Profile : Quebec’s Premier Faces Solomon-Like Decision : If amendments recognizing the French-speaking province’s uniquness are not ratified by all of Canada, Bourassa may yield to pressure for Quebec to go its own way. Either way, it may be a no-win situation for him.

The crowd roared as a thin, spectacled man in a blue flannel suit came through the pillared doorway of a downtown convention center. Flashbulbs popped, television lights came on, and reporters homed in with their microphones. The premier of Quebec, Robert Bourassa, was about to address the Canadian people.

“He’s not at all charismatic,” said Montreal newspaper editor Paul-Andre Comeau, but that doesn’t matter. Robert Bourassa isn’t just any Canadian politician, and these aren’t ordinary times north of the 49th parallel.

The Quebec premier leads one of the country’s largest provinces, with a fourth of the Canadian population. It’s the only province where the majority speaks French, and now, Quebec’s Francophone separatists are once again on the move.

Bourassa has opposed separatism in the past, but times change, and so may he. These days, when Bourassa speaks, people not only listen--they pick apart his words, seeking clues to what the future may bring.

Polls show that about half of all Quebecers now favor some sort of realignment with English Canada. The number has grown sharply over the past few months, as the country has debated whether to amend the constitution in ways that would give more power to Quebec. A package of amendments faces a June 23 deadline to either be ratified by all 10 provinces or die.

French-speaking Quebecers feel they need the extra constitutional powers because they constitute a threatened minority within Canada. But many English Canadians think the amendments are too generous to their Francophone compatriots, and two provinces, Newfoundland and Manitoba, have been threatening not to sign them in time.

If the amendments die, many Quebecers are likely to conclude there is little point in staying with English Canada. They will call on Bourassa to defend their province’s honor, and Bourassa will have to decide how to respond.

If, on the other hand, the constitutional amendments are ratified, middle-of-the-road Quebecers are likely to accept continued union with English Canada and go on about their business. But hard-line “nationalist” Quebecers will keep up the pressure on Bourassa to test the constitutional amendments in court, to show that they really mean something.

Quebec nationalists will also call on Bourassa to go into talks on additional constitutional amendments--some may be called this fall--with an even longer wish-list for their province. Quebecers want greater powers over education, television and radio programming and construction of huge hydro-electrical dams without federal environmental interference. Bourassa will be damned in his own province if he doesn’t take up the fight; damned in English Canada if he does.

Bourassa, the product of a Harvard legal education and advanced economic training at Oxford, is a pragmatist with all the elan and personal magnetism of a tax lawyer. So he is unlikely to do anything radical in either case. While there has been widespread speculation that the constitutional battling might prompt him to call a referendum on Quebec independence, those who know him best think he’ll take a middling approach.

“If one looks at his political career, one generally gets an impression of someone who avoids rash actions and tries to achieve compromise,” says Kenneth McRoberts, a professor of political science at York University and author of a political history of Quebec. “He is someone who is quite cautious and concerned with maintaining his electoral position.”

But that isn’t to say that Bourassa would do nothing. The premier is a close observer of public-opinion polls and bases his policy decisions in large measure on what he finds in the numbers.

In 1988, for instance, he tried to bridge the gulf between Quebec nationalists, who wanted a ban on English-language signs in the province, and minority English-speakers who said such restrictions would infringe on their civil rights. He banned the signs outdoors, authorizing their use indoors.

“It’s a weird compromise,” said Comeau. English and French-speakers both grumbled about the straddle, but they took to the streets only once over the issue. “He knew where the opposition was coming from and how strong it was, and that’s why he made that compromise. He followed the direction of the polls.”

Observers who have watched Bourassa walk the linguistic balance-beam in the past think he’ll do the same thing now, if Quebec separatism really does take off.

“He’ll try to solidify popular support on some option that’s midway between sovereignty and the status quo,” said McRoberts.

The premier knows better than most Quebec politicians what can happen to a leader who lets himself be swamped by public opinion. Just 14 years ago he was about the most despised man in all the province.

