Peter Black]
May 29, 2024
Local Journalism Initiative reporter
peterblack@qctonline.com
This country has seen some strange and unlikely political conversions over the years.
For example, there’s raw-boned rancher and Alberta Progressive Conservative MP Jack Horner’s decision to cross the Commons floor in 1977 and join the caucus of Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who promptly named him industry minister.
Then there’s perhaps the most unlikely political spot-change of all, that of Richard Holden: lawyer, scion of a wealthy Montreal anglo family, one of four Equality Party MNAs elected in the 1989 Quebec election, and … wait for it … a defector to the PQ caucus under then-leader Jacques Parizeau.
The bizarre tale of Richard Holden’s brief pirouette as a PQ MNA inevitably springs to mind when the topic comes up of anglophone converts to Quebec separatism.
As readers may know, current PQ Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon is wooing English speakers with a rather glossy TV ad in la langue de Alice Munro.
The McGill and Oxford grad’s big pitch is that Quebec gives $82 billion a year to those nasty colonialists in Ottawa and gets nothing in return. Such a claim, objective observers would say, is utterly simplistic hogwash, not to mention reminiscent of the hilarious scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, where some Judean rebels ask, “What have the Romans ever done for us?”
PSPP neglects to say specifically how much better off anglos would be in la République du Québec, but no need to get ahead of ourselves more than two years out from the next election.
Back to Richard Holden. His 1992 defection from the anglo-rights Equality Party to the PQ was, in a way, the ultimate mischievous act of a maverick and gadfly.
Holden joined the ranks of the PQ in reaction to being kicked out of the Equality Party because he refused to kowtow to its young leader, Robert Libman.
Surely such an over-the-top gesture gave Holden as much giddy satisfaction as it did Parizeau to have the MNA for Westmount, of all places, in his secessionist fold.
No one believed for an instant that Holden, a former anglo rights warrior, was a separatist in his heart, although he did run (and lose) for the PQ in the working-class Verdun riding in 1994.
The fact is, there has never been a true-blue anglophone Quebecer elected as a péquiste to the National Assembly, although one technical exception might be Robert Burns, who served in the cabinet of René Lévesque.
Burns was the son of a franco mother and anglo father who died when Burns was two. So, basically, he was raised and schooled in French and identified as a franco.
Then there is David Payne, a Yorkshireman immigrant to Canada, one-time teacher at Vanier College in Montreal and author of Autant de façons d’être Québécois (So many ways to be a Quebecer).
Payne, a left-wing activist, found himself in PQ circles and in 1981 won the South Shore Vachon riding for the party.
He lost in the 1985 and 1989 elections which brought in Liberal governments, but made a comeback with the PQ’s return to power in 1994 and 1998. He never made the cabinet of Parizeau or Lucien Bouchard.
This list of notable anglo-Quebec sovereigntists is likely incomplete and does not include other failed PQ candidates.
We cannot not mention another convert to Quebec independence, though with a large asterisk: Reed Scowen, a prominent Townships businessman, longtime Liberal MNA for Montreal’s NDG riding (1978-87) and, dare we say, an eloquent and wise voice for Quebec anglophone rights at a particularly challenging time.
In 1999, exhausted by the numbing discourse over Quebec’s place in Canada, Scowen wrote a book titled Time to Say Goodbye; Building a Better Canada Without Quebec.
As longtime friend and former Westmount mayor Peter Trent commented upon Scowen’s death in 2020, “He was very sad he had to reach the purported conclusion that the only solution was to say goodbye. He was saying a de facto separation had occurred, so let’s make it de jure.”
Scowen evidently felt more positively about Quebec’s future in Canada in the years following his cri de coeur.
Still, his plea to just stop fighting and have an amicable breakup might be the kind of potion a PSPP would find more useful in seducing anglos than an $82-billion whopper.
30