O COD!

OH MONTREAL!

Murray Sayle plumbs

the hidden depths of the Canadian crisis

Saint John's, Newfoundland WHEN Queen Elizabeth of Canada and other parts addresses the House of Com- mons in Ottawa next Sunday she will, naturally, speak in both English and French, the two official languages pre- scribed by the provisional Canadian con- stitution of 1982. QE I's speech from her North American throne was meant to have celebrated the acceptance of the new con- stitution, but unfortunately ratification failed to pass two of the ten provincial legislatures, those of Newfoundland and Manitoba, before the agreed deadline ex- pired last Saturday night. Just the same, in the hasty rewrite now under way, HCM is expected to call on her loyal Canadian subjects to sink their differences and dis- play their famous toleration and forbear- ance.

The very next day one of them, a certain Harry Schick, is due to continue his trial before the Superior Court of Quebec. Schick's crime: he exhibited the word `Welcome', in English, outside his business premises, the Swiss Vienna Pastry Shop in the Montreal suburb of Pointe Claire. Schick's defence is that his sign was in eight languages, reflecting the multi-cultural character of Canada as laid down in the new and impeccably liberal Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

This feeble excuse will get him nowhere. Bill 101, passed by the Parti Quebecois provincial government of the Quebec nationalist Rene Levesque, quite clearly 'Well, that all seems in order, Mr Padding- ton. Welcome to Britain.' states, in French of course, that all outdoor signs in Quebec must be in that language. The law is interpreted generously as it affects Vietnamese, German, Urdu and other tongues, and messages in those languages are displayed, unprosecuted, all over Montreal, including one whole street in Chinese. Anglais, however, is every- where a strict non-non.

When Allan Singer, a Montreal businessman, won an appeal to the Cana- dian Supreme Court against his conviction for exhibiting a sign, 'Stationers and Print- ing', pleading that Bill 101 violated his right of 'commercial free speech' as guaranteed by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Quebec government of its current, theoretically non-separatist, pre- mier Robert Bourassa promptly passed Bill 178, overriding the court's opinion. Singer lost several more appeals against Bill 178, and has gone out of business.

Martyred merchants are only one result of the Quebec sign law, easily Canada's best-known and (outside Quebec) most bitterly criticised legislation. All traffic signs, for instance, must now be in purest French. 'Stop' (universal in France) is now everywhere `Arrete' in Quebec. Motorists driving through from New York to Toron- to have to do the best they can with `Priorite au virage a clignotement du feu yeti'. A sign outside the Montreal Tourist Office explains that it is `Ouverte de 9h00 18h00 entre Paques et la fete de Dollard et de la Reine'. 'You try to figure it out,' advises Nick Auf de Maur, a member of the Montreal City Council from an English-speaking part of the city. 'I was born here and it's got me beat. What are American tourists supposed to make out of it?'

Auf der Maur, of Swiss extraction, is a prominent Montreal bon vivant and an engaging illustration of the vertiginous language politics of once-tranquil Canada. A founding member of the Parti Quebe- cois, he was arrested in 1970 as a danger- ous separatist when the Front de Libera- tion du Quebec kidnapped the British Trade Commissioner and murdered a local French-speaking politician. Last year Auf de Maur became a founding member of the

new Equality Party, which demands equal rights for French and English, as guaran- teed under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms — except in Quebec.

The Equality Party has now spawned sympathetic movements in other parts of Canada. The councils of Sault Sainte Marie (The Soo' to English speakers) and Thun- der Bay on Lake Superior have declared these cities English-only, pleading the cost of maintaining French-language schools for minute French-speaking populations. Meanwhile, back in Montreal, Colonel Sanders has renamed his product `Poulet free dans la maniere de Kentucky' (McDo- nald's are getting away with their sign because it's a proper name) and a dry- cleaning business formerly called Miss Smith's has had to cover up her apostrophe s after a visit from inspectors of the 'Office pour la Protection de la Langue Francaise', known to Montreal's 25 per cent who speak English in private as the 'language police' or 'tongue troopers'.

