With PQ promising new referendum, calls to partition Quebec are being renewed

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The Canadian Party of Quebec announced Monday it’s studying the feasibility of creating an eleventh province out of a partitioned Quebec, and a former member of the party has launched a separate group that plans to hold an online public meeting on the issue of partition this week.

The revival of the partition debate, which has its origins in the late 1970s as a countervailing force to Quebec separation, comes as the Parti Québécois pledged this weekend to hold a referendum on Quebec independence by 2030. Both groups reviving the partition issue cite negative impact from legislation passed by Premier François Legault’s government on the rights of minorities.

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“People are just fed up with everything that Legault is doing that they really want to consider partitioning from Quebec,” said Marc Perez, a West Island businessperson who ran for the Canadian Party of Quebec in D’Arcy-McGee riding in the 2022 general election.

“And the reason they want to do that is that they’re tired of being considered a second-class citizen.”

Perez, who says he was kicked out of the Canadian Party last year after challenging the leadership of Colin Standish, said he launched Let’s talk about Quebec/Parlons du Québec in January as a Montreal-based think tank.

Perez said the goal of the think tank is to consult the public and come up with proposals that would force politicians to heed the public’s will.

On Thursday evening, the group is planning an online meeting to hear the public’s thoughts on the idea of partitioning Quebec, Perez said.

Meanwhile, the Canadian Party of Quebec has established a “preparatory committee for the creation of an eleventh province” to look into the feasibility of partitioning Quebec, party member Keith Henderson said in an interview.

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“It’s a reaction to the constant call for breaking up Canada,” Henderson said. “We’re getting tired of it.”

Standish told the Gazette that Perez was removed from the party executive committee and then had his party membership revoked “for a multitude of behaviours and actions that undermined party cohesion and functions.”

“It wasn’t for his challenges to my leadership,” he said.

Henderson said there’s no problem in having two groups raise awareness and interest in partition.

Partition was considered radical and fringe when William Shaw, a Union Nationale leadership candidate, came up with the proposal and coined the term in 1976, he said. But it gained traction as an answer to the threat of a third referendum on Quebec independence in the 1990s, he added.

The name of the Canadian Party of Quebec’s committee hearkens to the “Preparatory Committee for an Eleventh Province” formed in Montreal in 1976. The group held that the threat of a partition of parts of Quebec that would remain within Canada in the event of Quebec independence would weaken support for separation.

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“It’s a party committee and it’s to study the idea, to see what might be feasible, what might be possible,” Henderson said. “We haven’t reached a conclusion about anything.”

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in the 1990s that in the event that a clear majority of Quebecers voting on a clear question in favour of the province’s secession from Canada, the country would have to negotiate in good faith the separation of Quebec from the rest of the country.

“So Canada became legally divisible under those conditions,” Henderson said.

“And what we’re asking ourselves — and I stress asking ourselves — is whether the reverse is true. If there’s a sufficient number of people in Quebec who don’t wish to be governed by the Quebec provincial government anymore, are they (the provincial government) required also to negotiate (partition) in good faith? If Canada is divisible along those lines, is Quebec divisible along the same lines?”

Partition would be for those in Quebec who are more “Canadian-minded,” who want bilingualism and multiculturalism and who would want to form a new province, he said.

The party plans a meeting next week to look at existing examples of regional secession, including the case of the Jura region in Switzerland where some districts with a French-speaking minority chose to secede from the German-speaking majority canton of Bern to form the canton of Jura in 1979, Henderson said.

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