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COMMENTARY
November 25, 2006
A nation? You?
Prime Minister Harper’s dramatic offer to the Québécois this week -- to be called “a nation within Canada”, whatever that means, by an official resolution of Parliament -- was a plain political stunt, as surely everyone realizes. It was designed to head off a Bloc Québécois political stunt, that would hurt the Tories in Quebec by introducing a nationalist declaration they could not support, without the Liberals being able to pull the stunt of painting them as separatists, elsewhere.It is sad that we have to play these kindergarten games in Parliament. It is particularly sad, for behind them is the gargantuan cultural narcissism of French Canada, which can in moments be even worse than the sanctimonious narcissism of English Canada. We may hope that this stunt does not reopen the constitutional can of worms, last exposed to contagion during the Meech Lake proceedings half-a-generation ago. We will probably hope in vain, for one cannot expect an Act of Parliament not to have legal repercussions, somewhere in our overreaching higher court system. As Lorne Gunter patiently explained to readers of the National Post, the heroic mindlessness of Mr Harper’s resolution -- conferring a “nationhood within nationhood” not on the province but on the people of Quebec -- cannot save us from logical corollaries. Either every Québécois in the country becomes a “nation within a nation” to himself, with special rights shared by no other Canadians, or the Province of Quebec has achieved a formal special status, at the expense of all the other provinces. Logic is universal, and precludes a declaration that can have a meaning in Quebec, but no meaning elsewhere. The courts will decide which of the two possible outrageous assertions will carry the day, and Lord help us when they do. We have played too long, in Canada, with the idea that vague cultural abstractions can be chiselled in constitutional stone. I tepidly supported official bilingualism, and even Meech Lake -- in the wan hope that such measures might indeed be sufficient to appease Quebec’s childish desire to have everything both ways -- to have all the advantages of full federation with Canada, plus all the advantages of independent nationhood. Had I my life as a pundit to live over, I would oppose both measures as warmly as I opposed the infernal Charter of Rights and Freedoms that arrived with sleigh bells in 1982, and has been wrecking our inherited common law order ever since. We have a problem with democracy itself, with which few of the defenders of democracy have tried to wrestle. Human psychology -- human nature, if you will -- is such, that people, male and female alike, of all linguistic, racial, and religious dispositions -- have a profound and mysterious need to be lied to. Even under quite trying conditions, they would rather not hear the truth, but instead what is comforting. On the individual scale, they are able to satisfy this deep need, by choosing false friends and companions. On the collective scale, we satisfy it by electing demagogic politicians, and believing what they tell us for as long as some superficial plausibility can be maintained. It would have been truthful to tell the Québécois, “You can’t have both the penny and the bun. You remain in Canada, you retain the same rights and duties as any other Canadians, and do what you wish on your own time. And Quebec remains a province with the same status as every other province. You don’t like that, and you can leave. For all we know you’d be better off leaving, for then you could embrace the growing-up experience that comes with having no one to whine to, and living strictly within your own means. The rest of the country might be better off, too. Or not: we’ll have to wait and see.” But this would have been disastrous politics, guaranteed to lose the Tories every seat in Quebec, and in Ontario, too. And maybe even a seat or two in Alberta. So I perfectly understand why the prime minister lied. He was just trying to tell a better lie than the opposition parties. (Given a choice between lies, I tend to prefer the one that is least consequential.) For the rest of us, one of the great advantages of not being Prime Minister, nor even Members of Parliament, is that we don’t have to lie. And if we all availed ourselves every day of this wonderful privilege, well -- I’m not exactly sure what would happen. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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