Rodrigue Biron (born September 8, 1934) is a politician in

Quebec Quebec ( ; )According to the Canadian government, ''Québec'' (with the acute accent) is the official name in Canadian French and ''Quebec'' (without the accent) is the province's official name in Canadian English is one of the thirtee ...

, Canada. He was leader of the Union Nationale political party from 1976 to 1980, when he joined the

Parti Québécois The Parti Québécois (; ; PQ) is a sovereignist and social democratic provincial political party in Quebec, Canada. The PQ advocates national sovereignty for Quebec involving independence of the province of Quebec from Canada and establishin ...

(PQ). He served as Minister of Industry, Commerce and Tourism in the PQ government.

Background

Biron was manager of his family’s sewer pipe factory in

Sainte-Croix, Quebec Sainte-Croix is a municipality in and the seat of the Municipalité régionale de comté de Lotbinière in Quebec, Canada. It is part of the Chaudière-Appalaches region and the population is 2,433 as of 2009. The new constitution dates from 20 ...

. He and his wife Huguette Dionne have had three children. His father Paul ran as the Liberal candidate for Lotbinière in the 1958 federal election. Biron's late brother Paul Jr. (1933-2015) was a

perennial candidate A perennial candidate is a political candidate who frequently runs for elected office and rarely, if ever, wins. Perennial candidates' existence lies in the fact that in some countries, there are no laws that limit a number of times a person can ...

in provincial politics who has run under different labels including Parti Québécois in the Lévis in

1970 Events January * January 1 – Unix time epoch reached at 00:00:00 UTC. * January 5 – The 7.1 Tonghai earthquake shakes Tonghai County, Yunnan province, China, with a maximum Mercalli intensity scale, Mercalli intensity of X (''Extrem ...

and Parti démocratie chrétienne du Québec, which was renamed

Parti Unité Nationale The (National Unity Party), formerly the (Christian Democracy Party of Quebec), was a social conservative political party in Quebec, Canada. It was founded in 2000 by Roman Catholics associated with the Centre d’Information nationale Robert ...

in 2012. Prior to entering provincial politics, Rodrigue Biron had been a card-carrying supporter of the

Liberal Party of Quebec The Quebec Liberal Party (QLP; french: Parti libéral du Québec, PLQ) is a provincial political party in Quebec. It has been independent of the federal Liberal Party of Canada since 1955. The QLP has always been associated with the colour red; e ...

. He also served as Chair of the federal Liberal Association for Lotbinière in 1962.

Mayor

Biron served as Mayor of the Town of Sainte-Croix, Quebec, from 1971 to 1973.

Member of the legislature

He became the leader of the conservative Union Nationale (UN) party on May 23, 1976. The UN had once dominated Quebec provincial politics, but in the 1973 election, it lost all of the seats that it had held in the previous National Assembly. However, the party returned to the

National Assembly of Quebec The National Assembly of Quebec (officially in french: link=no, Assemblée nationale du Québec) is the legislative body of the province of Quebec in Canada. Legislators are called MNAs (Members of the National Assembly; french: link=no, déput ...

by winning a

by-election A by-election, also known as a special election in the United States and the Philippines, a bye-election in Ireland, a bypoll in India, or a Zimni election (Urdu: ضمنی انتخاب, supplementary election) in Pakistan, is an election used to f ...

in 1974. Biron led the party to a modest comeback in the 1976 election, winning 11 seats. The party won one

anglophone Speakers of English are also known as Anglophones, and the countries where English is natively spoken by the majority of the population are termed the ''Anglosphere''. Over two billion people speak English , making English the largest language ...

riding, where UN candidate William Shaw was elected capitalizing on discontent with

Bill 22 The ''Official Language Act'' of 1974 (french: Loi sur la langue officielle), also known as Bill 22, was an act of the National Assembly of Quebec, commissioned by Premier Robert Bourassa, which made French the sole official language of Quebec, ...

language legislation passed by the Liberal government of

Robert Bourassa Robert Bourassa (; July 14, 1933 – October 2, 1996) was a Canadian lawyer and politician who served as the 22nd premier of Quebec from 1970 to 1976 and from 1985 to 1994. A member of the Liberal Party of Quebec, he served a total of just un ...

. The 1976 election had been won by the sovereigntist PQ, however, and the

nationalist Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the state. As a movement, nationalism tends to promote the interests of a particular nation (as in a group of people), Smith, Anthony. ''Nationalism: The ...

vote on which the UN had counted for support gravitated toward that party. Biron resigned as Union Nationale leader on March 3, 1980, campaigned in favor of the Yes side in the

1980 Quebec referendum The 1980 Quebec independence referendum was the first referendum in Quebec on the place of Quebec within Canada and whether Quebec should pursue a path toward sovereignty. The referendum was called by Quebec's Parti Québécois (PQ) government, whi ...

on sovereignty and joined the PQ on November 11 of that year. In the 1981 election, he was elected as a PQ member of the National Assembly, and served as Minister of Industry, Commerce and Tourism. Meanwhile, his former party, the Union Nationale, was again wiped out in the 1981 election, this time for good—the party never won another seat, and eventually ceased to exist. The PQ lost the 1985 election, and Biron lost his seat.

Federal politics

In 1997, he unsuccessfully ran for the leadership of the

Bloc Québécois The Bloc Québécois (BQ; , "Québécois people, Quebecer Voting bloc, Bloc") is a list of federal political parties in Canada, federal political party in Canada devoted to Quebec nationalism and the promotion of Quebec sovereignty movement, Que ...

, a federal (Canadian) sovereigntist party. When Preston Manning wanted to form the

United Alternative The Unite the Right movement was a successful Canadian political movement which existed from around the mid-1990s to 2003. The movement came into being when it became clear that neither of Canada's two main right-of-centre political parties, the ...

, he recruited Biron to the steering committee.

Footnotes

External links