Fabien Roy

Fabien Roy (born April 17, 1928) was a politician in Quebec, Canada, in the 1970s. Roy was elected to the National Assembly of Quebec and the Canadian House of Commons, and advocated social credit theories of monetary reform.

Background

Roy was born in Saint-Prosper, Quebec. He studied accounting, sales management, and human resources in the Saint-Georges seminary, and commercial law, political economy and business administration at Université Laval. In 1980, following his departure from politics, he studied property valuation.

He was an accountant for the Saint-Propser agricultural co-operative from 1945 to 1949, and secretary of the Federation of Co-operative Trucking (Quebec South district) from 1949–1952, and for the Sherbrooke district from 1952-1953. He founded the F. Roy Transports trucking company, which he ran from 1953-1962.

He was Director-General of a credit union in La Chaudière from 1962 to 1970, and member of the administrative and executive councils of a Quebec credit union federation (Fédération des caisses d'établissement du Québec) from 1968 to 1970. In 1970, he was director of recruitment and sales for the federation. In 1960, he co-founded the Saint-Prosper Chamber of Commerce, and became president in 1963.

Social Credit activist

From 1962 to 1968, he was president of the Dorchester riding federal Ralliement créditiste association, and regional organizer for the party in the 1962, 1963, 1965 and 1968 federal elections.

From 1964 to 1965, he was provincial vice-president of the party.

Member of the legislature

He was elected to the Quebec National Assembly for Beauce riding in 1970, and held the post of chief whip of the Ralliement créditiste du Québec caucus from 1970 to 1972.

He was parliamentary leader of the party from 1972 to 1975, and lost a bid to become leader at a February 1973 leadership convention. In the 1973 provincial election, he was returned to the National Assembly for the riding of Beauce-Sud.

He was president of the party from 1973–1974, but was expelled on November 3, 1975. He founded the Parti national populaire with former Liberal cabinet minister Jérôme Choquette on December 14, 1975, and was re-elected in the 1976 provincial election as the only PNP Member of the National Assembly.

Federal politics

He was appointed leader of the federal Social Credit Party of Canada on March 30, 1979, and resigned his National Assembly seat on April 5, 1979.

Under Roy, the party won the tacit support of the sovereigntist Parti Québécois, which formed the government of Quebec. Social Credit attempted to rally the separatist and nationalist vote: Canadian flags were absent at its campaign kick-off rally, and the party's slogan was C'est à notre tour ("It's our turn"), which was reminiscent of the popular separatist anthem Gens du pays that includes the chorus, "C'est à votre tour de vous laisser parler d'amour" (It's your turn to talk about love). The party focused its platform on constitutional change, promising to fight to abolish the federal government's rarely-used right to disallow any provincial legislation, and stating that each province has a "right to choose its own destiny within Canada". Despite these attempts to win nationalist and separatist votes, the party was reduced to six seats in the 1979 federal election. Roy himself was elected from Beauce in eastern Quebec.

While his party provided some support to the minority Progressive Conservative Party of Canada government, Prime Minister Joe Clark was unwilling to reciprocate. He refused to recognize the Socreds as an official party (they had half the seats required for official status in the Commons) or form a coalition with them. When the PC government presented its December budget which included a controversial gas tax opposed by the Liberals and NDP, the Socreds demanded that the gas tax revenues be allocated to Quebec which Clark turned down. In reaction, when the NDP attached a rider to the budget bill declaring that "this House has lost confidence in the government," the Socred caucus abstained on the vote to adopt the amendment, which led to the defeat of the Clark government and an election on February 18, 1980.

The abstention by Social Credit on this important vote contributed to the growing perception that the party had become irrelevant following the death of iconic leader Réal Caouette four years earlier Roy and all other Socred candidates were defeated in the 1980 federal election. The death of the Social Credit candidate in the riding of Frontenac, Quebec resulted in the postponement of the election in that riding to March 24. Roy sought to return to the House of Commons in the by-election, but lost to the Liberal candidate. Social Credit would never come within sight of winning a seat in the Commons again. Roy resigned from the leadership on November 1, 1980.

Retirement

Roy returned to business and community involvement, serving as director of Geoffrion Leclerc from 1981–1988, director of a community college (Cégep de Lévis-Lauzon) from 1984–1985, member of the Beauce economic council from 1981, as well as participating in Rotary Club activities and local celebrations.

He published his autobiography (Député à Québec et à Ottawa—mais toujours Beauceron !, ISBN 2-89448-421-6) in 2005.

See also

• National Assembly of Quebec
• List of third party leaders (Quebec)
• History of Quebec

External links

• "Biography". Dictionnaire des parlementaires du Québec de 1792 à nos jours (in French). National Assembly of Quebec. 
• Fabien Roy – Parliament of Canada biography