in Quebec companies.

After the election, I got involved in the regional executive of the PQ, for the outlying section of Montreal island to which our riding belonged. Over the next few months, we spent several hundred hours debating various political issues, competing with all the other regions in order to influence overall party policy. At one point, I even represented the party in an English language community television debate, with John Ciaccia, a high profile former cabinet minister from the Liberal Party. This aspect of my involvement in the PQ had to do with my role as an anglophone member of the party, so I joined the small committee of English speaking Quebec nationalists. Those militants tried very earnestly to promote the idea that support for sovereignty was not confined to French Canadian inhabitants, but was also supported by at least seven percent of the anglophones in the province. The anglophone committee even included one of my old friends from the radical socialist CPL in Ontario, who had also left Toronto and moved to Quebec.

That was when I came up with the idea to develop a regional economic committee, to get the members in our area better educated on economic problems, by organizing debates and inviting the appropriate government ministers to come and speak to our supporters about the economy. This idea was enthusiastically endorsed by the national executive, which wanted to counteract the party’s deserved reputation for being relatively weak on economic matters. What I also wanted was to use the regional committee as a sounding board for my own views on economic nationalism, with the eventual goal of rallying the whole party into a crusade against laissez faire capitalism. I had dreams of getting the Quebec nationalist movement to accomplish what the international socialist movement was incapable of achieving, namely developing a truly mixed economy, combining individual initiative with social democratic community spirit.

My efforts were soon derailed, however, by Bernard Landry, one of the PQ’s economic ministers, who later became the premier. He had his own ideas about economic development, being in fact opposed to some of the traditional policies of economic nationalism, such as protectionism, and wanted to promote free trade instead, especially with the USA. In practical terms, his economic nationalism seemed to be confined to supporting nationalized industries, or using government subsidies and incentives to bring more private investment into the province of Quebec. So he invited me to a meeting with some executives from a private firm, to discuss methods for eventually using Quebec expertise to help rebuild Lebanon after its civil war was over. This sort of thing did not give the impression that the PQ government was really interested in any kind of nationalist crusade against international capitalism.

A couple of months later, finance minister Parizeau also seemed to have changed his mind about the “docteurs Diafoirus”, apparently deciding that since he could not beat the monetarists, he was better off joining them. His government soon came out with a broad based assault on the public sector, seeking immediate relief from its budget problems by rolling back salaries among civil servants, teachers, and hospital workers, by about 20%. At that time, I was still working as a part time instructor at the university and saw my own salary cut by the same percentage, even though I was making less than ten thousand dollars a year.

The government had promised not to cut any salaries under 20 000 dollars, but it seems that the bureaucrats making the cuts in the universities decided that a part-timer was paid fifty dollars an hour for teaching which, when multiplied by forty hours a week and fifty weeks a year, gave an annual income of 100 000 dollars. In reality, however, most of the lecturers only taught an average of five to ten hours per week, for at most 30 weeks per year. Needless to say, decisions like that one made the government lose most of its support among the hundreds of thousands of public sector workers. Even our pension plan was cut, the government refusing any increases whatsoever to compensate for inflation from 1982 to 1999, meaning that we are all still suffering from those same decisions several decades later.

As could be expected, a group of us within the party tried to organize some internal opposition to this latest turn of events. Most of us had become members in the first place not only to promote Quebec nationalism, but also to help build democratic socialism, more commonly known as social democracy. We felt that during the PQ’s first mandate, the provincial government had been a model for all of North America, having put into place such government interventions as public automobile insurance and agricultural self sufficiency. We were completely opposed to this new style of government, which seemed to turn Quebec into the first Canadian province to copy Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, by slowly dismantling economic nationalism and limited social democracy, and replacing them with a gradual return to laissez faire. It turns out that this was a rather accurate prediction, since thirty years later, “sovereignist governance” is still official PQ policy, combining governance, the neoliberal codeword for free enterprise government, with anti federalist rhetoric.

For a time, I decided to support the radicals in the PQ, people who wanted total independence from Canada and not just sovereignty-association. This was quite different from premier Lévesque’s own description of sovereignty-association as trying to turn Canada into a true confederation, dominated by the provinces rather than by the federal government. The PQ radicals also favored a more complete version of social democracy, as well as a more enthusiastic defense of the affirmative action charter aimed at promoting the French language (“Bill 101”). In 1981, I therefore found myself sitting with the other delegates from my local riding at the party’s national convention. I voted for most of the resolutions presented by the radical faction of the party, since I felt that their ideas were opposed to the American economic empire’s program of world uniformity and supply side economics.