In 1970, Quebec’s provincial assembly had elected him premier for the first time; he was just 36 years old and seriously unprepared for the job. Quebecers ended up holding him accountable for the many problems of the time--insurrection, kidnapings and even the murder of a provincial Cabinet minister by radical separatists; a walkout by 200,000 government employees, the biggest in Canadian history; runaway expenses for the 1976 Montreal Olympics; soaring cost overruns on an enormous hydro-electric project in northern Quebec.

By 1976, Bourassa’s government was in ruins. He called an election that year anyway, and his Liberal Party took its worst drubbing in a century. Bourassa even lost in his own constituency. Worse yet, the separatist Parti Quebecois won, and set about designing a medium-term strategy for achieving political independence. English Canadians and federalist Quebecers blamed this, too, on Bourassa. It looked as though the young, ambitious technocrat was finished, at the tender political age of 43.

After his humiliating defeat, Bourassa moved to Belgium, another bilingual country, and studied the dynamics of the European Common Market at the Institut des Affaires Europeennes in Brussels. He reflected on Flemish-Walloon relations and kept office space at the local Quebec representative bureau, where he could keep abreast of politics back home.

“He really had one goal: To get in touch with civil servants from the European Community and to get in touch with European politicians,” says Comeau, who happened to be living in Brussels at the time. “Politics was the only thing he was interested in. He thinks about politics. He dreams about politics. His whole life revolves around politics. His main goal was to stage his comeback.”

By 1980, the Parti Quebecois government had organized a province-wide referendum on its proposed plan of “sovereignty-association,” which would have established political independence from the rest of Canada but continued economic ties. The federal government of the time, headed by Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, was doing whatever it could to frustrate the separatists.

Trudeau, a Liberal, made stirring speeches about the need for one great nation, united from coast to coast. But Bourassa re-surfaced in Quebec just in time to make his own, unemotional, anti-separation pitch, arguing from a strictly economic point of view.

Bourassa’s study of the European Economic Community had convinced him that two separate countries couldn’t share the same currency, as Quebec and English Canada would have done if sovereignty-association went ahead. He told Quebecers as much, and plumped for what he called federalisme rentable , or “profitable federalism.” It was a simple cost-benefit analysis that claimed Quebecers got more from Ottawa in transfer payments and subsidies than it paid in taxes and that Quebec’s standard of living would fall if independence were achieved.

The Liberal Party hierarchy may not have liked having the once-disgraced Bourassa around, but it couldn’t ignore someone willing to travel every rough road in the huge province, speaking in any high-school gym or church hall where people would listen to a federalist line. In the end, Quebec voted against sovereignty-association, and Bourassa had once more ingratiated himself both with his party and the voting public. In 1983, he became party leader again, posting the biggest winning margin in Liberal history. In 1986, he once again became premier.

“It’s an astonishing comeback,” says McRoberts. “It’s a bit like Richard Nixon losing (the gubernatorial race) in California in 1962, and then coming back and winning the presidency in 1968. I can’t think of anyone else in Canadian politics who has done this.”

But however ardently Bourassa may have fought 10 years ago to keep Canada together, his cold-blooded vision of “profitable federalism” has left him open today to the suspicions of English Canadians--and the hopes of Quebec nationalists.

What if the Canadian economic picture should change and Quebecers should conclude that they no longer get more out of confederation than they put in? Some already claim this is so, thanks to a one-year-old free-trade pact between Canada and the United States. The free-trade agreement has encouraged the development of north-south business links, rather than east-west ties.

“Bourassa is a conditional federalist,” said Guy Laforest, assistant professor of political theory at the Universite de Laval in Quebec City. “We’re all conditional federalists. There comes a time when, if Canada doesn’t give us enough, well, fine. Our first priority is to Quebec.”

Biography

Name: Robert Bourassa

Title: Premier of Quebec Province.

Age: 56

Personal: married and the father of two grown children. Member of the Quebec bar since 1957. A former fiscal adviser to the Department of National Revenue. He has taught at a number of universities in Canada, the United States and Europe.

Quote: “Canada is one of the most privileged nations of the world. Quebec wants to be part of that country, if it is accepted.”