WI: FLQ crisis manifests into a Canadian "Troubles"

GarethC

Donor
Tricky...

The Troubles were an outgrowth of a really pretty awfully discriminatory government in Ulster which used the overwhelmingly Protestant police to beat up Catholics who got uppity about not having jobs or votes or money or opportunities for their children.

The Quebec provincial government has not had that sort of approach since the Quebec Act in 1774. Maybe with a Pre-1900 POD with significant civil unrest in leads to suppression afther 1867 or something?

You'd be more likely to get anglophone Quebec residents forming the resistance against discriminatory local laws, if say French-language requirements for voting rights, state housing, welfare, firearms licenses, business ownership, etc were then used to justify denying all of them to English-speakers as an extension of Bill 101 in 1977.
 
You'd be more likely to get anglophone Quebec residents forming the resistance against discriminatory local laws, if say French-language requirements for voting rights, state housing, welfare, firearms licenses, business ownership, etc were then used to justify denying all of them to English-speakers as an extension of Bill 101 in 1977.

That last would not be a possibility.
 
I've come across two scenarios for this. Dr. Sean Maloney wrote 'Another Savage War of Peace: Quebec 1968' for the book Cold War Hot; Alternate Decisions of the Cold War. The other was 'Killing Ground: The Canadian Civil War' by Bruce Powe, written back in 1968.

They're both worth reading.
 
I've come across two scenarios for this. Dr. Sean Maloney wrote 'Another Savage War of Peace: Quebec 1968' for the book Cold War Hot; Alternate Decisions of the Cold War. The other was 'Killing Ground: The Canadian Civil War' by Bruce Powe, written back in 1968.

They're both worth reading.

What did Maloney and Powe suggest?

One key difference between French Canada and Northern Ireland is that borders between the different groups were much lower. There were nothing like the hostile legacies of partition and Irish independence, nor anything like such systematic repression of one community by the other. (The wealth of the Anglos was counterbalanced, if imperfectly, by the numbers of Francophones.) There were problems, but they weren't existential threats, mainly irritants.

Too, there were things which united across the barriers of language, for instance the shared Catholicism of Francophones and many Anglophones. I remember one comparison of Northern Ireland with New Brunswick which made the point that, even though one-third of the population of each jurisdiction belonged to an ethnic minority with a long history of dispossession and oppression (Irish Catholics and Francophone Acadians, respectively), in New Brunswick the minority population was not nearly so alienated and isolated. The shared Catholicism of Acadians with so many Anglophones helped create bonds, while capturing the Francophone vote was essential for any stable government to form.
 
Maloney had the FLQ backed by a destablised France as a proxy for the USSR. Things turn bad pretty quickly, NATO collapses as France and a united Germany go neutralist. The story finishes with Canadian and Allied forces fighting the FLQ in a long slog of a war.

Powe is a bit different. The story is seen through the eyes of a Canadian Army Lieutenant Colonel who has just returned from a UN peacekeeping mission in South Africa. There's quite a good synopsis of it here.
 
OTL during the 1960s most Quebec cities had 3 distinct school boards: French Catholic, English Catholic and English Protestant.
French Catholics were mostly descended from the original Norman-French colonists (habitants) who settled 400 years earlier.
English Catholics were mostly Irish Catholics who fled the 1840s potatoe famines back in Ireland
Meanwhile English Protestants were a mixture of British, Scottish, Scots-Irish and United Empire Loyalists. There were even a few Orange Order Protestants from Northern Ireland. English Protestants dominated the upper levels of banking, shipping, industry, etc. while the majority of French-Canadians toiled in the middle and lower classes.

The Quiet Revolution started during the 1950s after old-school Premier Jeam Duplessis retired. Centuries of oppression by the Catholic Church and British Crown lifted off the shoulders of Québécois peasants.
Left-wing political groups, hippies and trade-unionists angrily demanded dozens of radical reforms. Some trade unions became almost Marxist, striking etc. in their campaigns for better pay, better equality and opportunities for advancement.

WI Quebec suffered a civil war similar to the Spanish Civil War pitting conservatives (Catholic Church, wealthy land owners and the Army) versus reformers (lower and middle-class French Canadians)?
 
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I don't see how. The IRA fought the British Army for 30 years, the FLQ completely disintegrated after two weeks of Canadian soldiers standing on street corners and manning the odd roadblock.
 
I don't see how. The IRA fought the British Army for 30 years, the FLQ completely disintegrated after two weeks of Canadian soldiers standing on street corners and manning the odd roadblock.

A true force to be reckoned with, those FLQ insurgents. :p
 
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