René Lévesque. Marguerite Paulin
pitiless to any minister not in control of his files. In the caucus, the offender would bear the brunt of Lévesque’s wrath. “Go back and do your homework!” he would lash out in front of his colleagues. Time was precious. He knew he could ask a lot of his troops, he who spared no effort in his own work schedule.
“What about the referendum?”
Halfway through his mandate, the question returned with renewed vigour. For two years now, the PQ had shown themselves capable of governing Quebec: the economy was on track and the media were their allies. The social climate was less agitated than under the Liberal government. For example, in 1972, the leaders of three central labour bodies had defied the back to work legislation passed by the Bourassa government. Sentenced to jail, they became heroes and martyrs of the workers’ cause. The PQ, learning from the Liberals’ mistakes, tried to attract unionized workers and recruited a great many in the public and quasi-public sectors. But this fragile harmony was by no means guaranteed. The PQ had to hold its sovereignty referendum without further ado: procrastination would serve no purpose. The honeymoon between the unions and the Péquistes would end one day; the grace period was fading fast and at a second’s notice would be over for good.
In the flying saucer that was the bunker, the cabinet meetings continued to be contentious. As was his habit, Claude Morin would say: “Okay, whose life shall we make difficult today?” In fact, he said aloud what certain people thought to themselves: the government was taking on too much: “we’re getting up the backs of many voters who believe we are playing at being socialists.”
The gap between the radicals and the conservatives was widening. Fortunately for the PQ, René Lévesque’s charisma was still effective. Even when he resolved in favour of one side or another, he managed to make it unanimous. But all the pointless bickering left him perplexed.
“Lévesque embodies our contradictions,” remarked Doctor Camille Laurin. “He always seems to be sitting on the fence, unresolved, lukewarm.”
That morning, the aroma of burnt toast in the bunker confirmed the PQ leader’s presence. With his blackened toast, cup of strong coffee, and omnipresent cigarette, the premier was already at work. He would always remain a journalist. He opened Le Monde: in Cambodia, Vietnamese troops had overturned Pol Pot. Keen on international politics, he was interested in what was happening beyond the border. The front page of the New York Times described trouble brewing in Iran: the shah was fleeing his country, where Ayatollah Khomeini was being greeted as a redeemer. Quebec’s problems didn’t hold much weight alongside the human misery festering in the world.
His work finished, he set aside the quarrels of the various factions and quickly began a game of poker! This leaning of his was a source of contention. Certain people insinuated cynically that for Lévesque there were two kinds of members of the Assembly: card players – and others.
“There is a full committee at eight o’clock,” Lévesque announced to Marc-Andre Bédard who understood that that evening they would be playing cards till late in the night.
At the end of the session, René Lévesque gave a press conference. Reporters took notes. Yes, he would go on vacation. Where? He didn’t know yet. Before they asked “with whom?” Lévesque rose. There were persistent rumours. Recently divorced, he would not be free for long. On April 12, 1979, the premier tied the knot with Corinne Côté. He was fifty-six, she thirty-five. There would be no more unpleasant incidents like on that winter evening when Madame Barre refused to speak to Monsieur Lévesque’s secretary. He married a second time, in order to legalize a union over ten years old. And to please the woman he said he loved fiercely. Fidelity was another story.
After a week in the south of France, it looked as if the return to Quebec would be difficult.
While the Parti Québécois managed to rev up its troops for the referendum deadline, chaos reigned in Ottawa. At the end of March, Pierre Trudeau called an election that he lost on May 22 to the Conservatives. In his office, at the cocktail hour, with his close advisors, René Lévesque gloated:
“Things will be easier with Joe Clark in power.”
Trudeau was a thorn in the side of the sovereigntists. The worst was that he had star charisma: he was the man the majority of Quebecers loved, and that others loved to hate. And now he was gone from headlines, no longer undermining the enthusiasm of the Péquistes.
“Certain ministers want us to hold the referendum immediately. They’re in a rush. But I’d rather wait a little longer, until the fall or next year.”
Lévesque lit another cigarette. A deck of cards on the table. At eight o’clock they played poker.
“Do you wager we’ll win this referendum?”
The question was in vain. With Trudeau out of power, the chances of victory had never been so good.
René Lévesque was not prone to effusiveness. He had only cried twice: when Pierre Laporte died, and then more recently, when his mother died.
Diane Dionne had worn the pants in the family. At retirement age, she still travelled. By ship, because she hated airplanes. Alert, independent, after taking language courses, she decided to leave: once for Italy, another time for the Soviet Union.
Lévesque called her “Madame Pelletier” partly to aggravate her, but also because he had never really forgiven his mother for her remarriage to Albert Pelletier, a nationalist lawyer, long since passed away.
The death of his mother and his whole childhood resurfaced, carefree, happy images.
In New Carlisle, on the Baie des Chaleurs, a little boy, wild and free, looking at the ocean, as blue as his eyes.
The Son of Maître Lévesque, Esquire
“We’ll call him René, like in “renaissance.”
In the hearts of Diane Dionne-Pineault and Dominique Lévesque, their son, born August 24, 1922, in some way replaced André, the elder brother, who had died prematurely.
Custom would have dictated that they name him for his godfather, John Hall Kelly, an Irishman, powerful financier, and Bonaventure County politician, who was his father’s partner in the law firm they had opened together.
Nowadays, when René Lévesque wanted to amuse his family, he proclaimed himself John Lévesque, sovereigntist premier! Tit-Jean, to close friends. “I had a narrow escape!” he would add.
René Lévesque, age three.
René Lévesque, student of rhetoric at Collège Carnier in Quebec City.
Remembering his childhood, RenéLévesque compared francophones’ social inequality to that then suffered by the blacks in Rhodesia: “we were colonized: the good schools, the nice homes, all the wealth was in the hands of people who identified