The Gaspésie (official name), or Gaspé Peninsula or the Gaspé, is a peninsula along the south shore of the Saint Lawrence River in Quebec, Canada, extending into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. It is separated from New Brunswick on its southern side by the Baie des Chaleurs (Chaleur Bay) and the Restigouche River.

The name "Gaspé" may come from a Mi'kmaq word gespeg meaning "land's end".^{[citation needed]} However, "Gaspé" may instead be a mutation of the Basque word "Gerizpe", meaning "shelter".

The area of the Gaspé Peninsula is near that of Belgium, at 30,341 square kilometres (11,715 sq mi). The population is approximately 100,000.

Sea cliffs dominatate the peninsula's northern shore along the St. Lawrence River.Cap Gaspé, jutting into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, is the easternmost point of the peninsula. Percé Rock (or rocher Percé), an island pierced by a natural arch, is located just offshore of the peninsula's eastern end. The peninsula's interior is rugged, being a northward continuation of the Appalachian Mountains called the Chic-Chocks (or Shick Shocks), with Mont Jacques-Cartier at 1,268 metres (4,160 ft) the peninisula's highest peak.

Marcel Martel is the Avie Bennett Historica Chair in Canadian history at York University. A student of Ramsay Cook, he has published extensively on topics ranging from French Canadian nationalism to federal drug policy. His book Le deuil d'un pays imaginé[1] earned him the Michel Brunet Award from the Institut d’histoire de l’Amérique française in 1997.

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Félix Leclerc, OC GOQ (August 2, 1914 – August 8, 1988) was a French-Canadian singer-songwriter, poet, writer, actor and Québécois political activist. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada on December 20, 1968. Leclerc was posthumously inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame for his songs Moi, mes souliers (Me, My Shoes) and Le tour de l'Île in 2006.

He was born in La Tuque, Quebec, Canada from a family of pioneers in 1914, sixth in a family of eleven children. He began his studies at the University of Ottawa but was forced to stop due to the Great Depression.

Leclerc worked at several jobs before taking jobs as a radio announcer in Quebec City and Trois-Rivières from 1934 to 1937. In 1939, he began working as a writer at Radio-Canada in Montreal, developing scripts for radio dramas, including Je me souviens. He performed some of his earliest songs there. He also acted in various dramas, including Un Homme et son péché. He published a number of his scripts and founded a performing company which presented his plays through Quebec.