An Option for Quebec

An Option for Quebec (French: Option Québec) is an essay by former Premier of Quebec René Lévesque published in 1968. The essay presents the constitutional proposal of a group of progressive liberals who, after leaving the Liberal Party of Quebec, formed the Sovereignty-Association Movement.

On September 18, 1967, René Lévesque proposed to the members of the Laurier riding's Liberal Association, the adoption of a resolution he wished to present to the Congress of the Quebec Liberal Federation planned for October 1967. The text he wrote and which was the basis of his speech that day was entitled Un pays qu'il faut faire ("A Country That Must be Made"). That text was to form the first part of An Option for Quebec, published in its French edition a few months later, on January 6, 1968.

On October 14, 1967, René Lévesque left the Congress of the Quebec Liberal Federation and announced in a press conference held at Clarendon Hotel that he had quit the Liberal Party of Quebec and was from now on to sit as an independent member in the Parliament of Quebec. He cited as his reason for leaving the fact that his party had refused to even debate his proposal regarding the constitutional future of Quebec.

On November 18 and 19 1967, some 400 militants participated to the founding meeting of the Sovereignty-Association Movement, which was held at the Couvent Saint-Albert-le-Grand on Chemin de la Côte-Sainte-Catherine in Montreal. After a merger with the Ralliement national led by Gilles Grégoire, the Sovereignty-Association Movement founded a new provincial political party, the Parti Québécois, which placed René Lévesque's Sovereignty-Association idea at the heart of its program. René Lévesque was elected leader of this new party on October 14, 1968.