March 28th 2025,

We are reaching the end of the semester!

My Canadian class was canceled so there were video lectures again. A lot of it had to do with referendums, I will try to make this interesting but don’t hold your breath, feel free to skip through. In 1980 the Parti Quebecois (nationalist party in Quebec) announced a sovereignty association referendum, Quebec was to be recognized as politically independent but economically association with the rest of Canada would be negotiated. Trudeau wanted to move forward with the charter that gave language rights and widening guarantees, but Quebec wanted to discuss the division of powers first and then everything else could come after. Ryan, a liberal and Quebec nationalist, wanted decentralized powers but needed the charismatic Trudeau on his side. Trudeau proposed New Federalism but did not clarify what this even meant.

The 1981 Federal provincial Conference, some provinces were wavering in their resolve against the Federal strategy paper which argued that if the premiers were bad then the Prime Minister could move forward with whatever. This was a challenge to regionalism, and while New Brunswick and Ontario approved, the “Gang of Eight” did not. But like I said, members of the gang were wavering in standing against this. Lévesque of Quebec wanted the negotiations to fail but Trudeau was able to turn the other seven members against Lévesque. Quebec saw this as a huge betrayal and it would be called the “night of the long knives.” I don’t know what else to tell you regarding that name choice. Anyway, Trudeau’s legacy was recapped but none of his issues with Indigenous people was brought up. At all.

The last of the video lectures was about the Shamrock Summit of 1985, where Ronald Reagan was invited to Quebec City for St. Patrick’s day. Apparently this was a huge embarrassment as the new Prime Minister, Mulroney, did a lot of stupid shit in public like awkwardly singing karaoke. During this time Mulroney discussed some important issues with Reagan: the environment and defense. Acid rain was a huge concern for Canadians and if the US wanted to continue with this relationship the there needed to be some give regarding factory pollution, so a task force was created and it found great success. Apparently Mulroney had to be very careful when explaining the concept of acid rain and its distribution to Reagan as he was clueless to this and could take offence to be blamed for environmental destruction.

There were also concerns over the DEW (Defense Early Warning) Line on the tip of the north, systems put in place for NORAD needed refurbishing. Mulroney wanted Canada to be a good ally for the US. The Strategic Defense Initiative was fought up, where Reagan upped the stales during the Cold War by introducing “Star Wars,” which was a way to shoot down incoming weapons, this would be done from space. Mulroney was cautious as Canadians did not like this plan at all. In the end Star Wars did not work and Mulroney kept Canada as an ally without having to share the costs of SDI.

Now we can get into Haiti for real. Saint-Domingue was the “jewel” of the French Empire as it produced lucrative goods like coffee, sugar, and rum. Demographically it consisted of 40,000 white residents which were separated into different categories: grand Blancs (large planters), colonial administrators, merchants, and petite blancs (poor whites). There were also 28,000 Free People Of Colour, which included mixed-race “mulattos” and “affranchi”/freed black people like Toussaint-L’Ouverture. Many mixed-race residents wanted equal social and political rights with whites but not an end to enslavement of black people that were below them (racialized hierarchy, some Free People of Colour owned slaves). The largest demographic was, of course, black slaves who made up 500,000 of the population. Around 100,000 were domestic slaves while the rest were field slaves who were often worked to death.

1790, was i a milestone for liberty or maximum level exploitation? Well, there were actually more slaves imported into Saint-Domingue from 1785-1790, than to North America and the British Caribbean combined. The largest number of slaves shipped in a single year were done so underneath the French flag. A total of 54,403 slaves, 161 voyages, were taken in 1790 by the French. We shod us a website that visualized the amount of ships that were carrying slaves in every year. Each ship was colour-coded to show which country they were from and during those years stated before, most of the dots were blue (French). She then covered the slave economy, where it was. more “lucrative” to work a slave to death than to allow them to reproduce because they would get “replacements” from Africa. All of this would lead to a rebellion because people had already known freedom before being kidnapped and due to the fact that they were going to die anyway, why not die trying.

We ended the lecture with the “Le Code Noir,” which is what governed the colonies. It dictated that l slaves must be instructed in Catholicism, Lavern was passed down through the mother, slaves had no rights (beaten and killed with impunity, but owners were “encouraged” to take care of the old and sick), and they were banned from holding property or learning to read. She gave us an ate from the Governor of Martinique who states that “the safety of whites demands that we keep the (slur) in the most profound ignorance.”

I had no more work placement classes as our supervisor wanted us to have time to finish up our school assignments and he did not have much else to tell us regarding the agency.