On December 3

On this day in...
... 1985 (25 years ago today), Le Vieux Québec was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site at the 9th session of the World Heritage Committee in Paris, France. According to this website,

Old Quebec is the only North American city with its old ramparts, bastions, gates and defensive walls still intact. The city was founded by French explorer Champlain in the early 17th century. By 1750, it has become the largest town in the then French colony of Nouvelle-France ("New France"). Today it is one of the best preserved fortified colonial cities in Canada.

This old part of the city (above) was the 1st place in North America to win UNESCO recognition.

(Prior December 3 posts are here, here, and here.)

On October 2

On this day in ...
... 1980 (30 years ago today), Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau announced that Canada's government would seek unilaterally to "patriate" its Constitution -- the term used in Canada to describe a revision that would permit modification within Canada's governmental structure rather than by the British Parliament, as then was required. The announcement took place amid internal political battles. One concerned the status of Québec within the Canadian federation, a question left unresolved following a referendum in May. Eventually the dispute moved to the judiciary. Finally, on April 17, 1982, British Queen Elizabeth II came to Canada to proclaim the new Constitution Act (above left). (credit for photo, also showing Trudeau, seated at left) Included in the package was an instrument on which we've posted, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

(Prior October 2 posts are here, here, and here.)

On January 19

On this day in ...
... 1649, in what was then part of Nouvelle-France (left) and is now Quebec, "[t]he first executioner in Canada, a pardoned criminal, perform[ed] his first assignment." the subject of this 1st use of capital punishment in Canada was "a 16 year old girl found guilty of theft."

(Prior January 19 posts are here and here.)

On August 21

On this day in ...
... 1968, Germaine Guèvremont (left) died in Québec, Canada, 75 years after she'd been born Marianne-Germaine Grignon, to a lawyer-father and painter-mother, in that same province. Following her education in convent schools, she worked as a journalist, married and took a break to raise a family, but then returned to writing when the death of a daughter sunk her into depression. Guèvremont turned to the writing of fiction; she is most renowned for her novel Le Survenant (1945) and its sequel, Marie-Didace (1947). This work won French-language and -- in English translation as The Outlander (1950) -- English-language literary awards. Dr. Lee Skallerup Bessette, a literature scholar, has written that many consider Guèvremont's novels

the 'last' of the roman de terre, or novels of soil, a genre that dominated Quebec literature for almost 100 years. While the novels stay closely within the rules of the genre, evidence of the social reality of the Depression, the war and the decline of the rural way of life is also prominent. These books can also be read as pre-feminist texts, questioning the traditional roles and limitations placed on women by Quebec society.

(credit for photo (c) Antoine Desilets)
... 2001, Ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization approved sending "a full 3,500-soldier task force into Macedonia to help disarm Albanian insurgents." About 400 NATO troops, mostly Britons and Czechs, already were in what's also known as FYROM, the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia (flag at right); the troops had been deployed the previous week in an effort to preserve a ceasefire. Earlier this year, NATO's head applauded Macedonia's ongoing efforts to attain NATO membership.


(Prior August 21 posts are here and here.)

On August 4

On this day in ...
... 2005, Canada's Prime Minister, Paul Martin, announced his decision to appoint Michaëlle Jean as Canada's Governor General, effective Oct. 1. Then 48, the Haitian-born journalist was "one of the youngest governors general ever, the third woman in the job and the first black person" to serve as the represent[ative to] the Crown in Canada, thus carry[ing] out the duties of head of State." The appointment of Jean (right) would prove controversial; among other things, it was alleged that she once "might have cavorted with separatists in Quebec." To try to defuse this, she gave up her French citizenship. Last month, a columnist at Toronto's Globe and Mail celebrated her as "[b]ilingual, multicultural, modern and worldly," and another writer urged her to run for Prime Minister. (photo credit)
... 2006, the Lord's Resistance Army declared an immediate and unilateral ceasefire, a week before peace talks with the Government of Uganda were set to begin in Juba, Sudan. The New York Times reported that the rebel group "called on the government to lay down its arms," but that the government's head diplomat "said the government would wait to see what happened in the talks, to which the rebels have refused to send their top leaders, who are wanted by the International Criminal Court" (logo at left). As it stands today with respect to the ICC's situation in Uganda, arrest warrants have been issued against 5 persons; 1 has died, and "[t]he four remaining suspects are still at large."

(Prior August 4 posts are here and here.)

