Clifford Lincoln

Who is Clifford Lincoln?

Clifford Albert Lincoln is a retired Canadian politician who served as a Quebec cabinet minister prior to serving in the Canadian House of Commons.

Lincoln was the son of Francis Lincoln and Régina De Baize, a British colonial civil servant and his francophone wife, on the Indian Ocean colony of Mauritius. After studying insurance on the island and in Cape Town, South Africa, he immigrated to Canada in 1958 settling in Vancouver and then Montreal where he eventually became an insurance company executive.

He entered politics and was elected to the Quebec National Assembly in 1981 as a member of the Quebec Liberal Party. The Liberals took power as a result of the 1985 election and Lincoln was appointed to Robert Bourassa's cabinet as Minister of the Environment.

Lincoln resigned from cabinet in 1989, along with two other anglophone ministers, to protest the Bourassa government's language policy and its adoption of Bill 178 which invoked the notwithstanding clause of the Canadian Constitution in order to require French to be the dominant language on commercial signs.