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1. On January 20, 1999,
the English-rights group Alliance Quebec announced it was taking
the Parti Québécois government to court over access
to health and social services in English. Louise Beaudoin, the
cabinet minister responsible for French Language in Quebec took
issue with the Alliance for turning to the courts to settle its
disagreements with the government. Research why Alliance Quebec
is taking this particular approach and the impact it is having
on the sovereignist movement. Begin your research at the Alliance
Quebec Web site at www.aq.qc.ca.
 2. Forum Action Québec is a non-profit,
non-partisan organization founded by young English-speaking Quebecers
to promote and facilitate dialogue between Quebec’s linguistic
communities. Neither federalist nor sovereignist, it offers an
alternative to groups who affiliate themselves with political
parties and ideologies. Find out to what extent this non-partisan
approach is working. Visit Forum Action Quebec at www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/2508/.
3. The chief electoral officer of Quebec can be accessed on
the Internet at www.dgeq.qc.ca/anglais/index.html. What are the issues and laws
this office oversees? What is its role in the democratic process?
4. Working as a class, create a timeline that
chronicles Quebec’s governments over the last century. For
each government, record such items as the leader, political party,
main aspects of the government platform, date and length in office,
and significant events and issues that shaped French-English
relations. How has Quebec politics changed over the last 100
years? When you are finished display it in a prominent place
in your school.
5. Of the 656 candidates in the election, 121 were women—approximately
21 per cent. The Parti Québécois had 31 female
candidates, the Liberals 30, and the Action Démocratique
21. A record 29 women won in their ridings: 20 for the PQ, and
9 for the Liberals. Despite these impressive results, what barriers
might still inhibit women’s participation in politics?
6. In the 1994 Quebec election, Jacques Parizeau, who was much
less popular than Lucien Bouchard, led the PQ to 77 seats and
44.75 per cent of the popular vote. (In the recent election the
PQ won 76 seats and 42.7 per cent of popular support.) The Liberals
under Daniel Johnson, also not as popular as his successor, Jean
Charest, won 47 seats and 44.40 per cent of the popular vote.
(Charest’s Liberals won 48 seats and 43.7 per cent of the
popular vote.) Fourteen months later the PQ called a referendum
on sovereignty, which lost by a whisker. Compare Bouchard and
Charest’s performance with their predecessors’ and
prepare a class debate on one of the following questions. Did
Bouchard perform better than Parizeau? Did Charest perform better
than Johnson? Is a winning referendum less of a possibility today
than it was in 1994?
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