Just heard the tail end of a decent NPR piece on it. Interesting
factoid: Rene Levesque, dead patron saint of the soverigntists, was
actually drummed out of the Parti Quebecois for *removing* soverignty
from his party's platform (!) on the grounds that "first, we should try
to be a good government".
[NB: don't confuse two parties here; the Bloq Quebecois is a _federal_
party, is not in power, and has the status of federal opposition party in
virtue of coming in "second" in terms of seats in the last election. The
Parti Quebecois is a Quebec _provincial_ party, which is currently
running Quebec.]
> I was amaed to read (it was mentioned in passing) that the president was
> attacked by that bizarre flesh eating disease recently and it ate his leg.
(Semantics: nobody is "president" of Quebec; more importantly, Bouchard is
the leader of the _federal_ opposition party (translation: the party
charged with the responsibility of representing the interests of *all*
Canadians against potential abuses by the federal party in power; of
course, the Bloq Quebecois have for the most part failed to do this, and
have instead used their federal positions to plot the breakup of the
country. Would any other country in the world even *tolerate* this?
Sometimes we're just too damned civil.)
> Anyway what i am wondering is .. I still dont have a clear picture of
> Canada, or a simplistic one.
I don't know why, but it suddenly seems important to put all this in
perspective, while there's still time.
CANADA:
A history of half-remembered details and dates, in which the spirit is
correct: Canada was founded 300 or 400 years ago, when the Queen of
England commissioned the Hudson's Bay Company to go across the ocean to
get fur for England, especially beaver pelts. This Company was granted
dominion over "all the land that drains into Hudson's Bay" (that very
large bay that bisects Canada), and if you pull out a map with waterways
on it, you'll notice that a LOT of land drains into Hudson's Bay, a fact
that nobody knew at the time. A distant causal successor of the Company
still exists today, in the form of the Hudson's Bay department stores
scattered across the country. [Aside: I believe the traditional red coats
of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Canada's FBI), today used only in
ceremonial occasions, were originally chosen because they were the same
colour as the coats of the Hudson's Bay traders, who had established
relationships of trust with the natives. Something like that.]
At some point, an English colony was established in portions of what is
now Ontario, and at roughly the same time, France was busy founding
colonies in portions of what is now Quebec. At some later point (this is
dimly remembered 9th-grade history now, I'm ashamed to say) these two
relatively small (Nebraska-sized) regions became known as "Upper Canada"
and "Lower Canada"; there's some kind of French-English war in there
someplace, too. The present, much larger borders of Quebec and Ontario
came much, much later -- even sometime after Confederation, I believe.
It took a long time to assemble the rest (i.e. 90%) of the country, and at
every moment there was the danger that parts of what are now Canada could
have fallen into the hands of the United States, either through military
acquisition (e.g. the War of 1812, which we won in the sense of both
defending our territory and burning down the predecessor to what is now
the American White House), or through tempting economic offers from the
south. We built a railroad across the country to tie it together; this
was crucial to persuading British Columbia (on the West coast) to enter
Confederation. This also involved tremendous engineering efforts,
dynamiting miles of tunnels through the Rockies -- and in British
Columbia, we sacrificed appalling numbers of Chinese labourers, working
them like slaves and killing them carelessly and uncaringly in blasting
accidents. [This is one of the primary shameful moments in Canadian
history; another is when we rounded up all the Japanese Canadians we
could get our hands on during WWII, confiscated their property, and
imprisoned them in camps, on incredibly dubious grounds of "national
security".]
This construction effort also involved granting vast amounts of free land
in perpetuity to the national railways, which is why Canadians not only
get so emotional about the heritage of the trains, but also so pissed off
when trans-Canada passenger rail service is cynically phased out by the
same companies we so generously gifted in the previous century.
In short, Canada was constructed over a long period of time through
momentous engineering and military and deal-cutting efforts, primarily
directed at not becoming part of the United States, and the echoes of
these efforts persist today -- and I suggest that if England was
physically located next to the United States (or even culturally prominent
in the way that the United States is for us), similar anti-British
sentiments would persist in that country, given its history.
Canada didn't even assume its present form until 1947, when Newfoundland
(one of the poor, small provinces on the East coast) was persuaded to
enter Confederation, 80 years after the rest of the country was officially
tied together. Like the other former British colonies of the world,
Canada retained certain technical ties to England for a long time;
specifically, the Canadian constitution was owned and operated by England,
and all constitutional changes required "Royal Assent", which was
essentially symbolic and automatic, but also symbolically offensive.
