Longtime Quebec Liberal John Ciaccia dies at 85

“He greatly contributed to moving Quebec forward,” Couillard said, noting separately at a public event later in the day they had each represented Mont-Royal. “My deepest condolences to his family, friends and loved ones.”

The federalist politician was an influential minister under Liberal premiers Robert Bourassa and Daniel Johnson Jr., holding various portfolios over the years and actively campaigning on the “No” side in both the 1980 and 1995 referendums.

Ciaccia was born Giambattista Nicola Ciaccia in Jelsi in Italy in 1933 and arrived in Canada via Ellis Island when he was just four years old.

He studied at McGill University and was admitted to the Quebec bar in 1957. He practised law before becoming a senior federal civil servant in 1971, serving as Jean Chretien’s deputy minister when the future prime minister headed the federal Indian Affairs Department in the early 1970s.

Not long after he was first elected to the Quebec national assembly, Ciaccia was suspended from the Liberal caucus for nearly two months in 1974 — the year the Bourassa government passed Bill 22 enshrining French as the official language of Quebec.

In July of that year, Ciaccia and fellow Liberal George Springate joined the Opposition in voting against the bill, which passed by a 92-10 margin.

Ciaccia was known for his involvement in native affairs: in 1975, he was Bourassa’s representative in the negotiations for what would become known as the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, whih was signed with the Cree and the Inuit.

Later, he found himself at the centre of the storm during the Oka Crisis in 1990 when, on July 11, gunfire between provincial police and natives defending a small stand of pine trees resulted in the death of officer Marcel Lemay and sparked a 78-day showdown.

Ciaccia was at odds with his own government and provincial police as he scrambled to broker a deal and prevent further bloodshed. That breakthrough would come in September, at the end of a tense summer with the Canadian Forces also involved.

Ciaccia was shuffled out of his portfolio the following month.

A decade after the Oka Crisis, Ciaccia published a personal memoir called, “The Oka Crisis: A Mirror of the Soul.”

”The Oka Crisis was probably the most difficult moment that I went through, and the referendum of 1995 was a close call,” he recalled upon announcing his retirement in 1998 as the longest-tenured assembly member at the time.

In 2015, he published a book describing what drew him into politics: “Call Me Giambattista: A Personal and Political Journey.”

Ciaccia was one of the first minority members of Quebec’s legislature and detailed in his memoir that he adopted the name John in response to the abuse and hostility he faced after Canada declared war on Italy during the Second World War. He wrote that the childhood experience had a profound effect on his future career.

Another current Liberal of Italian descent, Rita De Santis, described Ciaccia as a builder of modern Quebec who was equally proud of being a Quebecer and Canadian of Italian origin.

“We will miss you, John,” De Santis wrote in a social media post. “Thank you for having shared your dreams and aspirations with us.”

Sidhartha Banerjee, The Canadian Press

by Canadian Press

Longtime Quebec Liberal John Ciaccia dies at 85

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