TORONTO, March 12, 2001 – If you were in a coma for the next 20 years and woke to find a former separatist leader had become prime minister of Canada, wouldn’t you want to know what happened?

York University history professor Paul Stevens might have some answers. Stevens’ work on a new biography of Canada’s first French Canadian Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier unearths documents previously believed to have been destroyed by fire that show Laurier was originally opposed to confederation and wanted a free and separate government in Quebec.

"Laurier was advocating what we would characterize today as sovereignty," says Stevens, who will deliver a special lecture on his findings on Wednesday, March 14, sponsored by the Vanier College Fellows lecture series. He says his discovery of a complete run of Le Défricheur, the newspaper Laurier edited in the 1860s around the time of confederation, reveals a different aspect of the man documented in all previous historical writings on Laurier, warranting a new look at his political career. Stevens has also discovered a collection of letters Laurier had written to his wife Zoe Lafontaine.

"They were closeted away in the Laurier museum in Athabaska and it took me one year to negotiate their release from the government of Quebec," says Stevens, noting that political biographers in Canada have seldom assessed the role of political wives in the making of Canadian history.

"Laurier’s wife had an enormous influence on him, particularly in tempering his anger with the Roman Catholic clergy in Quebec," says Stevens. He says Laurier’s decision to abandon the editorship of Le Défricheur was the result of Zoe’s influence, as was his decision to resign from the Institut canadien, an organization of prominent members of the radical liberal community in the decade prior to confederation.

Stevens will present his findings at 4:30 p.m. in the Vanier Senior Common Room, 010 Vanier College, York University, Keele Campus, 4700 Keele St.

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For more information, please contact:

Paul Stevens
Dept. of History
York University
(416) 736-2100, ext. 66973

Susan Bigelow
Media Relations
York University
(416) 736-2100, ext. 22091
sbigelow@yorku.ca
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