VICTORIAVILLE, Que. — Wilfrid Laurier, the first great Liberal leader, also was the first prime minister to confront Quebec nationalism in the name of Canada.
Conservative Sir John A. Macdonald had dealt with a Nova Scotia separatist movement after 1867 but managed to co-opt many of its 18 MPs who won in Canada’s first election.
Québec nationalism, then as now, was a more complicated affair.
There was no Québec separatist movement when Laurier served as prime minister (1896-1911) but there were nationalists stirred by powerful Québec newspaper editor Henri Bourassa and represented in the House of Commons by MPs who thought Québec had a raw deal in Canada and that Laurier was too subservient to the British Empire.
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For most of his 15 years as prime minister and 32 years as Liberal leader, Laurier stared them down, promoting Canada as the country of the future.
So it is a modern political irony that since 1993, the area southeast of Montreal where Laurier practiced law and first was elected to the Québec National Assembly in 1871 and then to the House of Commons in 1874 has been represented by separatist Bloc Québecois MPs.
And it is a classic Canadian political moment that current BQ MP André Bellavance, one of four survivors of the May 2 rout of the separatists in Québec as the NDP surged to 59 of 75 seats, happily lead a Canadian nationalist visitor on a tour of Laurier sites in Arthabaska last week.
This is where his law office was. This is his mansion where he spent summers even after moving to a Québec City riding after his 1877 electoral defeat in Arthabaska and then to Ottawa as prime minister.
This is the church where Laurier attended mass.
This is the piano that his wide Zoe used to give local music lessons.
Laurier’s role in shaping 20th Century Canadian politics can hardly be under-estimated.
In 1877, he gave a speech in Québec City that is considered a pivotal moment in Canadian politics, arguing that despite support for the Macdonald Conservatives from the Roman Catholic hierarchy, it was possible to be a good Roman Catholic and a good Liberal at the same time.
The message resonated, within years the church quit promoting the Conservatives and became neutral and by 1891, Laurier’s Liberals owned Quebec politically.
It held that grip (and became the natural governing party because of it) until 1984.
Bellavance, whatever his political views on the need to take Québec out of Canada, was happy to highlight the riding history of one of Canada’s most important federalist leaders.
In a confusing country in which separatists have been a part of Parliament for almost 20 years and draw handsome federal pensions when they leave or are defeated, where BQ MP Louis Plamondon is considered the dean of the House of Commons, presiding over election of the Speaker, and where the separatist leader (Gilles Duceppe until he was defeated May 2) have a place in the election-time national leaders’ English language debate, it seems fitting that a BQ MP would offer a straight-forward tour of Laurier sites.
It was a very Canadian moment indeed.
