Jacques Parizeau, the former Quebec premier who came close to severing that province from the rest of Canada, died on Monday in Montreal. He was 84.  His death was announced on Facebook by his wife, Lisette Lapointe, who is also a prominent Quebec separatist politician. No cause was given, but Mr. Parizeau had been ill in recent years.  The highest and lowest point of Mr. Parizeau’s career came in 1995 when, as premier, he engineered the second referendum set in motion by his party, Parti Québécois, on separating from Canada. The first attempt, in 1980, under the party’s founding leader, René Lévesque, was a failure, with only about 40 percent of voters favoring separation. But the 1995 vote was much closer, falling 54,000 votes short of victory, with 49.42 percent of voters agreeing to separation.  Mr. Parizeau’s speech after the vote, however, damaged his reputation and contributed to his decision to resign as premier.  “We were defeated by what?” Mr. Parizeau said. “By money and ethnic voters, essentially.”  While Mr. Parizeau vigorously rejected the widespread perception that his comment was a slight against immigrants and Montreal’s large Jewish population, he never retracted it or apologized for it. Although every analysis showed that ethnic, non-French-speaking voters had not been a major factor in the vote, Mr. Parizeau rejected advice to disown the remark, according to Jean-François Lisée, who was an adviser to Mr. Parizeau and is now a Parti Québécois member of Quebec’s legislature.  “Obviously he saw the next day that it was a terrible problem,” Mr. Lisée said. “But, for him, resigning was enough.”  Mr. Parizeau was born on Aug. 9, 1930, in Montreal, to Gérard Parizeau and the former Germaine Biron. His family had for generations been part of Montreal’s elite. His father was a historian, author and founder of what became a large and successful insurance brokerage firm.  The younger Mr. Parizeau graduated from the business school HEC Montreal, where he later taught, and earned his doctorate at the London School of Economics. He also worked for a time as a researcher at the Bank of Canada.  His life took a political turn in 1961, when he was recruited to be an economic adviser to Jean Lesage, the Liberal premier, who was introducing sweeping economic and social changes.  Mr. Parizeau became deeply involved in the nationalization of the province’s hydroelectric system and the founding of the Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec, a pension and investment fund that today has assets of about $226 billion in Canadian currency.  By several accounts it was during a train trip across Canada in 1963, to attend a conference on federalism, that Mr. Parizeau decided his province could achieve its potential only as a separate nation. He joined the Parti Québécois six years later and became a prominent member of Mr. Lévesque’s cabinet.  Mr. Parizeau was a striking contrast to Mr. Lévesque and an unlikely leader of a nationalist movement. Where Mr. Lévesque, a former television journalist, was energetic and charismatic, Mr. Parizeau was stout, relentlessly formal and ponderous in his public speaking, apparently a carry-over from his time as a professor of economics.  And although Mr. Parizeau was a fierce advocate of laws that limited the use of English in business and public institutions, he was an Anglophile who cultivated the antiquated air of a Victorian gentleman. He spoke English with a vaguely British accent, a holdover from his student days in London, and peppered conversations with phrases like “by Jove!” long after they had fallen out of general use in Britain. His trademark pinstriped three-piece suits were more Savile Row than fashionable Montreal.  “His British polish, his kind of Churchillian way of being, was very odd in Quebec,” Mr. Lisée said. “He really stood out.” Still, no one questioned Mr. Parizeau’s commitment to Quebec nationalism or progressive causes like pay equity.  Mr. Parizeau’s first wife, Alice Poznanska, a Polish-born novelist, died in 1990. He married Ms. Lapointe in 1992. She served in the Quebec National Assembly from 2007 to 2012. Besides her, he is survived by two children from his first marriage, Isabelle and Bernard.  An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Jacques Parizeau’s role in the hydroelectric system for the province of Quebec. He was deeply involved in its nationalization, not in its privatization.  A version of this article appears in print on June 4, 2015, on page B19 of the New York edition with the headline: Jacques Parizeau, 84, Quebec Separatist. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Mr. Parizeau wanted Quebec to secede from Canada to help it realize its potential, but after a second failed vote in 1995, he damaged his reputation with a speech explaining why the separatists lost.