Just so long as we are agreed.

Parizeau, at least, has never tried to hide his beliefs. Before the last referendum, the former premier boasted that it was possible to win a majority for secession without the support of Quebec's anglophone and allophone populations -- a majority of the francophones should suffice.

Referendum night, he was embittered to discover that his arithmetic had been in error, railing that "we," the majority of francophones who voted Yes, had been defeated by "the ethnic vote." Two years later, he chose a speaking engagement in Calgary to identify the culprits in more detail. If you're scoring, it was the Greeks, the Jews, and the Italians.

For his services to sociological research, Parizeau has been pilloried across the land. Such elaborate electoral calculations, critics charge, set Quebecer against Quebecer.

It is to suggest that some ballots count for more than others; that secession is really a matter for the province's francophones to decide, leaving the rest of the population to vote in a sort of side- referendum, entitled to express their views but not to decide the result.

This is hardly a caricature. If Parizeau has never gone so far as to suggest that only francophones should be allowed to vote -- as a Bloc Quebecois MP once did -- he was not averse to writing, a year after the 1995 referendum, that Quebec was "essentially constituted" of francophones. ("Alors qu'en est- il du peuple quebecois? Il est constitue essentiellment de francophones...") In his defence, Parizeau has always maintained that he was simply stating a fact. A majority of francophones did vote Yes in 1995. A majority, indeed a very large majority of non-francophones voted No. Should he be vilified for speaking the truth? Ah, say his detractors, but why analyze the vote on racial or linguistic lines? The margin between Yes and No was barely 50,000 votes. One could as well say, based on polling data, that women were to blame for the separatists' defeat, or old people. There is no particular reason to choose language as the electoral divide, unless that is the way you happen to view the world already.

For a premier, moreover, even a former premier, these are more than mere statistics. Statements of fact, placed in a political context, become charged with a significance far greater than they would have in an academic research paper.

But this being so, it can scarcely be any more acceptable for the premiers of the other nine provinces to propose that the constitution should acknowledge "the unique character of Quebec society, including its French-speaking majority, its culture and its tradition of civil law." No less than Parizeau, they presume to define Quebec society in terms of the language and culture of its majority, as if to suggest that the rest of its citizens are mere appendages. This would be offensive enough purely as a symbolic statement, without the very real legal weight the phrase is intended to possess.

Take those two, seemingly innocuous words: "its culture." Which culture is that, precisely? Is it the culture of the Cree in northern Quebec? Of the anglophones in west Montreal? Of the Greeks, the Jews and the Italians? Or if it is, as one suspects, the culture of the French-speaking majority, which culture is it even then? Of the dairy farmers in the Gaspesie? Of the corporate lawyers in Outremont? Or if it is all of these things, a great multilingual, polyethnic cultural stew, then how is it unique in that respect?

Behind the facade of concern for "diversity," then, the Calgary Declaration is really premised on homogeneity. It is not the differences between social groups that concern its proponents so much as the desire for sameness within the group. Of course Quebec is different from other provinces, strictly as a linguistic head-count. But the claim to some fundamental difference with the rest of Canada can only be supported by painting Quebec society in falsely homogeneous terms, eliding all other social differences in favour of language, and denying even then that other languages are part of Quebec's essence, as much as French.

Parizeau is frank enough to say plainly what soft-soap phrases like "distinct society" or "unique character" try to gloss over. Quebec can only be said to be different from the rest of Canada to the extent that the differences within Quebec are suppressed. So either those troublesome minorities must specifically be excluded from the definition of Quebec society -- Parizeau's way -- or, as the premiers prefer, they must simply be ignored. Either way, the implications aren't pretty.