Former Parti Quebecois (PQ) minister Jacques-Yvan Morin died on July 26 at the age of 92.
According to the death notice published on Saturday, Morin "passed away peacefully at home."
Son of Arsène Morin, secretary to Honoré Mercier fils and descendant of patriot Augustin-Nobert Morin, Jacques-Yvan Morin was predestined for politics.
Before jumping into the arena, however, Morin was heading for a career as an intellectual in law. The Quebec City native studied at the Université de Montréal, McGill, Cambridge and Harvard, which led him to practise law for several years.
In 1958, at the age of 27, he entered the academic world, which he never really left since he returned to it after his stint in politics. Until 1973, he taught constitutional law at the Université de Montréal -- the place where he first began his political career.
In the early 1960s, he was approached by Michel Chartrand, who was involved in the Socialist Party at the time, to draft Quebec's first Charter of Human Rights.
"The text of the charter, which he said he had largely conceived, led him to publish an article on the subject in the McGill Law Review in 1963 -- a journal he had helped to create. His thinking was the 'kick-off' for the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms adopted in 1975," wrote lawyer Alain-Robert Nadeau in the 'Journal du Barreau' on the 25th anniversary of the Charter.
Speaking on the program 'Mémoires de députés' in 2010, Morin said he had been bit by the political bug during the debate on the Fulton-Favreau formula -- a constitutional amendment formula that did not give Quebec a veto in the event of an amendment to the Canadian Constitution.
"This formula, which blocked any development favourable to Quebec, seemed to me implausible at the height of the Quiet Revolution, when Quebec was seeking to obtain more powers," he confided in an interview with Le Devoir in 2014.
And it was the Fulton-Favreau formula that enabled him to meet his future boss, René Lévesque, who was a Liberal minister at the time.
In 1964, Morin took part in a debate on this issue, pitting him against none other than Lévesque and Pierre Laporte, who was also a minister.
"I was impressed, I'll tell you that much," he said with a broad smile on the program 'Mémoires de député.'
Like many notorious nationalists of the time, Morin did not call himself an independentist. It was the Estates General of French Canada, which he chaired from 1966 to 1969, that changed his mind.
He concluded at the time that "without sovereignty," there would be no negotiations to grant more powers to Quebec.
Morin ran for the first time in 1970 in a riding that was not very favourable for the Parti Québécois: Bourassa. Unsurprisingly, he was defeated in 1970, only to win three years later in Sauvé.
In 1973, the Parti Québécois was reduced to six members, and Morin became leader of the opposition in the national assembly.
Three years later, Quebec was plunged back into the electoral campaign that would lead to the PQ's historic victory.
"To be honest, we didn't expect it (...) Our expectations were more modest," he recounted on the program 'Mémoires de député'.
Morin was appointed Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education -- a ministry he chose because Lévesque had offered him either Education or Justice.
During his time in this ministry, Morin initiated a major reform of education and helped shape Bill 101 with his colleague Camille Laurin.
In 1980, at his own request, Jacques-Yvan Morin passed the education torch to Camille Laurin and moved to the Ministry of Cultural and Scientific Development -- which was responsible for applying the Charter of the French Language.
After the failure of the referendum on sovereignty and the re-election of the Parti Québécois in 1981, Morin remained Deputy Prime Minister and held the same ministry for a year before moving to Intergovernmental Affairs in 1982 -- in the midst of the repatriation of the Canadian Constitution.
During this tumultuous period for the Quebec government -- the PQ had just lost its referendum, and the Constitution had been repatriated without its agreement -- Morin tried to get Premier Lévesque to travel to showcase "Quebec's international personality."
In 1984, wanting to "move on," Morin decided to resign and return to university life. He admitted, however, that a number of events "hurried him along" -- including quarrels between his department and that of International Trade, headed at the time by Bernard Landry.
"In 1984, under insistent pressure from Landry, Intergovernmental Affairs was separated from International Relations, which led to the resignation of Jacques-Yvan Morin," wrote experts Stéphane Paquin and Annie Chaloux in an article published in Globe magazine in 2010.
The jurist thus returned to his first love: university teaching. He returned to the Université de Montréal, where he became professor emeritus in 1997, before leaving in 2000.
He then became involved with the Agence universitaire de la francophonie and the Appeal Tribunal of the Agence intergouvernementale de la francophonie.
Although Morin ended his political career in the 1980s, he often took a public stance on issues close to his heart: sovereignty and education.
In 2011, when three Parti Québécois MNAs slammed the party's door by challenging the leadership of then-leader Pauline Marois, a collective of authors -- including Morin -- encouraged sovereigntists to return to the fold.
"The party best positioned and organized to take power, defend Quebec's superior interests and lead it towards independence is the Parti Québécois," they said.
In 2012, during the major student strike, he wrote an open letter in the daily Le Devoir denouncing the increase in tuition fees.
"Given the current state of the Quebec economy, a constructive approach would be to freeze tuition fees. Our society's educational needs are hardly any less than they were at the time of the Quiet Revolution. We must, therefore, also think about improving the system of bursary loans," he wrote.
"During my time as minister, the René Lévesque government increased scholarship loans by 50 per cent. It is measures of this kind that would allow the Quiet Revolution to continue, something that Quebec's youth badly need these days," he continued.
In 2015, he also got involved in the federal campaign that led to the coronation of Justin Trudeau's Liberals by encouraging Quebecers to vote for the Bloc Québécois in a letter signed by several long-standing sovereignists, including Jacques Lanctôt and Gérald Larose.
The author of numerous books on law, politics and education, Morin has received several awards during his lifetime. In 2000, he received the Droits et libertés award from the Commission des droits de la personne du Québec, and a year later, he was made a Grand Officer of the Ordre du Québec by PQ Premier Bernard Landry.
"Your career has unfolded on two levels of excellence: that of an eminent professor of international and constitutional law and that of a great servant of Quebec," Landry said when presenting him with the highest distinction of the Ordre du Québec.
In 2014, he also received the prize bearing the name of his former colleague, Jacques Parizeau, awarded by the Intellectuels pour la souveraineté. On that occasion, he reiterated that the idea of sovereignty was "not dying out."
"The Parti Québécois cannot continue to please everyone by advocating good government on the one hand and sovereignty on the other. It must first define its objective, which must be Quebec independence, and then find the means to achieve it," he told the daily Le Devoir.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on Aug. 12, 2023.
