(The following article is from the May 16-31,  2010 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)

(Adapted from a text of a collective of authors published in Le Devoir, November 18, 2006)

    On April 12, Michel Chartrand passed away at 93 years old. This exceptional fighter participated for over 70 years in all the memorable events in Quebec's history, starting in the mid-1930s. During the Fifties, in the "Grande Noirceur" (the dark days of Duplessis), he acted as a spearhead of the trade union movement, which acted as the real opposition to Duplessism and opened the way to the Quiet Revolution. Chartrand paid the price, jailed no fewer than seven times in the hard-fought conflicts that marked that period, the best known of which were those in Asbestos and Murdochville.

     This gave a foretaste of his later troubles with the legal system, including his detention for four months under the War Measures Act decreed by the Trudeau government during the October Crisis of 1970. His trial, like that of all the 300 or so persons unjustly jailed, ended in a dismissal of the charges.

     Michel was predominantly a political man, speaking abundantly about public issues. "Everything is political," he loved to say. But this patriarch of the Quebec left scorned the traditional parties, which in his view sought only power without real change.

     In the first part of his public life, he was deeply involved in the reformist nationalist parties of the Thirties and Forties - Action Libérale Nationale and the Bloc Populaire - precursors of the contemporary sovereigntist Parti Québécois and Bloc Québécois. As his thinking radicalized, in the Fifties he succeeded Thérese Casgrain as leader of the Parti Social-Démocrate, the Quebec wing of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). And in the early Sixties he was the founding president of the Parti Socialiste du Québec (PSQ). At the end of his life, he was an eminent member of Québec Solidaire.

     An independentist from the beginning, he never supported the PQ, criticizing its overly centrist and neoliberal policies. However, he was not a narrow nationalist, conscious that a nation oppressing another one cannot find the path to freedom. This is why he actively supported the struggle of the Mohawk people during the Oka crisis in 1990.

     Driven out of the CTCC (the CSN's predecessor), by its then secretary general, Jean Marchand (one of the three "doves" who, with Trudeau and Gérard Pelletier headed to Ottawa in 1965 to "put Quebec back in its place"), Chartrand went back to practising his trade as a printer for ten years.

     But as president of the Montreal Central Council of the CSN, from 1968 to 1978, Michel gave his full measure as a man of action and an orator. He became one of the pillars of the Quebec union movement, which he helped transform into an instrument of struggle.

     He was the keenest enthusiast of the innovative orientation adopted by the union central, which sought to add a "second front" to the traditional mission of trade-unionism, the negotiation of collective agreements. This was expressed, for example, in the Central Council's involvement in causes such as defense of the rights of tenants and injured workers; the founding of a popular newspaper, the weekly Québec-Presse; the establishment of superstore food co-operatives; support to the Front d'Action Politique (FRAP), the first progressive party to oppose Jean Drapeau, the autocratic mayor of Montreal; the successful campaign to abolish the private hunting and fishing clubs, which earned Chartrand yet another stay behind bars; and, above all, the practice of international solidarity.

     Still tireless, in the mid-1980s Michel established the FATA (Foundation to assist injured workers). When he was over 80 years old, he criss-crossed Quebec holding dozens of meetings for his campaign to establish a "citizenship income." He even made a lengthy stop in Jonquière, during the 1998 elections, to run against then premier Lucien Bouchard, as a spokesperson for the Rassemblement pour l'alternative progressiste (RAP - Coalition for a progressive alternative), one of the predecessors of Québec solidaire. His slogan was "Zero poverty through a citizenship income," which contrasted with the "Zero Deficit" of the PQ government.

     We hope this can acquaint the younger generation with some of the accomplishments of an exceptional personality, thirsting for justice, who devoted his life to the defense of the most disadvantaged in our society.