On April 25

On this day in ...
... 1940, 22 years after Canadian women were granted the right to vote in federal elections, the women of Quebec were permitted to vote and run for office in provincial elections. The change in Quebec culminated efforts that had begun in 1927, when Idola Saint-Jean (above right) founded l'Alliance canadienne pour le vote des femmes du Québec, and 1928, when Thérèse Casgrain (below left) founded La Ligue des droits de la femme. The groups lobbied the province's premier; eventually he persuaded the clergy to drop their opposition.
... 1980, a top-secret mission aimed at freeing 52 persons whom Iranian militants had been holding hostage for months at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran failed. Eight soldiers were killed in the attempt. The hostages would not be released for another 9 months (prior post).

(Prior April 25 posts are here and here.)

On October 13

On this day in ...
... 1943 (65 years ago today), by notice given to an ambassador in Madrid, Spain, years after it had helped to form the Axis Powers in World War II, Italy reversed course and declared war on Nazi Germany. The New York Times commented:

Thus the defeated nation led into war by Benito Mussolini re-entered it against its former ally through a curt diplomatic exchange in the capital of the country in which they had first collaborated on a military basis seven years ago.

(credit for image of 1943-45 war flag of the Italian Socialist Republic)

... 1705, a textile mill was opened in Montréal (below left; map credit), in the French colony of Québec, by 48-year-old Agathe de Saint-Père. Orphaned at age 15 -- many of the men in her

family having been killed in clashes with the indigenous Iroquois -- Saint-Père took on the task of caring for her 10 siblings and half-siblings. Her textile career began early, as she installed weaving looms in houses, and her career continued even after her marriage at age 28. On

matters of business she

outsh[o]ne her husband frequently. She signed contracts, made profits on fur-trading licences, bought and sold land, made loans, and settled her accounts as well as the debts of her husband and brother-in-law.

After retirement Saint-Père devoted herself to work at a Québec hospital. She is believed to have died about 1747; her last will and testament, in French, is here.

On June 3

On this day in ...
... 1753 (255 years ago today), in Montréal, Québec, Marie-Marguerite d'Youville (left), 51, who'd become the widowed mother of 3 before her 30th birthday, secured the permanent transfer of l'Hôpital Général de Montréal transferred permanently to the religious order she had founded a decade earlier -- the Sisters of Charity, better known as the "Grey Nuns."
... 1999, European Union envoy and Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari announced that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic had "accepted the terms of an international peace plan for Kosovo." The plan, which would require troop withdrawal, return of refugees, and "eventual autonomy of Kosovo within Yugoslavia,"had just been approved by Serbia's parliament.

On November 23, ...

... 1617 (390 years ago today), Father Joseph Le Caron conducted the 1st marriage ceremony in Québec. Marrying Étienne Jonquet, a native of Normandy, was Anne Hébert, daughter of a Parisian surgeon and his wife, who'd brought their family to France's North American colony the same year. The bride, believed about age 15 at the time of her wedding, died in childbirth 2 or 3 years later.
... 1987 (20 years ago today), the United Nations opened its files on war crimes to a member state for the 1st time, and investigators from the U.S. Department of Justice immediately began examining the records. "Access to the records had become a matter of dispute since the disclosure last year that former Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, now the President of Austria, was listed in a closed file that contained allegations against him" respecting his till-then hidden service as a Nazi intelligence office. Waldheim died in June of this year. (1978 photo of Waldheim visiting U.N. peacekeepers from Norway, stationed in Lebanon, courtesy of the United Nations)
... 1955, U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) was born in Arlington, Virginia.

Immigration & accommodation in Québec

Faced with what is described as “public discontent” with Québec’s current multiculturalism policies, particularly as they provide accommodations for immigrant groups whose cultural and religious practices differ from that of the French Canadian Catholic majority in Quebec, Premier Jean Charest created a commission last February to address the issue. The commission’s approach to its charge has been deliberately provocative. In its consultation document, it has developed a series of “frank” and “direct” questions, “at the risk of occasionally arousing very strong responses” because it is convinced that “a wellspring of disagreements, discontent, dissatisfaction, or even frustration has built up” that must be aired. Accordingly, the public is asked to give its opinions on subjects ranging from the value (or lack thereof) of multiculturalism, Québec’s policy toward acceptance and integration of immigrants, “what kind of secularism” Québec should adopt, and so on. Answers may be submitted via formal briefs, on the commission’s website (in french & english), or in person at public hearings and forums. The expected furor is, of course, framed by the context of Québec’s unique position as a Francophone province within Canada and its corresponding and longstanding concern with protection of its French identity. Accordingly, whereas Canada has long had a federal policy of promoting multiculturalism, Québec’s policy is one instead of “cultural convergence.” The debate has also been spurred by the increasing ethnic and religious diversity of immigrants to Québec in recent years and the new challenge this diversity poses in the context of the long-recognized francophone-anglophone tension in the province. The commission began holding public meetings earlier this month & will continue through November. It will be interesting to see whether the commission succeeds in creating the frank dialogue it seeks, and what, if anything, comes of this vast public conversation.