More seriously, the Montreal Catholic School Board is seeking permission to punish pupils who are caught speaking English in the corridors and playgrounds of French-speaking schools, which the law obliges all children to attend, unless both parents can show that they had their primary education in English in Quebec.

Councillor Auf der Maur, in a lengthy discussion conducted in a folklorique Mon- treal speakeasy, or 'blind pig', which opened for illicit business at three in the morning, told me that he was concerned about the future of the country. 'We used to have French culture, American know- how and British politics,' he said. 'Now we're getting American culture, British know-how and French politics. We're in a mess.'

WE CAN guess that it took the kindly Canadians more than a year or two to get into this mess, and a convenient, if rather late starting point is the year 1642, when the city of Montreal was founded on an island in the St Laurence river by Paul de Chomedy, Sieur de Maisonneuve. His geographical judgment has proved sound. Montreal is the second city of Canada and the second French-speaking city of the world, after Paris, where the language somehow soldiers on without the benefit of Bill 178.

Located at the head of navigation of the St Lawrence (tourists shoot the rapids through today's suburb of Lachine), Mon- treal was a centre of Indian trade long before the first habitants arrived, and the local Iroquois did their best to eliminate their small settlement. The settlers de- fended themselves with spirit and Maison- neuve's monument in Montreal has, among the supporting statues, one of an Iroquois hunting French scalps (they sold them to the English at Albany, New York) and the information that nearby the Sieur himself personally strangled an Iroquois

with his bare hands.

It is true that the Iroquois used to torture French Jesuit missionaries to unpleasant deaths if they captured them among their Indian enemies, the Hurons, viewing them much as the Vietcong viewed American advisers serving with the South Viet- namese. The harrowing Relations sent by the surviving Jesuit fathers back to France were not only prolific fund-raisers at the time but continue to be used as texts in the French-Canadian schools, souring rela- tions between the races to this day and even shaping the events of last week.

In time gunpowder and smallpox even- tually ended the Iroquois threat and the French from their base in Montreal fanned out through North America, as the names Detroit, Saint Louis and New Orleans attest. While the British colonists clung to the Atlantic seaboard, the sissies, French fur-trading voyageurs mastered Indian techniques like the birch-bark canoe and the snowshoe, explored most of North America west of the Appalachian moun- tain chain, claimed two-thirds of the conti- nent as New France and generally estab- lished an excellent claim to be considered one of the two Founding Nations of mod- ern Canada, to use the current political cliche, the other being the British Empire.

This doctrine, of course, sees Canada from the perspective of European settle- ment, not so universally praised as it once was. The Canadian Indians reject both French and English as Johnny-come-latelys and point out, supported by carbon dating, that they arrived at least 12,000 years ago from Asia and must be acknowledged as the First and Only Founding Nation. It was this revisionist line that led Cree Indian Chief Elijah Harper to use stonewalling legalities last week to scupper the constitu- tional agreement in the Manitoba legisla- ture, of which he is the only native mem- ber. Rejecting the pseudo-historical justi- fication for English and French as the two official languages, Chief Harper regularly begins his addresses to the legislature in Cree, switching to English only when he has made his point. His argument is confirmed at least to the satisfaction of Canadian natives at the last-ditch constitu- tional conference of the Prime Minister and the first ministers of the ten provinces, none of them Indian, held a month ago at the new National Museum of Civilisation

'And here's one of me with Colin Moyni- han, just before I was sent home.' near Ottowa. The $340 million museum reconstructs the national history from the arrival of Viking colonists in AD 1000 to a seigneurial stone house in Old Quebec and the plans of 19th-century Toronto. A First People's Hall, planned to illustrate native culture from the end of the last Ice Age, was never built, on the ground that, at $30 million, it would cost too much.

New France, as every British schoolchild is supposed to know, perished in 1759 when the British general James Wolfe defeated the Marquis de Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham, just outside Quebec City. Abraham was not the biblical figure, but an English namesake who kept a market garden there.

