MORE THAN JUST MAPLE SYRUP
Quebec separatists bring much-needed light relief to Canada's bruised psyche,
says Mordecai Richler SEVENTY-SEVEN per cent of Canadians, according to a recent poll, believe that their country will have a common currency with the USA within a decade. With the Canad- ian dollar hovering at between 67 and 69 US cents and bargain-hunting American firms making raids north of the border, and buy- ing corporations to the value of $49.7 billion (at last count), these are not happy times for those who believe that there will always be a Canada. American newspapers are pulling their correspondents out of Ottawa and Toronto because taxes are too high. Mind you, punishing taxation has its benefits. It now spares us the obloquy of intruding, smart-ass correspondents. Soon there will be nothing left in the larder but maple syrup. And gay Boy Scouts: even as the big- oted Boy Scouts of America has asked the Supreme Court to approve its ban on homo- sexual leaders, nice-guy Toronto has launched its very own gay and lesbian troops, complete with 'homosexual-related badges', whatever they might be.
There are still some who are prepared to talk Canada up, however: the Prime Minis- ter, Jean Chretien, for one. Addressing a $500-a-plate nosh in Toronto not long ago, he proclaimed that 'by working together as a country, we shall make Canada known round the world as the place to be in the 21st century — the place where people want to come and stay to learn, to pursue opportunities, to open new frontiers, to set the standard for the world for the quality of life'.
Damn. Forget for a moment Canada's uncertain sovereignty; this message is not getting through to dim foreigners. Although our government claims it can easily absorb 300,000 immigrants annually (whisper it, but preferably white and northern European), only 225,000 settled in Canada last year.
When I was a boy, immigrants to Cana- da, my grandparents among them, came steerage to the next-to-the-promised land, and could usually be identified by their starting-out trades: the Chinese put in umpteen hours a day in neighbourhood laundries, Jews bent over sewing machines in clothing factories or opened hole-in-the- wall shoe-repair shops, and Greeks and Italians favoured fruit stores and short- order restaurants. Other, more caring hal- Demonic possession can take many forms.' ians, it is worth noting, took to visiting the laundries, shoe-repair shops, fruit stores and short-order restaurants offering to insure them against mishaps.
Nowadays, however, some immigrants from Russia and Scandinavia fly over first- class and sign instant multimillion-dollar ice- hockey contracts. Deservedly so, because they immediately skate rings round most of our indigenous players. Yet plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. Many of the Rus- sian multimillionaire players suffer thought- ful compatriots who, for a consideration, insure their remaining relatives in Russia against unforeseen accidents.
While my unappreciated countrymen nursed end-of-the-century bruises to our national psyche, Quebec separatist zealots continued to divert us, making for some much-needed mirth. Last summer, for instance, inspectors from the Office de la Langue Francaise — or the tongue-troop- ers in local anglo parlance — took to the golf-courses to urge maudits anglais duffers to play in the language of the collectivity, never mind that the English golfing idiom is in common usage in France. Posters thoughtfully provided to country clubs by the tongue-troopers listed a vocabulary now deemed acceptable on the fairways: motte de gazon for divot, voiturette de golf for golf cart, fosse d'herbe for grass bunker, vert d'exercise for putting green, fosse de sable fof sand trap, and so on. Then the troopers pounced on one Mordechai Quezada, editor of the Jewish Express, a newsletter written in English and Yiddish and delivered to 1,800 Orthodox Jewish families in Montreal. The editor, it was ruled, 'must cease publication until a French version is available. . '. Mean- while, he was fined 5800.
When the separatists aren't disarming us with knee-slappers, they can be counted on to put a foot wrong. One day Quebec's fierce deputy premier, Bernard Landry, cal- culated that most federalists, English- or French-speaking, were old farts, and ven- tured, 'Logically, the simple passage of time gives 0.5 per cent more to the sovereigntist option each year because with the fatalities the oldest don't vote any more.' Shocked that his 'frank and factual' statement had outraged so many Quebecers, Landry added, by way of explanation the next morn- ing, 'Young people are very inclined toward sovereignty and remain sovereigntist.'
Actually, this is no longer the case. Increasingly, yuppyish francophone young- sters are more interested in their e-mail and going on-line than in manning the bar- ricades. A case in point was a recent ruling by a Quebec Superior Court judge that the fatuous provincial language law, which spitefully limited the size of English letter- ing on commercial signs, pronouncing it an affront to Montreal's visage linguistique, was an infringement of freedom of expres- sion. Ten years ago this would have prompted thousands to march through the streets of downtown Montreal, chanting `Le quebec aux quebecois!' Last autumn, separatist politicians aside, the ruling was greeted with indifference, both English- and French-speaking Montrealers weary of linguistic strife.
Meanwhile, Quebec's population is falling, as the exodus of discontented anglophones and so-called allophones (Greeks, Italians, Chinese) continues. Since 1976, something like 250,000 English-speaking Quebecers have quit the province. Furthermore, in 1999 only 15 per cent of immigrants to Canada chose Que- bec, while 55 per cent settled in flourishing Ontario. The distinguished Quebec demographer, Jacques Henripin, anticipat- ing a burgeoning shrinkage of the provin- cial population, can't understand the lack of concern among sovereigntists: 'What surprises me is there is so little worry among the hyper-nationalists about this problem . . . They are preparing a country for people who aren't there.... '
Compounding separatist difficulties, an uncharacteristically gutsy Ottawa, reacting to a 1998 Supreme Court decision, has finally declared it would only negotiate secession if the Yes vote won a 'clear majority' to a 'clear question'. In the past two referendums, of course, the questions put to Quebecers were complicated, fuzzy and intentionally misleading.
In any event, we are not likely to endure a third referendum. A large majority of Quebecers don't want one, and separatist support is at its lowest level in five years. According to the most recent poll, only 41.1 per cent would vote Yes to a question proposing sovereignty with the promise of an offer of political and economic associa- tion with Canada (my italics). But the latter clause is unacceptable to Ottawa, which not only rejects association but also threat- ens partition of an independent Quebec. As Pierre Elliott Trudeau observed years ago, if Canada is divisible, so is Quebec. Going into the last referendum, in 1995, I was on a television panel with, among others, a prominent separatist. Off-camera, I asked him, 'Why in hell don't you ask an honest rather than a tricky question for once? Say, "Are you in favour of an inde- pendent country, separate from Canada?" ' `Because,' he said, 'we already know the answer to that one.'
According to the most recent poll, should separatists dare to put such a straightforward question to Quebecers, support would slide to something like 35 per cent. The party's over, but not, alas, the hollering. Only days before last Christ- mas a number of Quebec unions combined to splurge US$80,000 on a misleading full- page ad in the New York Times_ 'SHAME ON OTTAWA! Ottawa wants to strangle Que- bec. . • ' Readers were invited to phone, write, fax or e-mail their protests to the Canadian ambassador in Washington. I doubt that the phone-lines were clogged or that a fleet of trucks was required to accommodate the mail-bags.
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