From Bourassa to Bourassa: A Pivotal Decade in Canadian History

Margaret Conrad is a history professor at Acadia University and editor
of They Planted Well: New England Planters in Maritime Canada.

The years from 1976 to 1984 were difficult ones for Canada, for Quebec, and for the Liberal Party. Each faced a serious challenge from the Parti Québécois, whose referendum on Quebec sovereignty served as the pivotal political event of the tumultuous decade. This fast-paced account by columnist L. Ian MacDonald is a valuable guide to the political intrigues that characterized the Liberal Party of Quebec during this period. MacDonald has a journalist’s ear for gossip and a storyteller’s eye for detail. The portraits of the fascinating members of the “Big Village” of French Power — from their common origins in the Catholic Action movement to their domination of federal and Quebec politics in the 1970s — shed a welcome light on Québécois political culture. Claude Ryan, hailed as the savior of the Liberal Party in Quebec after Robert Bourassa’s much applauded eclipse, dominates the narrative. The portrait that we are given is anything but flattening. Ryan was, we are told, mean-spirited, intellectually arrogant, and incurably prolix. Robert Bourassa, on the other hand, is politely profiled, his warts and blemishes scarcely alluded to. His major political failing, it seems, was that he was too young when he became premier in 1970. By 1983, this defect finally overcome and Ryan humiliated at the polls in 1981, an older and wiser Bourassa was back as leader of the party.

The reliance on character to explain events is appealing but ultimately unconvincing. There is more to Ryan’s poor showing in 1981 than his personality, imperfect though it may be. The social democratic programs of the Parti Québécois, the dismal economic climate of the period, the constitutional debate, the shaky course of the federal Liberal Party and the cleavages within its provincial counterpart, will each need more careful analysis before Ryan’s historical failure — or Bourassa’s “second coming,” for that matter — can be judged. MacDonald’s unwillingness to measure all men by the same yardstick tends to undermine his argument that the Liberal Party in Quebec is facing less than political bankruptcy. Instead, the book captures for posterity the backroom scuttle-butt that serves as rationalization for a political party spooked by the death rattle of opposition. But, like all good gossip, it makes compelling reading and makes us eager to see what happens next.