Both Wolfe and Montcalm died on Abraham's Plain and the job of peacemak- ing fell to Sir Guy Carleton, later Lord Dorchester, another unwitting author of the present crisis. (Boulevard Dorchester in Montreal has just been renamed Rene Levesque, with the ingratitude nationalists so often show toward their benefactors.) Impressed by the ordered, docile society of rural Quebec, Carleton reported to Lon- don that, 'barring a catastrophe shocking to think of [he probably had smallpox in mind] this country must to the end of time be peopled by the French Canadian race.'

The bishop of Quebec having died just before the battle, the British smuggled a French-Canadian priest into France, to be duly ordained and smuggled back. (Catho- licism was illegal in Britain at the time.) The Catholic church was confirmed in its control of the Quebec school system, old French law became the law of the land. (And in Quebec pretty much still is.) The British military were applying, not tolera- tion, but the principle of indirect rule which later preserved native regimes all over the world, only to lead to revolutions in the end. The Quebec hierarchy became staunch supporters of the British Empire, and when American revolutionaries tried to liberate Quebec, the habitants helped the British regulars drive them off. The same thing happened in 1812 when the Americans once again invaded Canada. The Quebecers are right: but for them, the country would not exist.

During the fighting, American refugees from the losing side poured over the Great Lakes and the St Lawrence to territory still comfortingly British. To accommodate them, Carleton, now Milord Dorchester, assigned a tract of land beyond Quebec for a model British society which he called Upper Canada, now the province of Ontar- io. Upper and Lower Canada both had elected assemblies, governors and coun- cils, modelled on the Westminster system. In 1840 they reunited, keeping their own legislature on a basis of equality between them.

By 1867 two provincial politicians, Sir George-Etienne Cartier of Quebec and Sir John A. MacDonald of Ontario, had put together a far wider federation, which initially included the mainland Atlantic colonies, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and the tiny Prince Edward Island in the Gulf of Saint Laurence, with the promise that British Columbia would join as soon as a railway had been built over the Rockies (and incidentally created three more English-speaking provinces, Manito- ba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.) The new Canadian Federation was sea- led by the British North American Act of the Westminster Parliament and blessed by Queen Victoria, whose statues in English Canada outnumber even those of Wolfe. The Canadian delegates wanted to call it The Kingdom of Canada, but the British were nervous of American reaction. One delegate, Leonard Tilley, opened his Bible at Psalms lxxii 8 and read, 'He shall have dominion also from the sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth.' So a new political term, an ingenious halfway house between colony and sovereign nation, old world and new, came into being.

CANADA is not, however, a genuine federation, which is the second root cause (along with the complaints of the native peoples) of the present crisis. The federal principle entered the English-speaking world at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. The big American states wanted strict equality of voters by population, the smaller ones equal repre- sentation by states. Connecticut came up with the famous Compromise which gives equal weight to every individual vote for the House of Representatives, and two delegates from each state, irrespective of population, to the Senate, which shares legislative responsibility with the Lower House.

The federal system has worked well, on the whole, particularly in expanding coun- tries of great area like the United States and Australia, where money has to be spent on the frontier before there are people there to vote for it. But Canada has never really tried it.

Wily old John A. wanted a unitary Canadian state which would have been dominated by Ontario, already the most populous province. His Quebec partner Cartier reminded him of the 'individuality of Quebec' and proposed what is, in effect, a condominium of Quebec and Ontario over the rest of the country. As the most populous provinces, they dominate the Canadian Lower House, and the Senators are not elected, but nominated by the provinces in the proportion: Quebec and Ontario, 24 each, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, ten each, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia, six each, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon, one each.

These figures have been arrived at by no coherent principle, but by the backstairs jobbery of MacDonald and Cartier and the inertia of their successors. Canadians have come to regard their Upper House as a harmless retirement home for worn-out politicians. Many have spoken vaguely of reforms that would produce a 'triple E senate' — elected, effective and equal but the first serious step in this direction was taken only last week by Premier Clyde Wells of Newfoundland, Canada's third highly distinctive society.

