Quebec premier Daniel Johnson Sr. died of a heart attack in the early hours of Sept. 26, 1968, at the Manic-5 dam site on the Manicouagan River, hours after presiding over a ceremony marking the completion of the massive hydroelectric project, according to the Canadian Museum of History and the Canadian Encyclopedia. He was 53.
Johnson, leader of the Union Nationale party, had been premier of Quebec since 1966, when his party unseated Jean Lesage’s Liberals. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, his government continued and even accelerated many of the changes associated with the Quiet Revolution, establishing the Université du Québec network and the Radio-Québec television service while holding the additional portfolios of natural resources and federal-provincial affairs. He had also become a prominent voice for Quebec’s constitutional demands, summed up in the title of his 1965 book, “Égalité ou indépendance” (Equality or Independence).
The dam that would eventually bear his name had its roots in an earlier chapter of his career. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, Johnson first championed the Manicouagan hydroelectric project in 1958 as a minister under premier Maurice Duplessis. Construction on the dam, an engineering landmark 214 metres high and 1,314 metres long, ran from 1959 to 1968. Built as a multiple-arch buttress structure with 14 buttresses and 13 arches, it remains the largest dam of its type in the world, a distinction widely cited in accounts of its history, including its Wikipedia entry.
On the evening of Sept. 25, 1968, hundreds of dignitaries gathered at the remote site, roughly 214 kilometres north of Baie-Comeau, for a banquet and plaque-unveiling ceremony celebrating the dam’s completion, according to the dam’s documented history. Johnson attended the festivities as premier before retiring for the night. He did not wake up. A Hydro-Québec executive at the scene, Robert A. Boyd, later recalled being roused before dawn and told simply that there was bad news, only to learn the premier had been found dead in his bed. The formal inauguration ceremony planned for that morning was cancelled.
Jean-Jacques Bertrand, who had served in Johnson’s cabinet, succeeded him as premier days later. Both the Canadian Encyclopedia and the dam’s documented history agree that Johnson’s fatal heart attack came overnight between Sept. 25 and 26, 1968, though neither source pins down the precise hour.
Exactly one year later, on Sept. 26, 1969, Bertrand returned to the Manicouagan site with Johnson’s widow, Reine Gagné, and the couple’s children to unveil plaques formally dedicating the dam to Johnson’s memory, according to the historical record compiled around the structure’s anniversary. It has been known as the Daniel-Johnson dam ever since, a name that today greets the roughly 30,000 visitors Hydro-Québec says take guided tours of the Manic-5 site each year.
The episode remains a striking footnote in Quebec political history: a sitting premier who died within sight of the biggest achievement of his public life, on the very night it was completed, in a project he had first set in motion a decade before reaching the premier’s office himself. One of his sons, Daniel Johnson Jr., would go on to serve briefly as premier of Quebec himself in 1994, continuing a name now attached to both a head of government and one of the largest dams on Earth.
