Quebec

This article is about the province of Quebec. For the capital city of that province, see Quebec City.

**Quebec**
*Québec*

Motto: Je me souviens (I remember)
Capital Largest city	Quebec City Montreal
Area - Total - % fresh water	2nd largest (1st lgst prov.) 1 542 056 km² 11,5%
Population - Total (2001) - Density	Ranked 2nd 7 410 500 5,43/km²
Admittance into Confederation - Date - Order	1867 1
Time zone	UTC -5
Postal information Postal abbreviation Postal code prefix	QC G, H, J
Parliamentary representation House seats Senate seats	75 24
Premier	Bernard Landry (P.Q.)
Lieutenant-Governor	Lise Thibault
Government of Quebec

Quebec (pronounced "keh-BECK"; French: le Québec) is a Canadian province with a population of 7,410,504 (Statistics Canada, 2001), primarily speakers of the French language making up the bulk of the French-Canadian population. The capital is Quebec City and the largest city is Montreal.

Geography of Quebec

Quebec is located in eastern Canada, bordered by Ontario and Hudson Bay to the west, Atlantic Canada to the east, the U.S. (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and New York States) to the south, and the Arctic Ocean to the north.

The province, Canada's largest, occupies a vast territory (six times the size of France), most of which is very sparsely populated. More than 90 percent of Quebec's area lies within the Canadian Shield, a large part of which was historically referred to as the Ungava Region. At the time of Confederation in 1867, the Province of Quebec consisted of a strip of land only a few miles wide running along the Saint Lawrence River where the first settlers had farmed. In 1912, a major portion of the Canadian Ungava region, previously part of the Northwest Territories, was allocated by the Parliament of Canada to be a component of Quebec Province. This vast and virtually uninhabited northern region created the massive Province of Quebec as seen today. This huge new addition to Quebec bordered James Bay and is where the Province's three largest hydro-electric projects would eventually be built on the La Grande River.

File:1867.jpg

Quebec (brown) in 1867

This new region in northern Quebec has extremely rich resources in its coniferous forests, lakes, and rivers—pulp and paper, lumber, and hydroelectricity are some of the province's most important industries. The extreme north of the province, called Nunavik, is subarctic or arctic and is home to Inuit communities.

The most populated region is the Saint Lawrence River Valley in the south, where the capital, Quebec City, and the largest city, Montreal, are situated. North of Montreal are the Laurentians, a range of ancient mountains, and to the south, the Appalachian Mountains extends into the Eastern Townships. The Gaspé Peninsula juts into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence to the east. The Saint Lawrence River Valley is a fertile agricultural region, producing dairy products, fruit, vegetables, maple sugar (Quebec is the world's largest producer), and livestock.

Inhabitants of Quebec are called Quebecers or Quebeckers or Québécois (pronounced "keh-bek-wah").

File:Can2002.JPG

Quebec (brown) in 2002

History of Quebec

Quebec was inhabited by a range of First Nations before the arrival of the French, and still is today—the Inuit in Nunavik, the Cree in the coniferous forests, the Huron and Iroquois (Mohawks) in the river valley, and the Mi'kmaq in the east, to name the most prominent peoples.

The first European explorer of Quebec was the Frenchman Jacques Cartier, who planted a cross in the Gaspé in 1534 and sailed into the Saint Lawrence in 1535. Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec City in 1608; it would become the nucleus of New France and the origin of French exploration of North America, and give its name to the province. After 1627 King Louis XIII of France forbade settlement by anyone in Quebec other than Roman Catholics, ensuring that welfare and education was kept firmly in the hands of the church. "New France" became a royal colony in 1663 under Louis XIV and the intendant Jean Talon.

The French allied themselves with the Huron against the Iroquois, who were allied to the English. The wars between England and France in Europe and North America came to a head in 1759 when the English general James Wolfe defeated Louis-Joseph de Montcalm at the Plains of Abraham near Quebec City.

Great Britain acquired "New France" at the Treaty of Paris in 1763 when King Louis XV of France ands his advisors chose to keep the territory of Guadeloupe for its valuable sugar crops instead of Quebec which was viewed as a vast, frozen wasteland of little importance to the French Empire. Despite being in full control of Quebec and its French-speaking residents, the new British government broke with the tradition practised by all European colonial powers at the time, and passed the Quebec Act in 1774, allowing the colony to retain its language and religion. Quebec also was allowed to keep a legal system different from the other provinces that was based on civil law from the French Civil law rather than on English Common law. In addition, Quebec maintained its semifeudal system and customs. This act of tolerance was one of the grievances listed by the Americans in the Declaration of Independence, but this effort at propaganda failed in its goal of rallying the people of Québec to the cause of the rebellion.

Built in 1779, the first public library in Canada was the Quebec Library, made possible by the efforts of the then British governor, Sir Frederick Haldimand. After Loyalists fleeing from the American Revolution settled in Quebec, the Constitutional Act of 1791 divided the region at the Ottawa River, creating Upper Canada (now Ontario) and Lower Canada (now Quebec). The first elected legislature was created in the same year.

Partisans in both Upper and Lower Canada revolted against the British Empire in 1837; in Quebec, the revolt was led by Louis-Joseph Papineau and the Patriotes. The rebellions were crushed, but they achieved their goal when Lord Durham's report recommended responsible government for the colonies. This was instituted in 1849, under the guidance of Robert Baldwin from Upper Canada and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine of Lower Canada.

Lord Durham's report recommended that the French-Canadians be assimilated, and an attempt at this was made by merging the Canadas into the Province of Canada in 1841; what is now Quebec became Canada East. This was unstable, however, and when the Province of Canada joined with New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in Confederation (1867), it divided into Ontario and Quebec once more.

