Radio-Québec, or the Office de Radio-Télédiffusion du Québec, was founded by the Quebec government in 1969 as an educational television service. This meant that it was parallel, in some respects, to the Ontario Educational Communications Authority or to the “ETV” stations of the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States. It was also perceived (within Quebec) as an historic affirmation of Quebec's constitutional rights in the field of broadcasting.

In recording party preference and political attitudes, election surveys usually fail to measure the liked among what is disliked and the disliked among what is liked; they use a simple like-dislike continuum with exclusive polar opposites, the continuum that dominates Western thought, rather than less clear-cut models, such as those underlying Eastern ideologies in which the principles in opposition are normally intertwined.

Although there exists a respectable literature on political thought in Canada, relatively little of this work has been done by political theorists or philosophers. Much of the research has been carried out by historians, sociologists, or more recently by political scientists working with sociological conceptions such as “political culture.” But there is still a place in the study of Canadian political thought for one of the traditional tasks of political theory, the critical analysis of significant texts. This paper examines one such document, which deserves to be better known than it is, the “Declaration of the People of Rupert's Land and the North West,” of December 8, 1869. The text is presented in both English and French versions, the background of the document is briefly discussed, and its argument is analyzed at some length.