WHEN John Cabot returned to his em- ployers in Bristol in 1497 with news of a `New Founde Lande' across the Atlantic, he reported schools of codfish so numerous that they 'sometimes stayed our shippes'. The word got round and millions of tons of cod have since been taken on the Grand Banks, still the best fishing ground, all things considered, in the world. The West Country fish merchants were against permanent settlement (settlers could fish in the winter and sell to the highest bidder), and Newfoundland has few sources of food, apart from fish, but sailors began to jump ship, and by the time Sir Humphrey Gilbert arrived in 1583 to claim 'The Rock' for the Crown he found a fish market thriving on Water Street, the harbourside of the port of St John's. Water Street is thus the oldest street in North America, St John's the oldest city, and Gilbert's claim the first establishment of the British Empire overseas.

Newfoundland has been in varying de- grees of economic crisis ever since. Dried salted cod turned out to be acceptable rations for European wars and a good source of protein for slaves in the British plantations in the Caribbean, which they paid for in rum. But peace, a shift in the North Atlantic currents or even a sunless summer soon brought the islanders back to boiled cod heads and potatoes three times a day. The Newfoundland government finally sank under a mountain of debt in 1933 and The Rock was ruled directly from London until 1949, when the Newfound- landers decided by referendum (44 per cent opposing) to join Canada as the tenth province.

Poverty, impossible communications (many of the `outports', tiny fishing vil- lages, can still only be reached by boat) and an educational system which has brought sectarian peace at the price of three separate school systems, all paid for by the province, have conspired to keep much of Newfoundland in the 18th cen- tury. People in the outports drink rum (particularly a villainous local brand called Screech) and subsist on cod and hard ships' biscuits, seal meat (80,000 are taken every year) and moose (40,000 on the island, the cause of many accidents on lonely roads). Newfoundland's statistics paint a gloomy picture: unemployment overall is 18.8 per cent, 27.3 per cent on the Eastern coast facing the Atlantic. The average earned income is 58 per cent of the rest of Canada's, less than half Ontario's. Every year Newfoundlanders draw in doles and subsidies $6,800 per head more than the national government raises in revenue here, while it costs Ontarians more than $1,000 each a year to remain Canadian. Since 1949, Newfoundlanders have been leaving the outports to find work in the mainland cities, and their outlandish ac- cents and simple ways have made a nation- al pastime out of Newfie jokes, half affec- tionate, half cruel; other Canadians, for instance, call the circle of Mounties on the back of the $50 note a `Newfie firing squad'.

Newfoundland is, in short, a pensioner of the rest of Canada, and with only 2.2 per cent of the population, not, it would seem, in a strong position to oppose the others. This judgment leaves out the stubbornness of Clyde Wells, son of a railwayman from Corner Brook in West Newfoundland (the railway has long since been closed down) who was one of Canada's foremost consti- tutional lawyers before he got into politics.

Wells undertook only to submit the Meech Lake agreement (the terms that Quebec would have accepted to ratify the 1982 constitution) to the Newfoundland House of Assembly, and made it clear that he did not approve of the agreement himself. The clause that made Quebec a `distinct society within Canada' smacked, he said, of inequality among Canadians, but Wells was especially critical of the unanimity that Quebec demanded for fu- ture constitutional changes (ironically, the same principle that gave Newfoundland its veto over the new constitution last week). Newfoundland's only hope of reaching parity with the rest of Canada and even- tually being self-supporting, Wells argued, lay in influence on the national govern- ment, which in turn depended on getting an equal vote in a 'triple E' senate. The proposed unanimity rule would make sen- ate reform impossible, and so entrench, 'perhaps for hundreds of years', the domination of Ontario and Quebec. The proper way to adopt or amend a new constitution, said Wells, was the way other federal states have done, by nationwide referendum.

