Québec, Canada: A cross between a province and a nation

Any encyclopedia will tell you that Québec is one of the 10 provinces (and three territories) that comprise Canada, but a visit may leave you with a different impression. 

Thanks to its history, ethnicity and language, Québec plays an oversized role in Canadian politics. It is the place where Canada was first settled by Europeans, the largest Canadian province in land area, the second-largest in population (after Ontario), the only province that is predominantly French-speaking and the only province whose sole official language is French. Almost a quarter of Canada’s 34.4 million people live there.

As my wife Liz and I noticed when we vacationed in Québec last week, this province, which  has a long history of flirting with secession from Canada, does not think of itself in provincial terms. 

Approaching Québec City from the south, a large highway sign welcomed us to the “capitale nationale," implying that Québec City is not the capital of a mere province. Once in the city, we drove past the ornate and imposing provincial Parliament, formally known as the Assemblée nationale du Québec (the National Assembly of Québec). 

And so it goes in Québec, where the blue-and-white provincial flag is a more common sight than the red-and-white Canadian maple leaf. This is a place where the Parti Québécois, which supports sovereignty for Québec, is the official opposition party in the provincial Parliament and the Québec-based Bloc Québécois, another political party that supports sovereignty, holds a significant number of seats in the Canadian House of Commons, the lower house of Canada's federal Parliament. 

One of the founding provinces of modern Canada, Québec remains a part of that larger whole. But it does so on its own evolving, sometimes contentious, terms. As the Canadian House of Commons stated in a resolution passed in 2006, the Québécois “form a nation within a united Canada.”