However, I was completely out of step with the radicals, and with most of the other delegates when I refused to give a standing ovation to a former member of the FLQ when he entered the meeting room. So far as I could tell, one of the few other people in that huge room who did not applaud was a woman who I would meet again as a colleague at a junior college where I became a teacher several years later. I felt that the PQ should not have anything to do with the terrorists, who had already killed several innocent people, especially since many FLQ members had probably been police agents. This was before the revelations concerning the fact that Claude Morin, the PQ’s own chief strategist, had also been working for the federal police from the beginning.

Most of the delegates at that convention voted in favor of several resolutions that contradicted Lévesque’s ideas on sovereignty-association and his relatively conciliatory attitude toward anglophones. I also witnessed the extraordinary event that the premier himself mentioned in his autobiography, when his finance minister pretended to mistakenly head for the microphone set up for delegates opposing the leader’s ideas, before finally speaking in favor of his boss’s position. Apparently, this was his way of showing everyone that opposition to the sovereignty-association point of view was supported by people in high places, but without risking his job as a powerful minister in the provincial government.

Over the next couple of months, the premier then threatened to quit the party, but decided instead to organize an internal referendum among all the members. The idea behind this so called “Renérendum” was to overthrow the decisions already taken democratically, and to replace them with new resolutions more to his liking. This was followed up by a second version of the same convention, which effectively reversed the earlier results. After that, the radical elements within the party spent almost a year organizing against Lévesque’s initiative and losing every fight with the leader. I remember participating in a regional delegation to the premier’s office in the Hydro Québec building, where he told us that there were to be no compromises and that it was to be his way or nothing. This was from a man who did not even have the humility to submit to a normal court case back in 1977 after he had run over a homeless guy lying in the street at night, while driving his car under the influence of alcohol.

It was in this context that the cutbacks against unionized public sector employees were introduced. Many of the radicals who had been defeated within the party on nationalist issues were now obliged to attack the government, this time including finance minister Parizeau, over its lack of social democratic principles. Naturally, the union movement to which I also belonged was attacking the party ideologically by pointing out that the government’s second mandate was opposed to some of the main goals of its first mandate.

However, the government then decided to make matters much worse by reinforcing its salary cuts with a new law that made protesting against the rollback itself illegal. Refusing to let the public sector victims even publicly criticize a government decree was the kind of undemocratic move that recalled some of the authoritarian methods that Pierre Trudeau had championed in the past. This was the last straw for people like me and I immediately wrote a letter announcing my resignation. I delivered this letter in person as a delegate to a regional convention, but was obliged to walk out alone when the time came. That was how at least the first part of my career as a Quebec nationalist and social democrat finally ended.

At about the same time, however, I had several other interesting professional experiences. For example, since I was not being employed often enough as a lecturer and did not want to continue relying on manual work, I jumped at the chance of joining a small team of researchers that had been hired in order to sort out the historical archives of the CSN, a large Quebec union confederation. In those days, the federal government had a program by which some prospective employer could get a grant to hire a few unemployed people for some worthy project. The CSN, which included my own little part time teachers union, decided to hire several graduate students from the history departments at the francophone universities in Montreal, to reorganize and classify the archives they had been building up since they were first founded in 1921.

We became a little team of researchers during the summer, at one point receiving a visit from Jean-Claude Malépart, the populist Liberal member of the federal parliament who had been instrumental in helping to get the project off the ground. After several months of work, we produced a long, well ordered list of every one of the several thousand documents that we found in their files. We also wrote a short description of our project in one of the provincial history periodicals, thus making a small contribution to Quebec labor history, which was much more popular at the time among historians than it has since become.

My hunger for part time work during those same years also led to several other experiences. Only a few weeks after the union project ended, I got a call from a guy who was working with some native people in Quebec and gradually learning their language. He had a radio program going in Montreal that was being beamed to isolated parts of the province and he needed someone to temporarily replace one of his assistants. So for several weeks, I read all the newspapers, and boiled down all the world and national news into short, pithy sentences, which were then translated and broadcast in the native language.

Shortly after my replacement period ended, I read several academic articles that my former employer sent me. They had been published by Jean-Jacques Simard, a sociology professor from one of the Quebec universities, who claimed that even native groups could be racist, just as the European colonizers had been. I was fascinated by his description of one particular myth about how the world was founded by “the people” (the English translation of the word Inuit). Given the fact that before the arrival of the Europeans, the Inuit were often fighting with various Amerindian groups over the control of hunting grounds, this seemed to indicate that they did not include those other human beings within their definition of people.