Newfoundland voters may not have fol- lowed all his arguments but they shared, at least at the constituency meetings I attended last week, a suspicion of the big two provinces and a loathing of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, son of an electri- cian from Baie Comeau, Quebec, educated in French at Laval University, Montreal, and a man with an acute sensitivity for Quebec's feelings, and considerably less for those of other Canadians (his govern- ment has for instance closed down much of the passenger railway system that built the prairie provinces in the West).

Newfoundlanders' grievances against Quebec seem to merge with those against its distinguished son. Quebec buys electric- ity from the seven million horsepower generating station in Churchill Falls, Lab- rador (Newfoundland's Arctic colony) and sells it to New York at four times the price, refusing the Newfoundlanders a 'power corridor' through their well-endowed pro- vince. Ottawa gives Russian factory traw- lers a generous quota of cod on the Grand

Banks — overgenerous, they say here — so that middle Canada can sell surplus wheat to the Soviets. Mulroney has not resisted a French claim to set its own quotas of cod on the banks near the French islands of St Pierre and Miquelon, south-west of New- foundland, so that France would vote favourably on the admission of Canada into the conference of French-speaking nations, according to another charge. 'This is all the doing of that sleazebag Mul- roney', said a speaker at a St John's meeting on the constitution impasse. 'Tell 'ee to fugg art!' shouted an indignant elector beside me, much, I imagine as Francis Drake would have expressed his view of the king of Spain. The Meech Lake agreement never came to a vote in the Newfoundland Assembly, but I believe, from the demeanour of honourable and blunt-spoken members, that it stood no chance of passing.

Newfoundland is stubborn, but why is Quebec so intransigent? Again, the statis- tics explain much. Until the 1950s rural Quebec had the highest birthrate ever recorded in a human society. A decade later, the authority of the Church among French Canadians collapsed, and Quebec nationalism has largely taken its place (many of the tongue troopers are former priests or postulants). Quebec has enthu- siastically taken up the commercial culture of the Americans, and its birthrate has fallen catastrophically. At 1.4 children per woman, it is now the lowest in Canada, well below replacement level. In the past decade, Canada's population grew from 24,221,000 to 26,440,000, a gain of more than two million. Quebec's increased from 6,413,000 to 6,736,000, a gain of only 323,000, all of them and more being immigrants from Vietnam, Algeria, Haiti, Senegal and most of the other French- speaking countries. Only from France did very few come.

English-speaking Canada can readily in- crease its numbers by immigration, requir- ing only that newcomers obey the law, pay taxes and give their assent to the principles of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to be Canadians. In this, Canada is parallel- ing liberal developments in the rest of the English-speaking world. But French Cana- da, bound by racial memories, cannot increase its numbers by immigration; their immigrants did not choose to speak French in the first place, and instantly begin learning English, the language of North American opportunity. The conclusion is clear: French Canada is dying out, inexor- ably losing the long contest with English Canada, and the sign law, the tongue troopers and the hopeless attempt to reg- ulate the language schoolchildren use in playgrounds are all symptoms of a lost cause, the stubborness of despair. Inde- pendence will probably come next, but that too will be a rearguard action, achieving nothing.

There is no constitutional way out. Wells is right: a genuine federation, adopted by nationwide plebiscite is the only logical future for Canada as a united, modern nation. But Mulroney is right, too: Quebec clings to its old equality with Ontario, seeing any substantial change as another concession to its dwindling numbers, another step down the road to extinction. There is no constitutional place in Canada acceptable to Quebec which could possibly pass a nationwide plebiscite, and, as Mul- roney's failure has shown, no way a deal can be cobbled together in smoke-filled rooms, in the manner of old John A. and George-Etienne Cartier, that could survive `Ah well, that's killed another evening.' inspection by the vigilant media and the provincial legislatures.

It is, indeed, a mess, or saiete as they say in the official language. QE II's speechwri-

ters are in for a tricky weekend.

Murray Sayle has just completed a documentary film on Canada. Channel 4 will show it in the autumn.