Life of the Parti

In the summer of 1992, Jacques Parizeau was in love. Then sixty-two, he was a widower and the leader of the Parti Québécois, having returned to the Assemblée nationale three years earlier. Parizeau was a serious figure in Quebec politics: one of the architects of the Quiet Revolution, a key member of the PQ, and René Lévesque’s minister of finance, until he dramatically resigned, along with a third of the cabinet. Now he had fallen for Lisette Lapointe, who had been his press secretary during the 1976 election campaign.

When Parizeau proposed, he told her his plan. First, get the PQ elected to form a government and, eight to ten months later, hold a vote on independence. “If I win, I will stay long enough to get the train on the tracks,” he said. “If I lose, I leave, I pass the torch.” Three years later, he led the PQ to power and, after forming an alliance with Lucien Bouchard of the Bloc Québécois and Mario Dumont of the Action démocratique du Québec, called a referendum.

When the Yes side lost by a hair, Parizeau, bitter and angry, let loose. “My friends,” he began. “We were beaten basically by what? By money and some ethnic votes, essentially.” Lapointe recalls her reaction in De combats et d’amour (Of battles and love): “Oh my beautiful love, they are going to lynch you.” She then offers an interpretation I have never heard: Parizeau wasn’t talking about the ethnic vote in general but the specific No votes that had been recommended by the Greek, Italian, and Jewish congresses of Canada. “Fundamental nuance!” she writes. “I repeat, that’s why he said clearly ‘some’ ethnic votes and not ‘the’ ethnic vote. How we both regretted that this explanation was not given that evening.”

I am not sure the explanation would have made much of a difference in the outrage that Parizeau’s remark provoked. That night, Bernard Landry, then deputy premier, phoned in a rage, saying Parizeau would have to resign. The next day — as he had said he would three years earlier, although some of his cabinet members were insisting he stay — Parizeau did just that, deeply resentful of what he saw as Landry’s betrayal. “Years later,” Lapointe recalls, “Jacques acknowledged that if he had known how things would turn out — how his successors would not pick up the torch and would renounce holding a new referendum, despite the admitted irregularities — if he had known how the fruit of so much effort would be wiped out, he would not have resigned.”

Lapointe describes herself as “plutôt fonceuse”— which one might translate as “rather pushy” or “pretty driven” or “quite dynamic”— and her memoir is a testimonial to how pushy, driven, and dynamic she is. When Parizeau fell in love with her, she had been married and divorced three times and had had her heart broken in an affair. When I first met her, she was the press secretary for Pierre Marois, a cabinet minister in Lévesque’s government, and she was both imaginative and controlling in her work. Here she demonstrates that same driven mixture of imagination and control, for Lapointe is a fighter.

When an affair ended abruptly in 1980 — after the friend of a friend told the wife about it — she left Quebec City and went to work in Montreal, beginning two decades as the executive director of Auto Prévention, a joint union-management organization dedicated to health and safety. In 1989, her son, Hugo, was severely injured by a drunk driver: the mayor of St‑Sulpice, Paul Landreville, who was ultimately convicted of criminal negligence causing bodily harm, jailed for six months, and fined $1,000. Lapointe carried on a lengthy fight to obtain compensation, despite Quebec’s no‑fault auto insurance.

After Parizeau left politics, Lapointe decided to run for office herself. In 2007, she was elected to the Assemblée nationale, where she would serve two terms. But her time as a member of the PQ came to an end in 2011 when the party, then in opposition, decided to endorse public funding for a new arena in Quebec City. Along with Pierre Curzi, Louise Beaudoin, and Jean-Martin Aussant, she resigned from the caucus in protest. She joined Aussant’s new sovereigntist party, Option nationale, but did not run for re‑election in 2012, when Pauline Marois formed a PQ minority government.

However, Lapointe was not done with electoral politics. When her village of St‑Adolphe-d’Howard was threatened with a massive hydro line, she became one of the leaders of the protest movement. Then she served two terms as mayor. She also worked to get a statue of Parizeau, who had died in 2015, created and installed at the Assemblée nationale.

Forty years ago, biographies in Quebec were primarily written by anglophones. But over the last few years, there has been an explosion of biographies and memoirs in French. Lapointe takes advantage of this trend, citing and challenging accounts with which she disagrees, whether about her or about Parizeau. She is nothing if not feisty; she readily takes issue with any description of herself or of the man she was married to for almost a quarter of a century that does not correspond with her view.

Lisette Lapointe is a woman of passions, and her book quivers with them: her love for her children, her failed marriages, her various houses, her heartfelt relationship with Parizeau, her immersion in one battle after another. Some she won, some she lost. Another writer might have been more concise (and dropped many of the real estate anecdotes). But these are her stories, and she’s determined to tell them all.