It is true that European racism was a lot more virulent than native racism, because during the colonial period their empires dominated people all over the world and not just in one part of it. But it seemed as if at least some kind of racism had also existed in the Americas, long before the arrival of the first westerners. Over the years, I discovered from other researchers that many other native peoples, not just in North America, often entertained similar myths. Dozens of other ethnic communities also named themselves “the people”, thereby implying once again that other human beings in the same region were not really as human as they were.

Unfortunately, this kind of reverse racism among native peoples is constantly being reinforced by the reserve, or reservation, system, a form of official apartheid set up during the nineteenth century not only in Canada, but also in the USA, Australia and New Zealand. Keeping “status Indians” separate from everyone else in the country, and economically dependent on the federal government, has encouraged native militants to denounce people opposed to the reserves as racists, whereas quite the opposite is true. Some of those militants have even used the antiracism gambit to cover for the fact that several reserves have become well known havens of organized crime.

Recently, many first nations all over Canada have been negotiating new treaties with the formerly much more racist federal and provincial governments in order to be recognized as self governing districts. Apparently, however, this is making a lot of other people, both native and nonnative, nervous that their rights might not be recognized by those new entities if they do not happen to belong to the designated ethnic group in each district. Not so long ago, one native leader who won an award from the federal government for his work on behalf of native peoples all across Canada was forced to give it back after he became an outspoken anti semite.

The proposition that individuals from native communities could be racist was something that I had not focused on before that. This discovery reinforced my conviction that Marx had overstated his case when he tried to argue that oppressed people are naturally inclined to be much more progressive because they have so much less to lose than rich or powerful people do. Throughout the Americas, most of the preColombian populations had been largely decimated during the European conquests, mostly by imported diseases, for which they had no natural defenses. In some cases, local administrators deliberately tried to worsen the effects of those epidemics, so as to kill even more natives.

For most of the ethnic remnants, their living conditions are still horrible nowadays, much worse than those enjoyed by the majority of people of European extraction. So I was initially inclined to believe that they were exclusively victims of racism rather than also being perpetrators. It turns out that being the victims of racist oppression is not sufficient to eliminate racist attitudes toward other groups any more than being a downtrodden worker necessarily keeps that person from trying to dominate other people even less powerful than himself.

This dovetails with the relatively new theory that many oppressed people, rather than uniting against those on top of society, often fight among themselves instead, so as not to be in the group that ends up at the very bottom of the heap. A good example was, and often still is, the attitude of the so called poor white trash in the USA toward African Americans. The struggle against racism therefore means a rejection of the naive assumption that oppressed people are by definition immune from adopting their own forms of inappropriate behavior. In reality, adopting an uncritical attitude toward oppressed ethnic groups turns out to be only another form of racism, slightly disguised.

During those same months, I also decided to visit Robert Rumilly, one of Quebec’s better known intellectuals at his home in Mount Royal, an upperclass Montreal suburb. This guy was a very old and prolific historian from the Catholic nationalist school of Quebec history, who died only a short time after my visit. I had been intrigued when I bought a booklet in a local secondhand bookstore, about the leftwing infiltration of French Canada, that he had published at his own expense back in 1956. In that pamphlet he had denounced Pierre Trudeau and everyone else opposed to his idol, then premier Maurice Duplessis, for being part of a worldwide Jewish-freemason-Bolshevik conspiracy. During my visit, he showed me some of the very numerous books and magazines that filled practically the entire house, including several that were written by people who had participated in helping some of the French collaborators left over from the Second World War get out of Europe. I certainly got the impression that leftwing observers back then had not been exaggerating when they wrote that many of the young Catholic intellectuals of the 1940s and the 1950s in Quebec had fallen under the influence of ultraconservative and antisemitic ideologies.

Some of those young anti semites later on became cabinet members in various different governments, at both the federal and the provincial levels, in several anglophone provinces as well as in Quebec. In more recent decades, most of them had long ceased being official racists, but a few virulent ones still clung to important positions for quite a long time in some of the more conservative Canadian governments. At that point in my historical research, I felt that I was running into racist attitudes every time that I investigated any kind of political movement at all. Still, that particular historian’s brand of racism was certainly one of the most disturbing kind and completely unacceptable, to say the least.

Unfortunately, my career as a part time instructor in the history department at the university was not very satisfying, particularly since I was not getting nearly enough work just giving one course per year on the industrial revolution. So I had to branch out in various different directions, one of which involved trying to convince the department to let me give other courses. These included the economic history of Canada (also for economics students), an introductory course on the general history of Canada, and even a course on the rise of modern capitalism, given to sociology students. At one point, the department, which was composed almost entirely of full time professors, had to vote on whether or not I was to be allowed to teach an introductory course on the history of Quebec as well. That resulted in a big argument among them over the national question, about how similar or how different the history of Canada was from the history of Quebec, which was either part of Canada or something else altogether.

