JACQUES BOISSINOT/The Canadian Press
When journalists called Claude Morin “The Sphinx,” they had in mind his knowing smile, unflappable manner and penchant for backroom intrigues.
In a twist worthy of that nickname, Mr. Morin, the man who shaped the constitutional demands of five consecutive Quebec premiers, turned out to have an additional secret – he was also a police informant.
Mr. Morin died Tuesday at the age of 96, Quebec media reported.
He was the father of étapisme, the gradualist approach that the Parti Québécois espoused, requiring a referendum before separation. And he was one of the bureaucrats who played a pivotal role during the watershed years of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution.
But his legacy as an éminence grise is clouded by the revelation that, while a high-ranking PQ member and adviser to party leader René Lévesque, he was also a paid source of the RCMP.
Until then, he had been the epitome of the academic and public servant, a pipe-smoking homebody who liked to putter in the book-lined basement of his suburban house. Then came a tale straight out of a spy thriller, with secret meetings, hush payments and covert recordings.
Mr. Morin said he agreed to meet the RCMP officers because he thought he could outwit them. “I am shrewd enough to learn more than they did,” he told The Globe and Mail in 1992.
Mr. Morin left “an indelible mark on Quebec society,” Parti Québécois Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon posted on social media Tuesday.
“It would be pointless to deny that some questions remain regarding Claude Morin’s legacy within the Parti Québécois. But I wish to pay tribute to the man who worked alongside René Lévesque for many years,” Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon wrote.
Even before his interaction with the Mounties became public, journalists had noted a paradox in Mr. Morin’s life.
While a mandarin who whispered in the ear of Quebec premiers, he was suspected of being a crypto-separatist. But once he joined the PQ, party purists suspected he was a crypto-federalist.
All along, he insisted he was only being loyal to Quebec and its interests.
He was born on May 16, 1929, in Montmorency, near Quebec City, the eldest of the seven children of Aline Dupont and Émile Morin.
His father, a physician, was a staunch nationalist and a member of the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society.
Mr. Morin studied social sciences and economics at Laval University. Quebec was still in the grip of the authoritarian Premier Maurice Duplessis.
However, Mr. Morin’s mentor at Laval was Father Georges-Henri Lévesque, dean of the social sciences school, whose progressive views influenced a generation of Quebec leaders.
After getting a master’s in social welfare from Columbia University in 1956, Mr. Morin was back in Quebec City, teaching, when Liberal leader Jean Lesage became premier in 1960, ushering in a period of social and political changes.
Through one of his former professors, now a deputy minister, Mr. Morin became a speechwriter for the new premier.
He found that his ideas, inspired by Father Lévesque, were in tune with Mr. Lesage’s reform-minded views. After three years, he was promoted to deputy minister for federal-provincial affairs.
He became a key adviser during years when Quebec repeatedly sought broader legislative, diplomatic and fiscal autonomy.
“Whatever he does … he is likely to keep Ottawa nervous,” said a 1969 Globe profile.
He had the same job with the next three premiers: Daniel Johnson Sr., Jean-Jacques Bertrand and Robert Bourassa.
According to Mr. Morin, the referendum idea came while he worked for Mr. Bertrand.
Whenever Quebec negotiated with Ottawa, federal officials claimed that provincial demands didn’t represent the true wishes of the population. Mr. Bertrand started talking about holding referendums to bolster his position.
The reaction from federal mandarins convinced him a referendum could provide effective leverage against Ottawa.
In 1971, not seeing eye-to-eye with Mr. Bourassa, Mr. Morin stepped down and joined the PQ. After the party only won six seats in the 1973 election, Mr. Morin pushed leader René Lévesque to reassure voters by clarifying how independence would happen.
Sovereignty shouldn’t be done simply through a legislative vote and had to be reached by stages, he argued. The PQ’s convention of 1974 adopted the idea that a referendum had to be held before Quebec could separate.
When the PQ took power in 1976, Mr. Lévesque picked Mr. Morin as intergovernmental affairs minister, the point man for the referendum strategy and timing.
The PQ lost the 1980 referendum and prime minister Pierre Trudeau announced he would patriate the constitution unilaterally. Mr. Lévesque agreed to join with seven other premiers who wanted to block the move.
