Divorce at last? A change of heart

Back in 1997 I was invited to contribute a chapter to the 3rd edition of Mark Charlton and Paul Barker's edited volume, Crosscurrents: Contemporary Political Issues, published by ITP Nelson. I was asked to respond to an essay by David Bercuson, "Why Canada and Quebec Must Part," originally published in the March 1995 issue of Current History. My contribution was titled, "Why Political Divorce Must Be Averted," and it was placed in the volume right after Bercuson's. I marshalled several arguments against Québec separation, drawing on the divorce metaphor to note that there are always casualties in a marital breakup. I pointed to the difficulties of historic instances of secession and partition, with the obligatory allusion to Cyprus, whose experience has given me a horror of separatist movements in general. I was especially proud of this essay, because I felt I had done my part for the cause of Canadian unity.

When the 4th edition of Crosscurrents was being prepared a few years later, I was not asked to revise my contribution. Both Bercuson's and my essays were to be dropped, because the editors judged that separatism was no longer in the forefront of public consciousness. If it was not exactly "yesterday's issue," as an old Canadian politics textbook I used in the late 1980s once put it, it was no longer at the centre of the national debate. The Supreme Court's 1998 Québec reference, the Clarity Act and the subsequent return to power of the provincial Liberals in Québec City had effectively sidelined the festering issue of separation.

Now this has changed once more. The latest public opinion polls indicate that a Majority in Quebec Would Choose Sovereignty. The Sponsorship Scandal, which had discredited the federal Liberal Party in Québec, has also damaged the federalist cause in general in that province.

If the editors put out a 5th edition of the Crosscurrents volume, they may have to revisit the separatist issue and put back in its pages essays taking opposite positions on the national unity issue. However, if they invite me to revise my old essay, I may have to decline. Why? Recently I have come to wonder whether Bercuson was not right after all. I still dislike partitions and separations as a general rule. They cause huge problems for everyone involved.

However, thinking as a Christian who strongly believes in the public witness of the christian faith, I am now beginning to wonder whether the presence within Canada of a radically secularized Québec might not constitute a nearly insuperable obstacle to the progress of such a witness. Once an overwhelmingly Catholic province, this changed after 1960 as a result of the Révolution tranquille, the Quiet Revolution, which transformed the province virtually overnight, quickly emptying the pews, severely depressing its once high birthrate, ending the church's hold on much of the province's life and fuelling the flames of nationalism. Since then Canadians as a whole have been governed the vast majority of time by Quebeckers who are heirs of the Quiet Revolution and who have managed to put their stamp on the culture as a whole. Given that Québec has the second-highest population in Canada, this gives the province considerable clout at the federal level.

Up until recently I have thought it best to accommodate Québec to the extent possible within the current framework of confederation. It is with some sadness that I am coming to conclude that this may not be in the longterm best interest either of Québec itself or of the remainder of the country. If Canada is to have some chance of casting off the stranglehold of official secularism and embracing something like a principled pluralism, then it may have to find its way without la belle province.