When Canada's prime minister Stephen Harper proposed this week that Parliament formally declare the province of Quebec "a nation within a united Canada," he was acclaimed for "statesmanship," even by the opposition Liberals. It was, of course, a capitulation to Quebec nationalism, but only a few voices ventured to say so.
One such voice was the National Post newspaper, which saw the Harper resolution as "the end of One Canada." The rival Globe and Mail commended him for intelligently de-fusing what could have been a dangerous situation.
Behind it lay a fact that Ottawa's officialdom carefully avoids in public discussion, namely the probability of a separatist victory in the Quebec election expected next year, and immediately after the election another referendum on the departure of the province from Canada.
The polls for the last several months have shown support for Quebec's present Liberal government running between 17 percent and 25 percent. A vast youth movement has taken over the separatist Parti Qu?becois. It has installed as party leader 40-year-old Andr? Boisclair, a self-acknowledged homosexual with a view of Quebec's economic potential much at odds with self-evident realities.
If, as expected, he wins the oncoming provincial election, he has pledged to make a separation referendum his government's first priority.
Ottawa's response to all this has been to tacitly ignore it. Nobody wanted another "Quebec crisis" – nobody, that is, except Gilles Duceppe and his Bloc Quebecois, the separatist contingent in the Commons, but he had no way of creating one.
What afforded him the opportunity was the arrival on the Canadian political scene of one Michael Ignatieff, a student of international politics, back in Canada after 27 years at Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard. Ignatieff is the most favored of eight contenders for the leadership of the Liberal party at its convention next week in Montreal.
Noting that Liberal MPs from Quebec were seeking a Liberal Party affirmation from the convention of Quebec's status as a "nation," Ignatieff threw his support behind this idea. Other contenders for the leadership balked, and a fight over the status of Quebec threatened to break out on the convention floor.
Seizing this opportunity, Duceppe announced he would introduce into the Commons next week a resolution describing Quebec as "a nation." Full stop. There would be no conditions attached. If Quebec's Liberal MPs voted against it, their chance of re-election would be distinctly diminished. If they voted for it, they would split the Liberal caucus and probably the convention as well.
It was in this circumstance that Harper acted. "The real question," he said, "is straight forward: Do Quebeckers form a nation within a united Canada? The answer is yes. Do Quebeckers form a nation independent of Canada? The answer is no, and it will always be no." Cheered by most of the Liberals, he crossed the floor and shook hands with the Liberal house leader. The prime minister's resolution will "save Canada," said Ignatieff. Whether it had saved Canada remained in doubt. There's no question that it saved Ignatieff. What it did, wrote columnist Andrew Coyne in the National Post, was doom Canada. "The idea of Canada has finally expired," said the headline on his commentary.
Maintaining the concept of nationhood, Coyne wrote, is "hard work." He defined that work eloquently: "To assert a national will, national objectives, a national interest, in a polyethnic, multilingual, transcontinental country, means upholding a national idea, a transcendent nationalism of ideals, against the more earthy delights of ethnic and cultural tribalism. It suggests that we are tied by something more than blood, something higher than ethnicity. And in turn it demands that we live up to that vision, that we hold a greater ambition for ourselves than mere existence."
Oddly, Coyne did not seem to realize the obvious. The kind of devotion to a national ideal that he was demanding would actually be a religious devotion. Notice the terminology: "more than blood… higher than ethnicity… greater than mere existence?" But the record of nationalism when it becomes a religion is not at all reassuring. One thinks, of course, of German nationalism, Italian nationalism and Japanese nationalism in the 1930s, or the various nationalisms that clashed in Europe between 1914 and 1918.
Surely there is a fine distinction here. One can serve God by serving his nation. But when the nation itself becomes God, we have taken a wrong turn, and that's what Coyne seems to be advocating. Maybe he ought to look for some other kind of religion.
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