PARTI QUBCOIS

(French: Quebecois [or Quebecer] Party), minor Canadian political party founded in 1968 by Ren Lvesque and other French-Canadian separatists in the largely French-speaking province of Quebec. In 1968 Lvesque merged his Mouvement Souverainet-Association, a movement advocating Quebec sovereignty in a new kind of looser association of Canadian provinces, with other separatist groups to form the Parti Qubcois. Unsuccessful in the Quebec provincial elections of 1970 and 1973, the party in 1976 won 71 of 110 seats in the provincial National Assembly. The following year, with Lvesque as premier, the Assembly decreed French the only official language of government and business in Quebec. In 1980 Lvesque hazarded a referendum seeking approval for the provincial government to negotiate a new status and relationship with the rest of Canada. The separatists lost, garnering only 40.4 percent of the vote; even a small majority of French speakers voted against the proposal. Although the party won 80 of 122 seats in the 1981 election, membership declined thereafter as separatist fervour waned. In 1985 the independence plank was removed from the party's platform, and, following a series of defections and by-election defeats that year, Lvesque resigned. Elections in December 1985 swept the party from power. By 1987 the party was again in the control of militant separatists, and, when Quebec separatism resurged generally in the 1990s, the party's hopes revived. It had informal ties with the Bloc Qubcois, a Quebec separatist party that captured most of the province's seats in the House of Commons in the 1993 federal elections. The Parti Qubcois won 77 out of 125 seats in the 1994 provincial election and formed a government under its leader, Jacques Parizeau. In 1995 the party held another referendum seeking popular approval to negotiate Quebec's secession from Canada, but again the proposal was rejected, this time by an extremely narrow margin of 50.6 to 49.4 percent.