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Remembering Michel Chartrand
Michel Chartrand, an outstanding leader of the Quebec labour, nationalist, socialist and social justice movements, died on April 12 at the age of 93.
A multitude of Québécois worked with Michel in the causes that marked his long life, and the Quebec media this week are full of tributes to his contributions. Translated below is an older tribute by 110 well-known activists, published on the occasion of his 90th birthday, that summarizes some of the key events of his life. It is followed by some personal memories of my own.
Michel Chartrand
In praise of a passionate defender of the workers
[Le Devoir, November 18, 2006]
Next December 20, Michel Chartrand will celebrate his 90th birthday. One of the very few public personalities to have never deviated from his ideals, this exceptional fighter has for 70 years participated in all the memorable events in Quebec’s history. He has become an integral part of those events since he has been on the line of fire in all the major social and political battles, starting in the mid-1930s. For example, during the Fifties, in the “Grande Noirceur” [the dark days of Duplessis], he acted as a spearhead of the trade-union movement, which was the real opposition to Duplessism and opened the way to the Quiet Revolution. Chartrand personally paid the price, being jailed no fewer than seven times in the course of the hard-fought conflicts that marked that period, the best known of which were those in Asbestos and Murdochville.
The fate he suffered then gave a foretaste of the troubles he would later have with the legal system and the many further jailings — including his detention for four months under the War Measures Act decreed by the Trudeau government during the October Crisis of 1970. His trial — like that of all the 300 or so other persons unjustly jailed at that time — ended in a dismissal of the charges.
A political man
Michel has been predominantly a political man. Throughout his life, he has concerned himself with public issues and spoken abundantly about them. “Everything is political”, he loves to say. But this patriarch of the Quebec left has consistently scorned the traditional parties, which in his view seek only power without real change.
In the first part of his public life, he was deeply involved in the adventure of the reformist nationalist parties of the Thirties and Forties — Action Libérale Nationale and the Bloc Populaire — precursors of the contemporary sovereigntist formations, the Parti Québécois and Bloc Québécois.
As his thinking radicalized he opted for more marginal parties. In the Fifties he succeeded Thérèse Casgrain as leader of the Parti Social-Démocrate, the Quebec wing of Tommy Douglas’s Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). And in the early Sixties he was the founding president of the Parti Socialiste du Québec (PSQ), while Jean Lesage’s “Equipe du tonnerre” [“thunder team”, the All-Star Liberal cabinet] ruled in Quebec City.
Michel was an independentist from the very beginning, but he never supported the Parti Québécois, criticizing it as overly centrist for his taste and denouncing some of its neoliberal policies. However, that did not prevent him from occasionally supporting progressive PQ candidates.
Pillar of the trade-union movement
Driven out of the CTCC, the CSN’s predecessor,[1] by its then secretary general, Jean Marchand — one of the three “doves” who, with Trudeau and Gérard Pelletier headed off to Ottawa in 1965 to “put Quebec back in its place” — Chartrand went back to practicing his trade as a printer for ten years.
But it was as president of the Montréal Central Council of the CSN, from 1968 to 1978, that Michel gave his full measure as a man of action and an orator. He became one of the pillars of the Quebec union movement, which he helped to transform into an instrument of struggle.
He was also the keenest enthusiast of the innovative orientation adopted by the union central, which sought to add to the traditional mission of trade-unionism — the negotiation of collective agreements, referred to as the “first front” — a “second front”. This was expressed, for example, in the Central Council’s involvement in various social and political causes, such as
– the defense of the rights of tenants and assistance to injured workers;
– the founding of a popular newspaper, the weekly Québec-Presse;
– the establishment of superstore food co-operatives (Cooprix);
– support to the Front d’Action Politique (FRAP), the first progressive party to oppose Jean Drapeau, the autocratic mayor of Montréal;
– the successful campaign to abolish the private hunting and fishing clubs, which earned Chartrand yet another stay behind bars;
– and, above all, the practice of international solidarity with the Centre international de solidarité ouvrière (CISO), founded by the late Roberto Quévillon, and the Québec-Palestine and Québec-Chile committees.
Return to the co-operative movement
Following his withdrawal from full-time union activity, in the late Seventies, Chartrand returned to one of his first loves, the co-operative movement, and he devoted himself primarily to his duties as chairman of the board of directors of the Caisse populaire des syndicats nationaux [the CSN’s credit union].
Still tireless, in the mid-1980s he established the FATA [Foundation to assist injured workers], where he spent several years working with such valued collaborators as Roch Banville, Émile Boudreau and Claude Pételle, all of them now deceased.
When he was over 80 years old, Michel launched a campaign in favour of establishing a “citizenship income”. For several months he criss-crossed Quebec holding dozens of meetings to publicize the manifesto he had written on this topic. He even made a lengthy stop-over in Jonquière, during the 1998 elections, to run against the then premier Lucien Bouchard, as a spokesperson for the Rassemblement pour l’alternative progressiste (RAP – Coalition for a progressive alternative), one of the predecessors of Québec solidaire. His slogan was “Zero poverty through a citizenship income”, which contrasted with the controversial “Zero Deficit” of the PQ government.
Sixty years after his activism in Catholic Action movements (following a spell as a Trappist monk at Oka), he was smitten with the same ideal of social justice, and had the same horror at injustice. Paradoxically, he became a nationalist while he was a monk. “Nationalism,” he explains, “is the precondition to an opening toward the world.”
The idealist
In 1993, after 51 years of marriage, Michel suffered the painful loss of his companion Simonne Monet. Canon Lionel Groulx, who married them and baptized their seven children, described them in 1942 as “two young idealists whose fates will be joined forever”. He could not have said it better. Even if, in their quest for greater social justice, Simonne and Michel chose the difficult road of financial insecurity and adversities of all kinds, they always supported each other as two inseparable accomplices.
This very incomplete overview will, we hope, have the merit of acquainting the younger generation of some of the accomplishments of an exceptional personality, thirsting for justice, who has devoted his life to the defense of the most disadvantaged in our society.
Some have been overly critical of his mood swings, his aggressiveness, his verbal violence, his utopian projects; but no one has ever been able to dispute his loyalty to the people, his idealism, his authenticity, his patriotism and his attachment to the French language. His many friends, among whom we wish to include ourselves, have had the privilege of discovering what lies hidden beneath the armour of the public figure. They can testify to the generosity and sensitivity of the man, his literary culture, his love of art, his profound humanism and even . . . his insolent language.
On the eve of his 90 years, therefore, we express the wish that this majestic oak will prolong for several years yet his peaceful retirement in the family home in Richelieu with his companion Colette Legendre. Long live Michel Chartrand, our young ninety-year-old!
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