Former Quebec Premier Who Blamed Jews For Referendum Loss Dies
Jacques Parizeau Image by Getty Images
Jacques Parizeau, the former separatist Quebec premier who blamed the Jewish and other ethnic communities for the narrow defeat in a bitter provincial referendum on seceding from Canada, has died.
Parizeau died Monday. He was 84.
Parizeau later acknowledged that in the razor-thin loss on Oct. 30, 1995, for which he blamed “money and the ethnic vote,” he was referring to the combined efforts of the Jewish, Italian and Greek communities on behalf of the “No side.”
“I knew very well who I was targeting when I said that: the common front of Italian, Greek and Jewish congresses,” Parizeau said in 2013.
He said that at 12 polling stations in Cote St. Luc, a heavily Jewish municipality in Montreal, “there were no Yes votes.”
The secession referendum lost by only 50,000 out of 4.8 million votes — less than 1 percent.
Parizeau stepped down the day after making the controversial comments.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism so that we can be prepared for whatever news 2025 brings.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