In those days, my relationship with the regular professors was colored by the fact that I had gotten myself elected as the part time instructors union delegate to the history department. This was one of the concessions that the university had granted to the part timers after our strike, getting the right to send an observer to department meetings, against the wishes of the separate union representing the tenured professors. Those people thought that they were being generous with us when they treated us as quasi colleagues.

During one particular meeting, I remember watching a fierce debate over whether or not certain professors with relatively high profile careers should be allowed to avoid carrying out some of their regular duties. This was because they were involved in so many different activities that they did not have nearly enough time to do any of their work properly. In those days, I felt as I do now, that the high profile professors were trying to force other people with similar qualifications to do work that they should be doing themselves.

This became particularly galling to me later on, when I read an article published in a history journal about one of the university professors who was being criticized at the meeting I attended. It turns out that this same person was lambasted by another professor, in public no less, about all the elementary historical mistakes that the over ambitious high profile professor was making in published articles and books. The whole thing brought to mind Marx’s accusation that big time investors were guilty of exploiting the working class by expropriating part of the fruits of their collective labor as individual profit. It turns out that the whole high profile professor thing was just another example of sadomasochistic social relations, hidden behind an academic veneer.

By itself, developing all those different courses resulted in an enormous amount of work, but I made things even worse for myself by also branching out into several different teaching institutions. For example, I taught one course on the history of Canadian-American relations in a university quite a distance east of Montreal, which meant that I had to spend as much time driving there once a week as in the teaching itself. Later on, I also gave an introduction to the history of the USA, in English, to a small group of inmates at one of the local penitentiaries. Only one of those extremely immature people actually managed to pass the course, even though they certainly had all the time necessary to read and to study for exams.

At about the same time, I also taught a course on the history of the USA, in French this time, to another special group of students, namely hockey players at the Junior A level. Many of those students did not succeed either, but that was mostly because they were much too busy with their sport. One of them, Vincent Damphousse, had to leave the class early when he became part of the Canadian national team playing in Europe. He ended up pursuing a very successful career with the pros in the National Hockey League. Another guy from the same group, however, did quite well in my course and I helped him again a little bit later on when he decided to study history himself at the university level. He has since become a history teacher just like me, rather than a hockey player.

While all that was going on, I was also involved in an acrimonious dispute with my MA thesis director about whether or not support for economic nationalism in nineteenth century Canada was as intellectually grounded and as internationally influenced as I had argued it was. In spite of that, I got the MA degree anyway, and since I felt like studying the same historical problem in more detail, I decided to do my PhD thesis on a related topic. In order to get more experience with the university scene, and to avoid intellectual incest, graduate students usually do their doctorate at a different university from the one where they got their MA. Nevertheless, I had no interest in changing universities, so the department decided to appoint a trio of history professors, to help me with my doctoral studies, assisted by an economics professor specializing in the history of economic thought.

I soon became convinced that Canadian economic nationalism in the nineteenth century had been even more influenced by practitioners and theoreticians from other countries than I had originally thought. From the dozens of new sources that I consulted, I found out a lot more about the very extensive networks of economic nationalist ideologues that had been set up all over the world back then. This included such prolific and well-connected nationalists as Friedrich List in Germany, JB Byles in Britain, Charles Dupin in France, Matthew and Henry Carey in the USA, Yukichi Fukuzawa in Japan, and Sergei Witte in Russia.

One of the most eloquent of my secondary sources from the USA was Daniel Walker Howe, who published a very well received book in 1979 about the Political Culture of the American Whigs during the first half of the nineteenth century. I also read many more such sources written by dozens of other equally well known political and economic historians covering not only Germany, France, Britain, Russia and Japan, but also Argentina, Egypt, India and Australia. From all those sources, I found out that leading economic nationalists all over the world were often quite aware of what their counterparts in other countries had contributed to the theory and practice of their common approach.

In Canada, one of the many secondary sources that I used to confirm this international influence was Suzanne Elizabeth Zeller, the author of an MA thesis and a published article comparing the national economic policies of Canada and Germany during the second half of the nineteenth century. While I was writing my doctoral thesis, under the influence of all those different readings, I came up with an original word, “neocameralism”, to describe the so called neomercantilist economic theory of the nineteenth century. Cameralism itself had been coined as a word back in the early modern period to describe the paternalist practice of several enlightened despots in the smaller German states, promoting local industrial development from within their government chambers, or “cameras”. I thought that neocameralism would be a much more appropriate title for state intervention into the economy during the late modern period, than the rather misleading reference to neomercantilism (aka neocommercialism).