Abomination

With the Liberals in disarray and hurtling towards a train wreck of a convention, word comes of a compromise proposal:

Liberal leadership hopefuls are scrambling behind the scenes to prevent a rupture over a potentially divisive resolution calling for recognition of Quebec as a nation. Several contenders are trying to broker a compromise that would defuse the Quebec bomb before it can explode at the party's leadership convention next month. Martha Hall Findlay, the lone woman left in the race, is floating the idea that all eight candidates should issue a joint statement making it clear that they agree Quebec constitutes a nation within Canada, but that "now is not the time" to re-open the Constitution.

This, of course, solves nothing. In fact, it amounts to endorsing the Ignatieff position. Whether you commit to put it in the constitution "now" or "later," you have still endorsed this repugnant idea. Yes, repugnant. Even as a "symbolic" statement, it suffers from being a) untrue, and b) prejudicial. Untrue, because Quebec, as such, is not a nation, at least in the sense that its proponents intend: a people who share a common language and culture. It's debatable whether it's even a nation in the civic sense, ie by virtue of a consensus among those of which it is composed. As the redoubtable Don MacPherson writes in the Gazette:

At the Liberal council meeting last Saturday, nearly one-third of the supposed members of the nation in attendance voted against the otherwise vanilla resolution recognizing them as such. Polls consistently show at least a significant minority of the province's residents don't consider themselves part of a Quebec nation. And a French-Canadian living in Quebec has far more in common with one living across the Ottawa River, who isn't a member of the supposed nation, than he does with a Muslim Arab living in Montreal, who is. But only sovereignists dare say out loud that Quebec nationhood is not yet a reality but an ideal that can be achieved only through sovereignty. For everybody else, a denial that the emperor is in fact unclothed is the ticket for admission to political debate in Quebec. Dissenters are simply ignored so that the pretense of a "Quebec consensus" can be maintained.

A Gazette editorial adds:

In the final analysis, Quebec is a political jurisdiction, rather than a nation. Sociologically, it is more accurate to say that francophone Canadians, in Quebec and New Brunswick and parts of Ontario and elsewhere, constitute a nation. Some hard questions must, therefore, be asked of those who claim that Quebec is a nation. Are any other provinces nations, as a Newfoundland MP said this week of his province? Are there nations in Canada that do not have their own provinces? Are there nations within provinces as minorities? Are Quebec anglophones a nation? How do we determine how these various nations should deal with the other nations that make up Canada?

In other words, you can only maintain that Quebec is a nation if you assume that Quebec = Quebec nationalists. That's the untrue part. And prejudicial, because to make this error you have to ignore altogether the hundreds of thousands of anglophones and allophones -- roughly one in six Quebecers have a mother tongue other than French -- who make their home in the province, to say nothing of dissenting francophones. Equally, you have to write off the one million or so French Canadians hors Québec as so many "warm corpses." Quebec-as-nation, then, is pernicious in principle, let alone as a clause in the constitution. It is a statement of ethnolinguistic triumphalism, of a kind that no responsible political leader in a liberal democratic state should encourage. At worst, it is intended to further marginalize the province's minorities. At best, it simply forgets they exist. It is also implicitly separatist. I repeat here an argument I have made before: statements of sociological "fact," even where true, take on a wholly different meaning in a political context. The word "nation" has many meanings, but in politics it simply means "us." It defines the outer boundaries of the polity, the largest community within which we are willing, as a matter of course, to sacrifice for one another, to share with one another, to trade with one another, and to accept the decisions of the majority. We might do all these things with "others," but it will always be contingent. Only within the nation is it automatic -- because, after all, it's "us." It would be absurd to put up trade barriers, for example, against ourselves, against "us." It only becomes thinkable when "us" are transformed into "them." Which is precisely the kind of thinking the "nation" nomenclature encourages. Indeed, that's why the nationalists invented it. Quebec nationalists have successfully colonized opinion in the rest of the country on a great many things: the terrible "injustice" of patriation (the 1982 constitution in fact granted a slew of powers and prerogatives to the provinces in general, and several more to Quebec alone), the resulting "illegitimacy" of the constitution without Quebec's assent (the 1982 constitution was endorsed by 74 of 75 MPs from Quebec, while provincial governments of both parties have invoked the protection of the same constitution over and over whenever it suited their purposes), the urgent "necessity" of repairing this breach (the issue took on such weight chiefly as a means of restoring Quebec's bargaining power, after the hoax of the Quebec "veto" was finally exposed -- just as the death of Meech, a document the nationalists themselves had rejected, became the pretext for still further demands, and as one supposes the current controversy will in its turn), the "right" of secession (tempered, but not repudiated, by the Clarity Act), and so on. But this is something new. Yes, it is true that federalists in Quebec -- some of them -- have been stampeded into support of the idea. In this they are only fulfilling their historic role, which is to agree on Tuesday with whatever the separatists propose on Monday, then insist that the rest of the country do likewise or risk their defeat -- in effect, to take themselves hostage, and demand we ransom them. As MacPherson writes, "God save Canada from Quebec federalists." But if the next federal Liberal leader, whoever he or she is, does likewise -- and Ms Hall Findlay's proposal would guarantee it -- it will be the first time that any federal leader of either major party has done so. (Even Stanfield's disastrous "deux nations" gambit was formally a statement, not about Quebec, but about French Canadians.) What I'd really like to hear, as Norm Spector has suggested, "is a clear statement to Quebeckers from each of the Liberal leadership candidates, in French, that the government in Ottawa is their national government, too." Too? HEY WAIT A MINUTE: Of what possible relevance is it to the present discussion, by the way, that Martha Hall Findlay is "the lone woman left in the race"?