Francis Daniel Johnson Sr. (April 9, 1915 – September 26, 1968) was a Canadian politician and the 20th premier of Quebec from 1966 until his death in 1968.
Leader of the traditionalist wing of the Union Nationale turned defender of the expanding welfare state, Daniel Johnson was a major figure of two epochs that mark Quebec's modern history: the Great Darkness and the Quiet Revolution.
Elected at the age of 31 as the Member of the Legislative Assembly for the provincial riding of Bagot in 1946, Johnson quickly became the figurehead of the up-and-coming generation within his aging party, the Union Nationale. After having served in multiple different roles under Maurice Duplessis's government, including as parliamentary secretary to Duplessis himself and as deputy speaker of the Legislative Assembly, Johnson was appointed as the Minister of Hydraulic Resources in 1958. During his time as minister, he most notably launched the construction of the Manic-5 dam. He became the leader of Union Nationale in 1961 and consequently became the leader of the official opposition to Jean Lesage's ruling Liberal Party. He would occupy this role for an additional five years after failing to win the 1962 election.
The Union Nationale was finally returned to power in the 1966 election, making Johnson the 20th premier of Quebec. However, the party that would now go on to form a majority government bore little resemblance to the one of Maurice Duplessis, having broken with its traditional anti-statism and anti-intellectualism under Johnson's leadership. His administration was also the first in Quebec history to open up the door to Quebec separatism, while still not explicitly endorsing it. During Johnson's premiership, Quebec's relationship with France underwent a rapprochement due to his close collaboration with the French president, Charles de Gaulle, who visited Quebec in 1967 at Premier Johnson's behest, whereupon de Gaulle gave his Vive le Québec libre speech.
In September 1968, while still in the midst of his reforms in health, education, the economy, and the constitution, Johnson died in office following a heart attack. He is the father of Pierre Marc Johnson and Daniel Johnson Jr., who each later briefly served as premier of Quebec, with Pierre Marc heading the Parti Québécois and Daniel Jr. heading the rival Quebec Liberal Party.
Background
Johnson was born in the town of Danville, located in the Eastern Townships region of Quebec. He was the eldest son of Francis Johnson, an anglophone labourer of Irish heritage, and Marie-Adéline Daniel, a French Canadian. He was raised bilingually but educated entirely in French.
His father, Francis, was politically active in the Conservative Party of Quebec, which at the time was the opposition party to the governing Liberal Party of Quebec. However, due to rampant patronage, this support cost Francis his job and prevented him from receiving social welfare assistance. As a result, he was reduced to scrounging together what odd jobs he could find in order to make ends meet. With eight children to feed, this precarity put the family under great financial strain. Despite the environment of familial solidarity and religious piety that Daniel Johnson grew up in, the poverty and deprivations of his youth would leave a lasting imprint.
Education
In 1928, Daniel Johnson started high school at Collège Antoine-Girouard in Saint-Hyacinthe. Johnson nearly quit politics altogether, going so far as to hand in his resignation to Maurice Duplessis. However, Duplessis refused to accept the resignation and instead decided to take the budding representative under his wing, appointing Johnson as his parliamentary secretary and using his considerable influence to stifle news about the incident, including the publication of his wife's name, so as to preserve Johnson's reputation. Two years later, on December 15, 1955, Johnson became the new deputy speaker of the Legislative Assembly. This strategic position allowed him to deepen his understanding of the internal workings of the government machine; being responsible for the smooth running of parliamentary debates, he was given permission to peruse the contents of each ministry's budgets in detail. After three years in the position, Johnson had become a master in parliamentary procedure, much like Duplessis himself.
Despite the double hit of the party's overall poor performance and the natural gas scandal, Daniel Johnson was re-elected as the MLA for Bagot. With Barrette having resigned, he began to eye the leadership of the Union Nationale for himself. However, he soon became embroiled in yet another controversy, when, in November 1960, he accused the Liberals of creating counterfeit banknotes during the last election campaign, with the aim of buying votes and manipulating the outcome of the election. and further tarnished his reputation. It also inspired caricaturist Normand Hudon to create a new character, referencing Johnson's Irish heritage, named Danny Boy, "a cowboy with the appearance of a gruff bandit, armed with a lasso and revolvers, firing in all directions." This caricature would go on to haunt Daniel Johnson for years to come, and the hit to him and his party's reputation would have the immediate effect of the loss of two seats, Joliette and Rouville, to the Liberal Party in by-elections.
