Liberté

In the typology of political activists, Louise Beaudoin is a realist rather than an idealist. That is not to suggest that she does not have ideals; she is and has always been a believer in Quebec independence. Nor is it to suggest that she lacks principles; fourteen years ago, she resigned from the Parti Québécois while a member of the Assemblée nationale because she profoundly disagreed with the leader at the time, Pauline Marois.

Beaudoin is a pragmatist. Although a progressive herself, she worked to develop relationships within every segment of the political spectrum in France, from left to right. After briefly serving as unelected minister of international relations, she went to Téléfilm Canada. Despite her commitment to democracy, she dealt with dictators in the Francophonie, the French-speaking counterpart to the Commonwealth, arguing, “If we had decided only to talk to really democratic nations, there wouldn’t have been many countries around the table, even in Europe.”

Now almost eighty, Beaudoin has worked with two academics, Stéphane Paquin and Mathieu Roy, to produce a collection of interviews that cover her upper-middle-class childhood in Quebec City, where her father was a lawyer active in the Union Nationale and then a judge; her years at classical college and university; her political involvement; and her varied career as an activist, political adviser, public servant, diplomat, and administrator. Blunt, candid, charming, lucid, she has used her position, whatever it has been, to pursue her policy objectives.

I remember Beaudoin speaking out at a Parti Québécois convention in 1981 in favour of unhyphenated independence without necessarily an association with the rest of Canada. She had stopped advising Claude Morin, then René Lévesque’s minister of intergovernmental affairs, and had become a public servant, which, paradoxically, gave her the freedom of speech that she did not have as a political aide.

Despite her clear ideological commitments, she had positive relationships with her political opponents: the night that the 1980 referendum was defeated, both Robert Bourassa, the former Liberal premier, and Jean Marchand, the former Liberal senator and federal cabinet minister, expressed their sympathy. That prompted her to reflect on what a tight family Quebec was. “After all, two of our principal adversaries were there to console me,” she observes. “It was testimony, I believe, to the great respect everyone had for René Lévesque. The man was always larger than the politician.” Elsewhere, she adds that “even forty years after his death, everyone claims a fragment of the true cross of René Lévesque, including me.” She was close to Lévesque; along with François Dorlot, her husband, she had dinner with him a week before he died.

Just as Bourassa and Marchand showed their respect for her, she reciprocates in her description of Gérard Pelletier, the journalist that Pierre Trudeau appointed ambassador to France in 1975, describing him as “an honest man, reasonable, an incarnation of the ideal of a bilingual and bicultural Canada. He was profoundly Québécois, a friend of René Lévesque and Pierre Elliott Trudeau. . . . Pelletier was sensible, and able to manoeuvre and argue in stormy waters.”

Beaudoin is straightforward about the referendum defeats, which she saw as representative of the views of Quebecers at the time:

Still, she remains hopeful that the province’s changing demographic status in Canada and in North America might lead Quebecers to conclude that independence is essential.

Ever the realist, following the constitutional agreement in 1982, she explained the situation to two French friends, both former prime ministers under Charles de Gaulle, who did not understand how Quebec got nothing out of the negotiations that followed the referendum defeat in 1980. Quebec, she admitted, had no bargaining power in the talks that reached a climax with the patriation of the Constitution — over the province’s objections.

Previously defeated three times, Beaudoin was elected to the Assemblée nationale in 1994 and 1998. As the minister of culture and communications, she was responsible for implementing the Charte de la langue française — still known in English as Bill 101, although it has long been a law — and started to crack down on what she saw as the creeping return of English on signs and menus. Terry Mosher, the cartoonist known as Aislin, began to draw her as, in his words, “a whip-cracking, leather-clad dominatrix.” Readers of the Gazette were delighted, though she did not appreciate some of the Nazi overtones, which she thought cast her as “a she‑wolf of the SS.” Nevertheless, she sent Mosher a note when she left politics, written on one of his cartoons about her, saying she would miss having him in her life.

Beaudoin was defeated in the 2003 election, in large part because of the municipal mergers introduced by Lucien Bouchard’s PQ government, but she regained a seat five years later, winning in the Montreal riding of Rosemont. But in mid-2011, after Marois, as leader of the opposition, decided to support a massive subsidy for a Quebec City arena in, designed to woo back an NHL franchise, Beaudoin left the party and sat as an independent. She rejoined the caucus a year later and, as she puts it, “spent my last moments in active politics at the heart of my family.”

There were two enduring themes to Beaudoin’s political career: her deep and strategic affection for France and her commitment to Quebec independence. Neither one gave her rose-coloured glasses, however: she is highly critical of Emmanuel Macron, describing the French president’s policies as a failure, and she is candid about the referendum results, whereas many of her contemporaries continue to blame Ottawa for the outcome. Louise Beaudoin: Entretiens proves she’s as blunt and direct as ever.