Quebec Sovereignty Movement - Quebec Sovereignty Movement in Fiction

Quebec Sovereignty Movement in Fiction

• Richard Rohmer's novel Separation (1976) was turned into a TV-movie for CTV Television in 1977. In the movie, the Parti Québécois has formed the government of Quebec but Premier Gaston Belisle has repeatedly put off its promise to hold a referendum. International politics forces Belisle's hand.

• In the mid-1980s, a second movie, Quebec-Canada 1995, depicts a meeting between the president of Quebec and the prime minister of Canada to discuss a crisis involving Quebec military occupations of parts of Ontario and New Brunswick. Canada's armed forces are stretched thin with peacekeepers in such varied places as the Falkland Islands (with "Lady Goosegreen" being Margaret Thatcher).

• William Weintraub's satirical 1979 novel The Underdogs provoked controversy by imagining a future Quebec in which English-speakers were an oppressed minority, complete with a violent resistance movement. One planned stage version was cancelled before its premiere.

• Clive Cussler's 1984 novel Night Probe! is set against a fictional attempt at secession in the late 1980s. Rights to newly discovered oil resources in Ungava Bay, discovered as Quebec moves to secede, clash with the ramifications of a rediscovered secret treaty negotiated between the U.K. and U.S. governments during World War I.

• David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest includes both real and fictional Québécois separatist movements as integral to the plot. In the story, the United States has merged with Canada and Mexico to form the Organization of North American Nations (ONAN). Wheelchair-bound Quebec separatists use a video so entertaining it leads to death to accomplish their goals of both Quebec independence and the end of the ONAN.

• In the Southern Victory Series of alternate history novels by Harry Turtledove, Quebec becomes a separate nation during the Great War (an alternative World War I), in which the United States defeats Canada, the UK and her allies (including the Confederate States of America). Since the United States organized this separation to weaken the rest of Anglophone Canada (and the UK by extension), the Republic of Quebec operated as a client state of the United States, rather than being truly independent. This is later demonstrated in the series when Dr. Leonard O'Doull is pressured by the United States and Quebec governments to serve as a surgeon in the U.S. Army, despite being a Quebec citizen. O'Doull joins both under this duress, but also as a result of his loyalty to his birth country.

• In DC Comics, the villain (and sometimes hero) Plastique is initially a Québécois freedom fighter, who resorts to acts of terrorism.

• In Marvel Comics, the superhero Northstar was part of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) in his youth.

• Margaret Atwood's 1979 novel Life Before Man is set in Toronto in the late 1970s and several characters watch and sometimes comment upon the elections and sovereignist movement in Quebec. The sovereignist movement and its struggles are metaphorically linked to the difficulties the characters in the novel have with separating their own personal relationships.

• In the roleplaying game Trinity there are references made to a separatist Quebec nation who in return for independence helped the then formed 'Confederated States of America' take control of Canada.

• In the roleplaying game Shadowrun, Quebec exists as a sovereign nation alongside the United Canadian American States and the Confederated American States.

• In the film Die Hard, the terrorist leader demands, as a ruse, the release of imprisoned members of the fictional group Liberté du Québec. (Presumably meant to be a fictional version of the FLQ.)

• In Peter Watts' science fiction series starting with Starfish, Quebec has attained sovereignty and is an energetic/economic superpower within North America.