Camille Laurin
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dr. Camille Laurin (May 6, 1922 - March 11, 1999) was a psychiatrist and Parti Québécois (PQ) politician in the Province of Quebec, Canada. He was known as the father of Quebec's language law.
[edit] Biography
Born in Charlemagne, Quebec, Laurin obtained a degree in psychiatry from the Université de Montréal where he came under the influence of the Roman Catholic priest, Lionel Groulx. After earning his degree, Laurin emigrated to Boston, Massachusetts where he worked at the Boston State Hospital. Following a stint in Paris, France, in 1957, he returned to practice in Quebec. In 1961, he authored the preface of the book Les fous crient au secours (The crazies are crying for help), which described the conditions of psychiatric hospitals of the time.
He was one of the early founders of the Quebec sovereignty movement, seeing independence from Canada as a necessary collective psychotherapy to treat the inferiority complex of the Québécois. As a senior cabinet minister in the first PQ government elected in the 1976 Quebec election, he was the guiding force behind the Bill 101, the legislation that placed restrictions on the use of english and established French as the only official language in Quebec. Premier René Lévesque later defended the law, but was initially reluctant to it in private. Lévesque called it a "necessary humiliation" because having to legislate the status of the language of the majority showed the "colonial situation" of Quebec.
Laurin resigned from his cabinet position on November 26, 1984 because of a disagreement with Lévesque on the future of the sovereignty movement. He resigned from his seat in the National Assembly on January 25, 1985. He was elected once again to the Assembly on September 12, 1994 but did not run in the 1998 election because of health reasons.
In 1996 Marie-Pascale Laurin, one of his two daughters, was arrested on charges of drug trafficking in heroin. Camille Laurin died in 1999 after a long battle with cancer.
