This was originally a series of posts the Canada forum of
Café Utne. It was written in
June of 1998.
I don't suppose anybody here has read Misconceiving Canada: The
Struggle for National Unity by Kenneth McRoberts?
The basic thesis is that "the Trudeau vision" of a Canada, bilingual
irrespective of territoriality, never met the needs of Quebec society
and was pushed not by the bulk of Quebeckers (and thus should not be
perceived as "doing what Quebec wanted" even though English Canadians
often see it this way) but by minority francophones in other provinces
and Trudeau and his followers.
English Canada's failure to acknowledge this, failure to acknowledge
that language *is* territorial and that Quebec is different from the
other provinces because it is the only French one, is the problem.
Without an asymmetrical federalism of some sort or other, says
McRoberts, the country will not survive.
One idea presented is that language rights are meaningless when
applied to individuals -- that since language is about communication,
only in groups does it have any meaning to promote a language. People
will lose a language if they do not have a society to speak it in, and
governments don't make any difference on that score.
I think this is all very interesting and somewhat disturbing.
(The question was asked: what kind of asymmetrical
federalism?)
He is deliberately unspecific about the form asymmetrical federalism
could take, anywhere from opting-out of federal programs (the offer of
which could be extended to all provinces, but probably only Quebec
would bother) to a more formal asymmetrical federalism, with an
English-Canadian formal structure of some kind. That's not crucial
for him -- the point I think he's making is that Canada should
clearly break away from the idea that all provinces are equal and that
Quebec has no special place. He believes that the Quebec government,
and not the federal government, can reasonably represent the French
society in North America.
Again I am not taking the position of the book, but I thought it
clearly stated its assumptions and from there was very well-reasoned
if one accepts those assumptions.
I come at this with a clearly outside perspective -- my take on
language issues is Californian, my take on nationalism is as someone
who regards the jingoist excesses of his home country as repugnant.
This probably strikes everybody in Canada irrelevant at
best and more likely nosy and meddling. So, this can be taken as a
disclaimer -- don't take *my* view too seriously. I don't have to live
with the result of all this.
I think my own conflict comes from my admiration for the goal of "the
Trudeau vision" to eliminate cultural/ethnic nationalism, which is at
the root of the vision of Quebec nationalism -- with the recognition
that in the Canadian context, the attempt at getting francophone
Quebeckers to identify with the civic nationalism of Canada has failed
utterly. The book basically dismisses the idealism of the civic
nationalists (using the term "Trudeau vision" for it, which it seems
to me implies that the many who share this view are merely Trudeau-
maniacs, in the '68 sense).
And yet I find this idea of patriotism -- a reasoned (the book's term)
commitment to civic rights and values, symbolized by the Charter of
Rights and Freedoms, unifying all Canadians -- much, much more
attractive than the mythologized, traditional ethnic nationalism that
Quebec shares with European countries, or the ignorant mythological
patriotism, essentially the same as sports fanaticism, that is common
in so much of the United States.
I see nationalism in all its forms as fundamentally, deeply divisive,
a profoundly evil thing -- even in its best "we don't want to hurt
anybody else, we just want our day in the sun" form, it's based on
exclusion of others. For every case where unification, secession or
irridentism (transfer of land from one state to another) was peaceful,
there are a dozen counterexamples -- Catalonia, the Basques,
Kurdistan, Ireland, the whole Balkans including Bosnia, Rwanda,
Biafra, Algeria, Germany after 1871, India/Pakistan in 1947 and
Kashmir up until the present day... the list is endless. Nationalism
kills.
What hope have we as a world? I'm not an expert on multiethnic states. Africa's
multiethnic states are not, as a rule, good examples, although perhaps
there are one or two that have been peaceful. The European Union is
still a collection of nation-states, and ethnicities within the
nation-states have no reason to take comfort, as they are still
primarily in a Spanish or British or whatever state (although, the
EU has given minorities in places like Scotland a counterargument to
the "it would hurt too much economically" argument, much as NAFTA has
done for Quebec, although even more strongly). Most of the other
multiethnic states are more or less explicitly partnerships between
particular ethnicities -- in Belgium you can be Flemish *or* Walloon,
in Switzerland German, Italian, French *or* Rumansch. And in the
United States, a person of any nationality (at least in theory) is
free to lose all of their national characteristics, except cuisine,
and assimilate. (It just hit me that cuisine is, for the most part,
the most easily commodified of national characteristics. I wonder if
that's why it's the one attribute that's allowed to remain.)
This book advocates the return to the "two founding peoples" view of
Canada, or at least its formal recognition, with perhaps some
ancillary recognition of the First Nations as "founding" as well.
This essentially puts Canada in the same situation as Switzerland or
Belgium. This is just nationalism tempered with pragmatism, a
recognition of the small size or power of the French-Canadian and
First Nations. Changing perceptions of the power or size of the
French-Canadian nation have changed this calculation. (If Creeland
could be a state, would it not wish to be?)
And yet, if Canada goes this direction, what happens to the vision of
civic patriotism instead of ethnic nationalism? The world *needs* a
vision of a multiethnic, multinational state, because the continued
strength of the idea of the uniethnic state is killing us. I don't
think "the Trudeau vision" was perfect but it was a huge step forward
toward the day when we can look back at nationalism as another
discarded idea of the past, like feudalism.
And yet .. and yet I write all this hundreds of miles from the nearest
Canadian territory. To some extent it's all an academic exercise for
me. (We have language problems in California, but they have no real
parallel to the French-English problem in Canada. By the end of the
19th century there was no unassimilated remnant left of the original
Californios.) Does Canada have the responsibility to be an example
for the world, or should it solve its own, very real, problems first?
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