Canada: a country on the loose
Peter Nichols
Montreal At whatever level you focus, the separate life is Canada's issue of the moment — as Margaret Trudeau prepares for the publication of her memoirs and the husband, from whom she is parted, talks of the Federal election in May as vital in the process of keeping Canada together. The centre of the disruptive energies is of course here in Quebec where a unique transatlantic French culture still finds confederation too tight for comfort. But Pierre Trudeau is not restricting his warnings about the danger for the country's constitutional integrity to the province from which he came himself. He has accused the leaders of both the Alberta and Saskatchewan provinces of wanting 'to get rid of the Federal government' by weakening it to the point where the provinces would become semi-sovereign. And the object, he implies, is that the provincial governments do not want Ottawa's hands on their growing wealth from oil. Mr Trudeau was replying to a new bid for Provincial power put forward by Peter Lougheed after his victory in the Alberta elections on 14 March. At a celebration Mr Lougheed told campaign workers: 'I feel the country is stronger if the provinces are stronger.' The Trudeau view is exactly the oPposite: 'If Mr. Lougheed or some of the Other premiers succeed in diminishing Federal power, then we won't have a unified Canada. We'll have a piece of geography but we'll have ten principalities with semisovereign status with a Federal government that can't do anything except through consultation and consent of every one of the ten, which would be a stalemate.' Even the Indians are demanding more rights over taxation while theatregoers in Toronto can now see a chilling play in mime recounting the sufferings which western life brought to the Eskimoes. It is a country on the loose.
Trudeau himself ironically personifies Much of what fundamentally caused the stress. He is from Montreal, bilingual in English and French with his own very personal flamboyant style. He needed these qualities for success: a national leader from the ranks of the English-speaking Canadians would not need to be bilingual or have Personal brilliance to be the country's prime minister. French Canadians at all levels feel that they must make .greater efforts than Would be expected of an English-speaker to arnve at the same level.
Quebec faces a series of problems st.lmmed up by the fact that the palais in the City where young people go to hear popstars is named after Montcalm, the general Whom Wolfe defeated. French Canada stayed almost pre-French in the sense that it remained, under the British, untouched by developments in French society, the revolution included. Yet now the first full generation is emerging from what was called 'the quiet revolution', so quiet that a fundamental change in the most sensitive area of this huge country passed unnoticed in much of the rest of the world.
Quebec had not only lived the oppressive existence of being the one enclave of French culture in English-speaking North America. From the end of the last war, for 16 years, it was ruled by the heavily conservative 'Union Nationale' of Maurice Duplessis whose hand, in the words of a bishop, was kept so heavily on the boiling kettle that when it was removed the steam blew off the lid. Duplessis has been compared to Huey Long in his popular appeal, love of power and his conservative politics. Yet Long's Louisiana and New Orleans in particular have little enough in common with the province which is now leading Canada to the brink of a severe constitutional crisis. The feeling of an historical destiny is strong. But if ideas are clear on where Quebec is going, the advocates of change are certainly not expressing them clearly. Defenders of the present confederal state bequeathed by the British more than a century ago accuse the prophets of change of deliberate attempts at confusing the issue. The Quebec provincial government speaks of a referendum this autumn or the spring of next year. The question to be put to the electors has yet to be defined, but it will presumably call for an opinion on the proposal for sovereignty-association between Quebec and Canada. What this really means is again uncertain. The aim would presumably be that Quebec would be granted sovereignty and would then negotiate an agreement for economic association with Canada. The two leaders of Quebec's movement for sovereignty and association, Rene Levesque and Claude Morin, who are the province's prime minister and minister for intergovernmental affairs, do not seem to have very clear plans for the future.
Morin has said that a powerful vote in favour of change would force English Canada into negotiating a new constitution, or at least profound constitutional change. A resounding result was needed because 'neither in Ottawa nor in English Canada is there now, nor has there ever been, the desire or the will to completely renew federalism, far less to accept the practical and constitutional consequences of the existence in Canada of a distinct Quebec society.'