Leader of the Union Nationale
In the leadership race for the Union Nationale, Daniel Johnson faced off against his increasingly influential rival, Jean-Jacques Bertrand. Bertrand embodied the more progressive, reformist wing of the party, with his reputation as a man of integrity and his nationalist rhetoric rallying a majority of young people. One of Bertrand's goals was to free the party from the chokehold of a clique of overly powerful senior party members, such as long-time treasurer Gérald Martineau and campaign organizer Joseph-Damase Bégin, who were resistant to the changes demanded by Quebec society.
Daniel Johnson, on the other hand, represented the more traditional, conservative wing of the party, advocating for the maintenance of the and the limiting of state power, especially in the realm of private enterprise. Johnson garnered support from the very clique that Bertrand was hell-bent on dismantling, including Martineau and Bégin themselves. However, wanting to avoid alienating Bertrand's faction and splitting the party, Johnson concentrated his attacks on the Liberal Party, employing a combative tone and style rivalling that of Duplessis. took place between Daniel Johnson and Jean Lesage, organized by Radio-Canada. Owing to a lack of preparation and a failure to adapt his style to this new medium, the debate left voters with a poor impression of Johnson, crushing hopes of a last-minute electoral boost in the remaining three days of the campaign. The Liberal Party was thus re-elected with 62 seats (56.4% of the vote), compared to the Union Nationale's 31 seats (42.15% of the vote). Johnson also demanded full recognition of the dual nature of Canada as two nations and two cultures, therefore rejecting the Fulton-Favreau formula supported by Lesage's Liberals. However, in 1965, the threat of separation was by and large a negotiation strategy to strengthen the province's position in the federation, with independence still being seen as a radical and improbable option.
By the end of the conference, the Union Nationale had developed a new platform that marked a clear break from the Duplessis era in its comparative affinity for state interventionism. Notably, they proposed repatriating all taxes to Quebec, creating new ministries for immigration, recreation, and economic planning, establishing a comprehensive universal healthcare plan, introducing free education at all levels, adopting an anti-scab law, creating a provincial industrial fund, and adopting a declaration of human rights. The Union Nationale thus emerged from the congress with both a new platform and a long-awaited original solution to the national question, which took into account the modern sensibilities of Quebec as well as its burgeoning nationalism. According to historian Pierre B. Berthelot, this constituted "the moment when the Union Nationale was won over by the Quiet Revolution and turned its back on the party's founder." The Union Nationale, meanwhile, opted for the exact opposite strategy, running a ground-level campaign that catered to specific local interests and highlighted local candidates who were usually well-known and respected within their community. This strategy worked particularly well in rural areas, where dissatisfaction with Lesage's school reforms, among other issues, was most intense.
The election was held on June 5, 1966. The initial results reported on election night gave the Liberal Party a significant lead, but gradually, aided by a favourable electoral map, This came at a time when Franco-Canadian relations were already strained, leading to further tension between Quebec and Ottawa. The fruit of the blossoming relationship between the two French-speaking nations was a visit, at Johnson's invitation, from de Gaulle to the province in July 1967 as part of Expo 67. This visit turned into a historic event when de Gaulle delivered a speech from Montreal City Hall that would go down in history, in which he exclaimed, "Vive le Québec libre!" (). who argued that international relations were the sole purview of the federal government, and that provinces did not have a right to attend international conferences even when it related to areas in their jurisdiction, such as education. In the lead up to the second part of the conference, which would take place in April in Paris, Pierre Trudeau, who was still Minister of Justice at the time, went as far as publicly threatening breaking off diplomatic relations with France if Quebec were to be invited a second time. In the end, Johnson's bet paid off, with Ambassador Léger soon being returned to Paris with nothing but a letter of protest in retaliation.
On September 25, Hydro-Québec organized a ceremony to mark the completion of the Manicouagan-5 Dam, which Johnson himself had launched as Minister of Hydraulic Resources in 1958. Hundreds of dignitaries, politicians, and journalists were flown out by plane from Montreal, Quebec City, and New York City to the worksite to attend a banquet and a plaque-unveiling ceremony.
Among the guests were Jean Lesage and René Lévesque, the former Minister of Hydraulic Resources under Lesage, who had been responsible for completing the nationalization of Hydro-Québec. Photographs taken at the banquet show the two men and the premier in jovial spirits, shaking hands and smiling, despite the difficult relations between Lesage and Lévesque, who had just recently defected to the Mouvement Souveraineté-Association, a precursor to the Parti Québécois. On September 26, 1969, a year to the day after Johnson's death, the new premier, Jean-Jacques Bertrand, accompanied by Johnson's widow and children, unveiled two plaques and officially dedicated the dam to his predecessor. Both plaques are now side by side at the top of the complex.
See also
- Politics of Quebec
- List of Quebec premiers
- List of Quebec general elections
- Nicknames of politicians and personalities in Quebec