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Did the introduction of the Charter of Quebec Values in September 2013 signal a repudiation of Quebec's longstanding consensus on liberal-pluralism in its dominant integration model? While the Charter died as a result of the election defeat of the minority Parti Québécois government in May, 2014, its salience and impact continues to be felt, in that it has moved the normative benchmarks around ethnocultural and ethno-religious diversity and represents a qualitatively new framework for regulating the terms of belonging in Quebec. This paper, however, contends that such a reading of the legacy of the Charter misses a significant part of the story. A broader contextual overview reveals that recent events in Quebec are conditioned by variables associated with the unfinished nature of a constitutive project for national integration. Regardless of whether or not the proposed Charter signaled a permanent normative turn in Quebec, or merely an intensification and greater polarization of an interminable argument, this paper will attempt to provide some context with which to interpret this 'trial balloon' of the minority Parti Québécois government in power from 2012-2014. I argue that this short-lived incursion into more exclusionary politics are the direct result of a variety of factors that go beyond standard normative principles usually attributed to citizenship and actually reflect structural difficulties associated with Quebec's status as an unrecognized minority nation. The article will proceed to highlight the primary identity-forging initiatives undertaken by Quebec in lieu of citizenship, and conclude with some reflections on some distortions that may be attributable to a protracted, frustrated and unfinished constitutive journey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the determinants of ethno-religious intermarriage in Quebec over a century as an indication of integration in a province where minority/majority relations are distinct from the rest of Canada. Drawing on previous work by Kalmijn and others outside of Canada, we distinguish between cultural preferences and structural factors and continue a long tradition of such studies within Canada by using the manuscript censuses. We use data from 1881 (entire census), 1911 and 1941 censuses (newly available CCRI samples), to examine ethno-religious intermarriage among couples who were married at the time of the census for three successive generations thirty years apart. Using multilevel analysis we try to distinguish between the role of individual level determinants such as the ethno-religious identity, knowledge of French and English, level of education and immigrant status as well as characteristics of the areas in which these couples lived, such as type of milieu (rural and urban), sex ratio and degree of cultural diversity, separately for men and women. We confirm the importance of contextual variables both on their own and in addition to spouses' characteristics. The models are relatively stable over the entire period and point to the importance of structural factors as well as the ethnic diversity of the area at the contextual level; cultural preferences also play a role, most especially among the Jewish. British Catholics (mostly Irish) show a particularly high propensity to marry across language and religious lines, reflecting their special position in Quebec society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]