Levesque is seen to float between portraying future relations as not traumatically different from what they are now, though much improved, and the demand for a major transformation of political structures which is what the majority of Quebeckers profoundly want. Critics of the campaign for a referendum point out the bombastic excesses of its supporters. The Quebec minister for transport, Lucien Lessard, was felt to have done the best so far with the comment on Quebec's high number of traffic deaths: 'Quebec is about to live much too important a page in its history to allow itself to suffer that many losses.' Englishspeakers are leaving the province: as an indication, the English-speaking part of Montreal's active population dropped between 1971 to 1978 from 203,900 to 189,865 while the French-speakers rose from 119,600 to 129,806. The Frenchspeakers point out that the exodus from the province began before the pace-forcing Tarn Quebecois' came to power in 1976 but this observation scarcely changes the meaning of the exodus.
Reactions are inevitable. The St. Patrick Day's parade in Montreal last month was the biggest ever. The huge procession including 27 bands took two hours to file through the centre of the city, where crowds estimated at 300,000 lined the main streets. The object was to avoid politics (and the Northern Ireland delegation was persuaded to put away its banners calling for Irish unity). But the political lesson was clear despite the good humour. The Irish, too, have been here a long time.
The French-speakers have already seen dramatic reversals and advances.,TheParti Quebecois', which is leading pressure for the referendum, was slightingly referred to as a particle rather than a party a matter of a few short years before it took power in the province in 1976. Observers had foreseen a decline in its advance because of the period of violence in 1970 when a provincial minister was kidnapped and murdered by militant separatists. But the decline never came, and violence seemed to act more as a stimulant for Quebec's political patriots, even if now the violent phase seems to have passed.
Just as dramatic in its way was the stripping of the Catholic Church's temporal power. Under Duplessis and earlier, the Catholic hierarchy practically controlled society: in its hands it had education, hospitals and social services. Respect towards the church was essential. It was highly conservative and the greatest repository of French-Canadian culture. But once the quiet revolution began, young FrenchCanadians not only felt discriminated against by the English-speakers but oppressed by the church. And now, in some parts of the province, church attendance by Catholics in what was an ostentatiously devout region is down to 10 per cent.
TheCatholic Church is officially taking no stand on the Quebec problem. The Bishops maintain that they should keep away from political issues though, whatever the outcome of a referendum, they would be ready as a group to try and meet the people's needs. About 65 per cent of Canada's ten million Catholics, which is nearly half the total population, live in Quebec. According to bishops of both language groups, the thinking and the differences among them are more over particular issues than along language lines. That they can speak in this way is probably due in part to the care which the bishops show among themselves to avoid clashes between the two groups. The chairmanship of the National Episcopal Conference, for instance, alternates between a French-speaker and an Englishspeaker. But, as one of them remarked, if Quebec should secede from Canada, there would be less reason for the rest of the country to stay together than there was in Pakistan before that country split.
The provinces of both seaboards are seen to be pulled more towards the United States than eastward and westward towards the prairies. Alberta and Saskatchewan are regarded by sound federalists as suspect. A member of a study group on Canadian unity, Ronald Watts, principal of Queen's University in Kingston, has publicly stated that it is common resentment of Ontario that holds Canada together on the grounds that Ontario is regarded by others as a province unfairly favoured by confederation.
Certainly Trudeau will make this point constantly when he begins his Federal election campaign next month. He has already accused the Tory opposition of refusing to stand up for the national interest when the need is clear and apparent. With the elec tions over, it will be Quebec's turn to move by holding the promised referendum. The general estimate is of a 50 per cent chance that the referendum will be carried. And in such an event, the future would be too clouded by emotion for the rational processes to distinguish clearly how Quebec's assertiveness will develop in a nation still seeking its own identity. 'Beyond Reason' is the title of Margaret Trudeau's book and, if her memoirs have little effect on Canadian affairs, the phrase is not a bad one for this disturbed moment in Canada's career.
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