He played a critical role in the October Crisis of 1970 in which his colleague Pierre Laporte was murdered. It was Bourassa who pushed Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to call in the army. After Laporte's kidnapping Bourassa barricaded himself and his cabinet behind heavy layers of security. He lost the 1976 Quebec election to René Lévesque and resigned the Liberal Party leadership, accepting teaching positions in Europe and the United States, but subsequently returned to politics as Liberal leader on October 15 1983 and regained the office of Premier in 1985.

During his time in power he pursued policies such as language laws. In his first term, he introduced Bill 22 in 1974, the first legislation designed to strengthen the position of French within Quebec. However, this legislation was soon superseded by the Charter of the French Language also known as Bill 101, introduced by the Parti Québécois government that replaced him in 1976. In his second term, he invoked the notwithstanding clause of the Canadian constitution to overrule a Supreme Court ruling that declared parts of Bill 101 unconstitutional, causing some English-speakers ministers in his government to resign. A few years later, however, he introduced compromise modifications to Bill 101, and with this the language controversies of the previous decades softened as the majority of Quebecers reached a consensus on accepting the new status quo.

Bourassa also pushed for Quebec to be acknowledged as a distinct society, promising Quebecers that their grievances could be resolved within Canada with a new constitutional deal. Early in his first term he participated in an early attempt at constitutional reform, the Victoria Charter of 1971, which quickly unraveled. In his second term, he worked closely with federal Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and received many concessions from the federal government, culminating in the Meech Lake Accord and the Charlottetown Accord. When both of these accords failed to be ratified, the constitutional reform efforts collapsed, reviving the separatist movement.

The Bourassa government also played a major role in rescuing the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal from the huge cost overruns and construction delays incurred by the mismanagement of the project by mayor Drapeau's administration.

Bourassa, not in great health and quite unpopular, retired from politics in 1994 and was replaced by Daniel Johnson, Jr, who quickly lost an election to the separatist Parti Québécois.

He died in 1996 in Montreal of skin cancer.

External links

• National Assembly biography (in French)