Liberals, The nation and whatever
ELLIOT BROWN
The last few weeks have been tough for the eight candidates hoping to lead the Liberal Party of Canada. Some bright lights in the Quebec wing of the Party thought that the December Liberal convention — the one at which delegates will decide who challenges prime minister Stephen Harper in the next election — would be a smashing occasion to ask whether Quebec is a nation or not. This is the political equivalent of: “Have you stopped beating your wife? yes or no?” The only right answer is not getting asked the question, something that most of the candidates were doing splendidly until Michael Ignatieff opened his mouth about it.
Ironically, the man who came to the rescue was none other than Stephen Harper. Seeking to pre-empt a Bloc Québecois motion in the House of Commons on the question, he proposed his own motion, stating that “the Québécois are a nation within a united Canada.” This was a stroke of tactical brilliance: Harper simultaneously derailed the Bloc attack and stopped a potential loss of support for the Conservatives in Quebec. The Prime Minister also saved Ignatieff from the baying wolves and the Liberals from the ignominy of having to answer a question for themselves. In the aftermath, it seems that at least two of the other three leading candidates — Bob Rae and Stéphane Dion — are prepared to support the motion, if grudgingly.
But what of the motion, “the Québécois are a nation within a united Canada?” What does it mean? What are its implications? Is it true?
It would seem that the journalists neatly dispatched the first of these questions: the motion means, precisely, nothing. It will create no law, nor will it amend the constitution; it will confer no powers upon the province of Quebec, or upon any other entity. A legal vacuity in both form and substance, it is a piece of pure, meaningless art, not unlike
Before the Quiet Revolution, there was a French Canadian nationality; after it, there was a Québécois nation.
that found in hotel lobbies and airport terminals.As for the second question, there is some room for concern. A creative judge (or group of Supreme Court justices) might, with enough time and paper, be able to make something of it. However, Quebec’s fetchingly named National Assembly has already passed a similar motion, and neither it, nor the infamous “distinct society” motion (proffered by a former Liberal government), have had any legal fallout to date. In short, it seems that conferring honorary citizenship on the Dalai Lama had more implications than this motion ever will.
Much ignored in the debate on the motions, counter-motions, and related gestures of the past few weeks is the third question: is it true? Are the Québécois a nation within a united Canada? As written, clearly, the statement is only a halftruth, since Canada has never been a particularly united. The big question revolves around that word nation.
Nations are relatively new inventions. France was a kingdom before the French were a nation, in the sense of sharing a common language and culture. However, as Benedict Anderson observed in Imagined Communities, modern nations are preceded by their nationalisms; there were German and Italian nationalisms before there were countries called Germany and Italy. Nations do not depend upon states for their existence. If this were the case, then the Québécois should have become Canadian long ago. Indeed, if any province in Canada can claim sovereignty, by rights it should be Newfoundland which, prior to 1949 held a level of independence from Britain similar to Canada at the time.
However, nations are also difficult to define; if the French are the people of France, then who are the Kurds or the Tibetans? Virtually the only standard that applies universally is that a nation is a group of people who think they constitute a nation. Of course, there have always been ethnic and cultural groupings; what distinguishes nation is the political character the term has taken on. Nations want things: money, power, flags, anthems and on and on. Nations want to have states, but states can make nations; sometimes states have more than one nation, and sometimes nations are spread across more than one state. Confusing? You bet.
This places Canada in a very interesting position. From the beginning, Canada has subsisted in efforts to allay ethnic sentiment. After the British conquest in 1760, les canadiens were permitted to retain their language and their laws, in return for their pacific acquiescence to British rule. Lord Durham, the progenitor of responsive government in Canada, advocated a policy of assimilation via “benign neglect.” The Québécois, “a people with no history and no literature,” he averred, could not fail to follow the fine British example set before them when Upper and Lower Canada were united. In point of fact, they could, and Canada has been less a country than a balancing act in consequence.