20th Century History

When Quebec became one of the four founding provinces of Confederation, guarantees for the maintenance of its language, culture, and religion were specifically written into the Constitution; English and French were made the official languages of all Canada and dual school systems were established based on religion. However, attempts to curtail Roman Catholic control over education in Manitoba and Ontario increased the Québécois' feeling of isolation, but by the 1960s, Quebec broke away from the control of the Catholic Church and in the 1990s, amended its schoolboards from religion-based to language-based, unlike the Province of Ontario where Catholic schools are still guaranteed. French Canadians stood firmly opposed to conscription in the First and Second World Wars.

Quebec had been strongly Catholic throughout its history; this came to a head in the 1950s under the Union Nationale government of Maurice Duplessis, who maintained religious control over social services such as schools and hospitals. In return, the clergy used its influence to exhort voters to stay with the conservative government, who also took firm stands against social reform and unionism. However, after the party was voted out of office, under the new Liberal government led by Premier Jean Lesage, the power of the church fell away. Quebec moved towards a very progressive society in the 1960s, a social sea-change called the Quiet Revolution (Révolution tranquille), and it has maintained its socially progressive nature to this day.

Nationalist feelings flowered into sovereignism in the 1960s. The sovereignist movement burst onto the scene with the October Crisis of 1970, when a terrorist group, the Front de Libération du Québec, kidnapped a British diplomat, James Cross, and the Quebec minister of labour, Pierre Laporte. Cross was released, but Laporte was murdered. Although later it was learned that the FLQ were fringe extremists, Prime Minister Trudeau's invocation of the War Measures Act, suspension of civil liberties, military intervention in Montreal, and arrest of dissidents promoted grievances in parts of the general population. Nonetheless, the FLQ extremists had broad support within the mainstream separatist party. On December 7, 1981, in an interview with Radio-Quebec, Quebec Premier René Lévesque said that he was astounded by the fact that convicted terrorist Jacques Rose had received a standing ovation at the Parti Québécois convention of early December. René Lévesque added that he could not defend the radical proposals that had come out of the convention.

1970 also saw the formation of the sovereignist Parti Québécois under René Lévesque. This party won the 1976 provincial elections and instituted a series of laws promoting the use of French. (French had been made the sole official language in 1974.) The language measures taken by the Government of Quebec were declared illegal by the Supreme Court of Canada for curtailing the use of languages other than French. In 1988, Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa used the Notwithstanding Clause contained in the 1982 Constitution to annul the Supreme Court of Canada's ruling. A massive emigration of English speakers and their companies, mainly to Ontario, was attributed to these measures.

In 1980, Lévesque's plan for an independent Quebec, called sovereignty-association, was rejected by voters in a referendum. However, the PQ was reelected in 1981, and rejected the newly repatriated constitution in 1982. From 1985 to 1994, the federalist Parti libéral du Québec governed under Robert Bourassa and Daniel Johnson Jr.; progress on the constitutional issue resulted in the Meech Lake Accord in 1987, but it collapsed in 1990. Another constitutional deal, the Charlottetown Accord, which sought to resolve a long list of unrelated issues at the same time as it resolved the nation's relationship with Québec, was rejected by countrywide referendum in 1992.

The Parti Québécois was re-elected to office in 1994 led by Jacques Parizeau, and held another referendum on sovereignty. On October 30, 1995, the measure was rejected by an extremely slim margin, less than one percent, for which the federal Liberal party under Prime Minister Jean Chrétien came under sharp criticism.

Quebec Premier Jacques Parizeau denounced the "ethnic" vote for the separatists' loss, then, under media pressure over his remarks, announced his resignation and was replaced by the head of the federal Bloc Québécois, Lucien Bouchard. Under Bouchard, Quebec's status as a distinct society was recognized by Parliament. Since then, support for secession has shrunk to some 40%; moreover, nearly 70% of the population are simply not interested in holding a referendum, be they federalist or sovereignist. The PQ, currently led by Premier Bernard Landry, has seen its support drop critically, especially relative to the popularity of a new right-wing party, the Action Démocratique under Mario Dumont.

At this point, the national question is on the back burner. On a day-to-day basis, Quebecers, especially in Montreal, live in a relatively stable state of cultural equipoise. Much more pressing political concerns include the state of education and the health-care systems. Quebec City hosted the Summit of the Americas in April 2001, attracting huge anti-globalization protests with activists from everywhere in the province and the rest of the hemisphere.

Provincial Symbols

The motto of Quebec is Je me souviens (I remember), which was carved into the National Assembly building façade in Quebec City.

The emblem of Quebec is the fleur-de-lis, usually white on a blue background, as in the provincial flag (above), called the Fleurdelisé which is the symbol of the Monarchy of France.

The provincial flower of Quebec is the blue flag iris. It was formerly the Madonna lily, to recall the fleur de lis, but has been changed to the iris which is native to Quebec.

The provincial bird of Quebec is the snowy owl.

The patron saint of Quebec is Saint John the Baptist. La Saint-Jean-Baptiste, June 24, is the Quebec official holiday, now called the Fête nationale du Québec. The Canadian national holiday of July 1st, to celebrate the country's independence from Britain in 1867, is not recognized by the Quebec Provincial Government.

External links

Government of Quebec

Canada
Alberta	B.C.	Manitoba	New Brunswick	Nfld.-Lab.
Nova Scotia	Ontario	P.E.I.	Quebec	Saskatchewan
	N.W.T.	Nunavut	Yukon