Thursday, April 17 The fool returns to his folly; the dog returns to its vomit. Listening to Brian Mulroney speak the other day, warning Canadians -- again -- that they must pay constitutional ransom to Quebec or risk the breakup of the country, it became more clear to me than ever: It isn't Quebec that has been blackmailing the country all these many years. We have been blackmailing ourselves. We have held the knife to our own throat.

It wasn't that he said anything new. Quite the contrary: it was the Talmudic rote of it, the uncomprehending recitation of old certainties, undisturbed by reflection or the passage of time. And it was the military precision of the political class in response, a well-drilled line of editorials in newspapers across the land, each repeating what they have all repeated many times before, the same message nearly every politician, business leader and academic has inscribed as often in the public record: we must buy the country's life with offers to Quebec.

What we have here is a suicide cult -- only in this case it is governing the country. An entire generation of Canada's elites has somehow absorbed and adopted as its own the idea that Canada has no independent right to exist.

Five centuries of history, a hundred years and more of self-government, two world wars, an honoured place among the nations of the world: all of these have earned us nothing. The country lives or dies at the whim of a distempered minority, or more precisely on the swing of a few thousand of the most confused voters on earth, the so-called "soft nationalists." The rest of us must only hope to purchase their mercy.

Think, for a moment, just how craven this is. There is a group threatening, in effect, to blow up the country if their demands are not met. And our political class can think of no other response to this bit of constitutional terrorism but to jump up and down, hands in the air, shouting: Pay the man! Pay the man!

True, it was only under Mulroney that the government of Canada actually joined in the extortion, in what must surely be the final extremity of our self- abasement: a prime minister forcing his own country, not once but twice, to beg for its life. But so long as we have indulged francophone Quebecers in the delusion, acknowledged nowhere else on earth, that unilateral secession was a legitimate option, then it is we, Canadians, who have taken ourselves hostage.

For what other reason are we enjoined to bend the constitution to "recognizing" Quebec's "uniqueness," or whatever other euphemism the political class prefers for the slow suffocation of the province's English- speaking minority? Does anyone pretend that this amendment would be good for the country, on its own merits? No. Is there some power the government of Quebec now lacks without which it cannot preserve the French language and culture? Is the status of French even mildly in jeopardy in Quebec? No and no again.

Is there some great wrong, then, for which the rest of Canada must make amends? Hardly: the patriation of the Constitution in 1982 was both legal and justified, even without the signature of the separatist premier of Quebec.

The only power the government of Quebec lost in any degree was the power, now circumscribed by the Charter of Rights, to oppress its own people. It is not surprising to find that many of the most ardent supporters of "distinct society" status in the rest of Canada are also viscerally hostile to the Charter, but it hardly makes their assurances that the clause is nothing but a meaningless "reflection of reality" terribly convincing.

We cannot begin to deal sensibly with this question until we establish some elementary rules of civilized procedure. Not every grievance is justified; not every demand must be met. Strike that: no demand should be met, so long as it is backed, explicitly or implicitly, by the threat of secession.

We are not actually obliged, morally or practically, to recognize a secession vote: certainly not one whose every feature -- timing, rules, question, interpretation, even the counting of the ballots -- is tailored to the strict designs of the Parti Quebecois. Whatever gloss of democratic principle the PQ may try to put upon it, the truth is that only the people of Canada may decide the future of Canada. A referendum in one province is no more than a propaganda exercise, to which the proper response of the Government of Canada is, as Guy Bertrand has lately suggested, sublime indifference.

Even if the will were there, anyone who has given the matter much thought realizes that a legal secession could not be negotiated; anyone who thinks much further will see that a unilateral secession bid has even less chance of succeeding. So what are we talking about? It is dishonourable enough to make offers at the point of a knife; it is something else again when the knife is made of rubber.