Today we'll be discussing part one of the champions, which is called Unlikely Warriors.

And I just have a few top line remarks about why I think the subject matter is so particularly well suited to a documentary format

and to the particular structure that this documentary takes on, where it's using two figures to tell its story.

And I think this was something that the

director, writer, and narrator, Donald Brutain himself was very aware of. What we see near the

beginning of this film is the respective beginnings of Trudeau and Lavec. Trudeau, needless to say,

right, Canadian Prime Minister from 1968, with one short interlude until 1984,

René Levick, popular broadcaster, enters politics as a Quebec liberal in the 1960s,

the Quebec Liberal Party being distinct from the Federal Liberal Party, that's important to know,

grows disillusioned after being a minister in that government. Eventually,

helps found the Partique Quebecois, which to this day is one of Quebec's major political parties,

and in 1976, becomes Premier of Quebec and leads the province into its 1980 referendum,

in which the no side defeated Quebec and the Sovereignty by a quite significant margin.

So these are two very consequential figures in Canadian politics. And as we see at the beginning of the film,

not only do they share a lot of parallels in terms of their respective trajectories, but as the film, I think,

conveys very nicely, post-war Quebec, which, you know, before the quiet revolution,

which begins in 1960, is dominated by the Duplice regime, which is incredibly corrupt,

which is quasi-theocratic, which controls most institutions in the province, and which is

nationalist, but in this way that is very regressive.

The first real champion of Quebec labor was 31-year-old Jean Marchand.

The French-Canadian worker was still locked in 19th century servitude by Big Business, the Church, and Maurice de Pleissie's goon squads.

Marchand needed any friend he could find.

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