The Québécois separatist movement began as a staunchly traditionalist creed with powerful religious overtones, Dieu, famille, patrie; “God, family, and homeland.” Langue and histoire are conspicuously absent. But the Quiet Revolution changed all of this. The Quiet Revolution was inaugurated by Jean Lesage’s Liberals, under the slogan “Maîtres Chez Nous!” Political and economic reforms were accompanied by a burst of artistic, literary, and cultural energy. In only a few years, the power of the Catholic Church in Québec was
In short, it seems that conferring honorary citizenship on the Dalai Lama had more implications than this motion ever will.
deflated; Québec’s demographics began to mirror the rest of North America, as divorce rates have risen and birth rates have fallen. The old traditions have not disappeared, particularly in rural Québec, but their proponents are of another generation. Before the Quiet Revolution, there was a French Canadian nationality; after it, there was a Québécois nation.However, through the late 1960s and early 1970s, it became clear that Maîtres Chez Nous meant more than hydroelectric dams and social programs. As Québec reinvented itself, so too did the separatists, and they invented their history and literature as they went. In the process, they have constructed their own historical mythology. There is a small pantheon of heroes and martyrs to the cause, including some dubious selections: the blundering Louis-Joseph Papineau; the lunatic Louis Riel; even the despot Maurice Duplessis, the most corrupt politician in Canadian history, has received a partial redemption. These heroes face off against a predictable stable of villains — the assimilationist Lord Durham, the backstabbing Pierre Trudeau, etc.. Historical episodes have been rewritten, grievances both real and imagined resurrected.
This should come as no surprise; separatism, like most nationalisms, is a romantic rather than a rational doctrine. Nationhood is aspirational, less about being than becoming, and this engenders a need to rewrite the past for sake of the future. However, this romanticism shows up in other ways, as a failure of clear thinking about the process and implications necessary for Quebec to become sovereign. In my own dealings with Québecois youth, I have been struck by their reflexive, casual separatism. In this sense, separatism has become a secular religion — it is a belief system that is not so much thought through as it is assumed; it is part of the cultural milieu, introduced by family and friends, educators and journalists. And it is something that one professes, whether one acts upon it or not.
This has been reinforced by the Bloc and their compatriots in the Parti Québécois: after two failed referendums, they are the custodians of a dream, not the agents of change. Successive leaders of both the Bloc Québécois and the Parti Québécois have assiduously avoided making firm commitments to a plan or timeline for Quebec sovereignty, focusing instead on getting the best deal (read: the most money) from Ottawa. Gilles Duceppe, for his part, seems more interested in talking about what will happen after the referendum — a bullet train to New York, apparently — than about actually getting there. Ditto for Andre Boisclair, leader of the PQ.
Of course, none of these leaders have wanted to force themselves into another losing referendum, and the numbers have not changed much since 1995 — depending upon which poll you prefer, somewhere between 45 and 52 per cent of the electorate still support the separatist cause. Until recently, then, prudence has been the better part of valour — fight the good fights you can win. To date, this has not hurt the Bloc overmuch, although the Liberals currently rule the roost in the National Assembly. However, a decade of demands for clarity from the federalists and the Quebec Liberal party may have had some effect. A recent poll by SOM indicated that 54.3 per cent of voters, and 60 per cent of PQ voters, want “a specific agenda for a referendum on sovereignty.” None has yet been forthcoming.
What has been forthcoming from the Bloc is meaningless motion on whether Quebec is a nation or not. Of course, between calling Quebec a nation, and calling the Québécois a nation, there was never much doubt which option the Liberals would prefer. Neither is true, but where the former is patently false — a government cannot be a nation — the latter at least makes semantic sense. Nations may be invented, but they are also descriptive for their putative members in a way that other words and phrases are not. If the Québécois are not a nation, then what are they? This may not seem like much of a choice, between falsity and half-truth. But, like the current leadership of the Bloc and PQ, the motion is all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Beside which, Confederation has long been sustained by half-truths and tip-toeing; it will be again.
