Jacques Parizeau, former leader of the Parti Québécois (PQ) and premier of Quebec from 1994 to 1996, reportedly summarized his disagreement with Pierre Elliott Trudeau by saying that, at bottom, they agreed on every issue save one: where to locate the national capital.
This remark has the merit of illuminating one essential fact: the Parti Québécois and Trudeau’s Liberals fundamentally shared the same statist, interventionist, dirigiste view of the world. The only thing they really disagreed on was how this power should be divided between Canada’s federal government and Quebec’s provincial government.
In other words, Quebec separatists were, and still are, interested in a “Québec libre,” but, it seems to me, are all too rarely interested in the individual freedom of Quebecers themselves.