But their common front collapsed in November, 1981, after the other premiers agreed to a deal with Mr. Trudeau during an all-night session from which Quebec was excluded.
Nearly a decade later, nationalist feelings soared again in Quebec and Mr. Morin started getting involved in the PQ once more.
Then, in May, 1992, Radio-Canada broke the story that Mr. Morin had been a paid RCMP source in the 1970s, codenamed Q-1, then French Minuet.
Mr. Morin acknowledged his contacts with the RCMP started at Laval University, when was part of a movie club that showed works of the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein. He said the dean, Father Lévesque, urged him to notify the RCMP to make sure he wouldn’t be suspected of being a Communist sympathizer.
The officer Mr. Morin met was Raymond Parent.
Mr. Parent reappeared in 1966, when Mr. Morin was deputy minister for federal-provincial affairs. He said Premier Lesage told him that a federal emissary – Mr. Parent – wanted to discuss concerns about French provocateurs agitating for Quebec separation.
They met in 1969, at the Château Frontenac hotel, again to talk about French interference, Mr. Morin said.
Sometime in 1974 or early 1975, Mr. Morin said he got a call from Léo Fontaine, another RCMP security service officer.
“He wanted to know if I had noticed anything unusual about foreigners that I was meeting. To my great surprise, he cited the names of some of my visitors in the past few months,” Mr. Morin said in a statement released in 1992.
The meetings continued and “in March 1975, I had an indication that we might be on the verge of something more spicy,” the statement said.
“My modest travelling expenses had come up before, but now my interlocutor proposed to `compensate’ me for them! I understood that he wanted to offer me money, doubtless because he intended to touch on even more delicate matters.”
Mr. Morin said he decided he had to go along to discover what the Mounties were up to.
He tried to protect himself by writing a 40-page account that was notarized and sealed. He also made a secret recording of one meeting with Mr. Fontaine.
On the tape, Mr. Morin is heard insisting he is meeting to thwart foreign interference in the PQ, not to assist Ottawa.
“Maybe I’ll become a Parti Québécois minister,” Mr. Morin said on the tape, “and then, some years later, I don’t know, even if Quebec was independent, something happens on the federal side and then (inaudible) because my name will come out, will I have to testify?”
The Mounties too were secretly recording. A former officer, Gilbert Albert, later revealed he was tasked to hide video equipment ahead of a meeting at Quebec City’s Le Concorde hotel.
“We wanted something in case this blew up in our faces... It was not blackmail, but a form of protection,” Mr. Albert told Montreal CKAC radio in 1992.
He said Mr. Morin didn’t appear to say anything of substance.
According to Mr. Morin, he received between $500 and $800 for each meeting, which took place every two months. Radio-Canada reported he got as much as $6,000 a month. He said he gave the money to charity or donated it to the party.
Mr. Morin said he informed Mr. Lévesque of his activities in 1975, but the PQ leader didn’t take it very seriously.
Mr. Morin also looped in PQ justice minister Marc-André Bédard in early 1977.
Mr. Bédard didn’t approve that his colleague had accepted money, but he suggested Mr. Morin meet the Mounties a few more times to find out their targets before cutting off all contacts.
The story took even more bizarre twists in 1981.
The Quebec government kept a bureau in Ottawa. Its director, Loraine Lagacé, got the newly released report of the McDonald inquiry into illegal RCMP activities.
Ms. Lagacé said that someone had underlined a passage in the copy that she received – to draw her attention to a part that said the RCMP had paid sources within the PQ.
She said that during a conversation she later had with Mr. Morin, the minister let it slip that he was one of those sources.
Ms. Lagacé said she went to inform the premier and Mr. Lévesque turned pale and slumped forward, clutching his chest.
At a second meeting between Ms. Lagacé and Mr. Morin, she said she goaded him into admitting the whole thing again while she covertly recorded him.
There is still disagreement about when in the fall of 1981 Mr. Lévesque fully understood what Mr. Morin had done.
Some accounts say this only unfolded after the November conference when the other premiers cobbled a deal without Quebec.
Others say it happened the month before, suggesting that Mr. Lévesque went into the meeting knowing that his adviser had been an informant.
In any case, according to Mr. Lévesque’s chief of staff, Jean-Roch Boivin, the premier decided that Mr. Morin had to resign.