Dr. Camille Laurin (May 6, 1922 - March 11, 1999) was a psychiatrist and Parti Québécois (PQ) politician in the Province of Quebec, Canada. He was known as the father of Quebec's language law.
Biography
Born in Charlemagne, Quebec, Laurin obtained a degree in psychiatry from the Université de Montréal where he came under the influence of the Roman Catholic priest, Lionel Groulx. After earning his degree, Laurin emigrated to Boston, Massachusetts where he worked at the Boston State Hospital . Following a stint in Paris, France, in 1957, he returned to practice in Quebec.
He was one of the early founders of the Quebec sovereignty movement, seeing independence from Canada as a necessary collective psychotherapy to treat the inferiority complex of the Quebecois. As a senior cabinet minister in the first PQ government elected in the 1976 Quebec election, he was the guiding force behind the Bill 101, the legislation that established French as the only official language in Quebec. Premier René Lévesque later defended the law, but was initially reluctant to it in private. Lévesque called it a "necessary humiliation" because having to legislate the status of the language of the majority showed the "colonial situation" of Quebec.
Following the defeat of his government in the 1985 Quebec election, he left politics in January of 1986. Tragedy struck in 1996 when Marie-Pascale Laurin, one of his two daughters, was arrested on charges of drug trafficking in heroin. Camille Laurin passed away in 1999 after a long battle with cancer.
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