Fast-forward to 1982, when Pierre Trudeau, our longest-serving and (in
retrospect) best-loved Prime Minister, decided to draw up a true Canadian
constitution, including (because Trudeau was in many ways a liberal
individualist) a "Charter of Rights and Freedoms" -- an addition which
caused some debate about whether having a bill of individual rights would
"make us too American". This constitution was approved unanimously by
the federal parliament, composed of members elected from every region of
the country, and agreed to by England, and this was all that was required
for it to be binding. In 1982, they pulled us all out of our classes to
watch the constitutional signing on TV. It was a great national moment.
It was a time bomb. Nine of the ten provincial premiers symbolically
signed it (which was not required, since it would be the fundamental law
of the land either way), but Quebec, at that point led by the sainted Rene
Levesque and possessed of quasi-separatist sentiments (separatism has
never been as clear-cut as it is at the moment; previous efforts have
centered around strange intermediate proposals known as
"soverignty-association", the details of which were never quite clear),
refused to sign for reasons that I believe were basically symbolic and
related to other issues of the moment -- in fact, it seems somewhat
doubtful that Levesque himself would have wanted his gesture to be
amplified into the rhetorical monster it has become, 13 years later. But
the current rhetoric endlessly repeats the claim: "Quebec was excluded
from the constitution".
But it is empirically unclear that Quebec is "excluded" from anything.
Quebec enjoys disproportionately high amounts of federal power, relative
to the size of its population. Quebec has been given unique amounts of
provincial autonomy in virtually all areas: from greater control over
immigration policy (to help pre-filter immigrants in favour of those from
French-speaking nations), to a pension plan fiscally separate from the
Canadian pension plan, to special dispensation for cultural-protection and
language laws that would be formally illegal in any other part of Canada,
and probably any other part of the world (even in France, it is _not_
universally illegal to display English on signs, for example). Quebec has
labour laws that act as trade barriers against neighboring provinces;
Quebec dictates which children will be allowed to attend English schools.
Quebec's provincial parliament is (mis)named the "Quebec National
Assembly". Quebec (if we want to think of it in these terms, which we
don't) has been a net revenue drain on the rest of Canada -- a trait
common to 7 of the 10 provinces in this redistributionist nation. In the
last 20 years, Quebec has done nothing but become more prosperous and more
strongly French.
Separatists allege that they need even more autonomy, more cultural
protection, and more control, and that they cannot get these things within
Canada -- and the latter claim is probably true, given that many other
regions (and ethnic groups) of Canada have a conflicting shopping list
that they're ready to haul out if we start reformatting things -- as we
discovered, twice, during the hideous constitutional botch-jobs of the
Mulroney era that thankfully were defeated. On the other hand,
federalists like me allege that Quebec would not have gotten this far
without Canada to act as a life-support system, a buffer against a world
that would be even more hostile to them than it has been to us. And
practical questions aside, Quebec is in some ways the best part of us; the
feeling that "there is a definite Canadian culture here" is startlingly
stronger there than basically anywhere else in this country, and
politically, Quebec remains closest to what Canada represented 30 years
ago, before we slipped slowly under the influence of short-sighted
conservatives of various parties.
There are a lot of differences between the Quebec-separatist movement at
the moment and the movement of the 60s and 70s, when they held the last
referendum. NPR just pointed out that the anthem of the movement last
time was "a love song to Quebec", whereas this time they're using
something best described as "an advertising slogan, repeating the name of
a product: 'OUI'". And that's not a bad summary, given the mostly
pragmatic tone of the current separatist rhetoric: "We want X, we need Y,
and this is the only way to get them."
Last time around, it was a different story. Passions were considerably
higher on all sides. A small group emerged, known as the FLQ ("Quebec
Liberation Front", no less), and waged a minor terror campaign, placing
bombs in public mailboxes. One of its central members, Pierre Vallieres
(I think?), wrote a book-length manifesto called "White Niggers of
America", which alleged that the Quebecois race had been forced into
precisely the same status that blacks has previously been subjected to
within the United States. The FLQ eventually kidnapped a federal cabinet
minister, Pierre Laporte, and demanded that their manifesto be read over
the radio (I believe that it was). Around that time, then Prime Minister
Trudeau, in one of those decisions that will be eternally second-guessed,
invoked martial law. Literally, there were armed troops in the streets of
Quebec -- the images were, and are, astonishing; you cannot look at those
pictures without thinking "this is not Canada". Laporte's body then
turned up, strangled, in the trunk of a car. (The person jailed for this
killing later wrote a strange apologia of a book, claiming that the actual
strangling was to some extent an accident, although their overall cause
was quite justified.)
Although I saw a news story several months ago claiming that the members
of the FLQ were being, once again, gradually and quietly reconstructed as
"heroes" within Quebec, any such talk has been scrupulously avoided by the
current leaders of the separatist movement.
[later: part 2, modern Canada]
-- Evan Kirchhoff, kirchh@umich.edu