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Robert Bourassa (July 14, 1933 – October 2, 1996) was a politician in Quebec, Canada. He served as Liberal Premier of Quebec in two different mandates, first from May 12, 1970 to November 25, 1976, and then from December 12, 1985 to January 11, 1994.
Early life Robert Bourassa was born in Montreal in a working class family to Aubert Bourassa, a port authority worker, and Adrienne Courville.•, Robert Bourassa graduated from the Université de Montréal law school in 1956 and was admitted to the Barreau du Québec the following year. On August 23, 1958, he marries Andrée Simard. Later, he studied at the University of Oxford and also obtained a degree in political economy at Harvard University in 1959-60. On his return to Quebec, he was employed at the National Revenue Department as a fiscal adviser. He also worked as a professor in public finances at Université de Montréal and Laval University First term He was first elected as an MLA in 1966, then went on to lead the Liberal Party of Quebec on January 17, 1970. He positioned himself as a young, competent, administrator. He chose "100 000 jobs" as his slogan, which emphasized that jobs creation would be his priority. Bourassa felt the extensive hydro-electric resources of Quebec were the most effective means of completing the modernization of Quebec and sustaining job creation. His leadership in the James Bay Project (French: projet de la Baie James), which refers to the construction of a series of hydroelectric power stations in northern Quebec, would later become his most recognized feat. He successfully led his party into government in the 1970 election, defeating the conservative Union Nationale government and becoming the youngest Premier of Quebec. One of his first crises as Premier of Quebec happened during the October Crisis of 1970 in which his labour minister Pierre Laporte was kidnapped and murdered. It was Pierre Trudeau who pushed the Premier of Quebec, Bourassa, to declare a state of emergency, which resulted in the Canadian army patrolling the streets of major cities in Quebec and in the national capital, Ottawa. After Laporte's kidnapping, Bourassa barricaded himself and his cabinet behind heavy layers of security. Bourassa and Trudeau often clashed over issues of federal-provincial relations and Quebec nationalism with Trudeau opposing what he saw as concessions to sovereigntism. Trudeau also looked down on Bourassa personally, once referring to him as a mangeur d'hot dog (a hot dog eater), though Trudeau later admitted in his TV biography that the comment was a friendly poke at Bourassa's habit of bringing this choice of food to meetings, saying that the original sentence was more like "Bourassa brought his hot dogs, we are ready to talk." During his time in power, Bourassa implemented policies aimed at protecting the status of the French language in Quebec. In 1974, he introduced Bill 22, the first legislation designed to strengthen the position of French within Quebec. However, this legislation was soon superceded by the Charter of the French Language also known as Bill 101, introduced by the Parti Québécois government that replaced him in 1976. Nonetheless, Bill 22 perhaps had a greater impact than Bill 101. By making French the official language of Quebec, that meant that Quebec was no longer institutionally bilingual (English and French). Many businesses and professionals were unable to operate under such requirements and an estimated 300,000 emigrated to neighbouring Ontario, enabling Toronto to overtake Montreal as the business capital of Canada. Bill 22 angered Anglophones while not going far enough for many Francophones; Bourassa was vilified by both groups and lost the 1976 election in a landslide. Bourassa lost the 1976 Quebec provincial election to René Lévesque, leader of the separatist Parti Québécois. When Bourassa lost his own seat in the National Assembly, he described himself as "having his head chopped off, with people still looking for it." Bourassa remained in political exile until 1983 when he returned to provincial politics. He resigned as Liberal Party leader, and accepted teaching positions in Europe and the United States. He subsequently returned to politics as Liberal leader on October 15, 1983, and regained the office of premier in the 1985 election. Second term In his second term, he invoked the notwithstanding clause of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to override a Supreme Court ruling that declared parts of the Charter of the French Language unconstitutional, causing some English-speaking ministers in his government to resign. A few years later, however, he introduced modifications to the language charter. These compromises reduced the controversy over language that had been a dominant feature of Quebec politics over the previous decades. The majority of Quebecers reached a consensus on accepting the new status quo. Bourassa also pushed for Quebec to be acknowledged in the Canadian constitution as a "distinct society", promising Quebecers that their grievances could be resolved within Canada with a new constitutional deal. Early in his first time in office, he participated in an early attempt at constitutional reform, the Victoria Charter of 1971, which quickly unravelled when Bourassa backed away from the proposed deal after it was strongly criticized by Quebec opinion leaders for not protecting Quebec's traditional veto power on constitutional amendments. In his second time in office, he worked closely with federal Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and received many concessions from the federal government, culminating in the Meech Lake Accord and the Charlottetown Accord. When both of these accords failed to be ratified, the constitutional reform efforts collapsed, reviving the separatist movement. Bourassa initiated the James Bay hydroelectric project in 1971 that led to the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement of 1975 with the Cree and Inuit inhabitants of the region. The Bourassa government also played a major role in rescuing the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal from the huge cost overruns and construction delays incurred by the mismanagement of the project by mayor Drapeau's administration. However, Bourassa was accused of simply throwing money to bail out the Montreal Olympics without taking the much-needed steps of providing additional oversight, and his government became embroiled in corruption scandals that led to his 1976 defeat. Final years Bourassa retired from politics in 1994 in poor health and having lost the popularity that had returned him to the premier's office. He was replaced as Liberal leader and premier by Daniel Johnson, Jr., who lost an election to the separatist Parti Québécois after only nine months. In 1996, he died in Montreal of skin cancer at the age of 63, and was interred at the Cimetière Notre-Dame-des-Neiges in Montreal, Quebec. Quotations Posthumous Homage See also | ||||||||
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