Short term gain, long term pain.
It all began with Ignatieff's ill-advised comments about Quebec being a nation and the divisiveness that introduced into the Liberal leadership campaign. The Bloc Head, seeing another chance to toss a little sand in the gears, put forward a motion that Parliament recognize the Québécois as a nation. The Liberal caucus could not be seen as not supporting that without losing support in Quebec. Then along comes Harper to add "within a united Canada" to the motion. He saves Ignatieff's and the Liberal convention's dilemma, he pre-empts the Bloc, and produces a motion all parties in the House but the Bloc can support. Bully for him.
But, no unambiguous definition of nation is possible. Harper's motion uses it as a cultural, linguistic, and sociological term, and it's significant that it's the Québécois being identified as a nation, not Quebec. The Québécois have self-identified as a nation for years in that sense, just as Canada's aboriginal people have done. The Bloc Québécois and the Parti Québécois want to use nation to mean an organized independent political and geographic entity as well. It won't be long before they're spinning it to mean whatever they want and trying to intimidate the rest of us into giving them what they want. Somebody will claim that Parliament recognized Quebec as a nation, for instance, and try to lever that into greater delegation of powers to the province.
In fact it's happening already. Today's (23 November 2006) Toronto Globe&Mail newspaper was already muddying the waters. Several columnists failed to make the distinction between Québécois and Quebec, though the lead editorial got it right and talked about exactly the issues I've raised here. The editorial cartoon was a drawing of Harper opening a can of worms.
But it just re-opens that ugly and divisive existential debate about national unity that never solved anything, and gives new impetus to the separatists. It's quite clear from every poll I've ever seen that Quebecers, given a clear question about independence and sovereignty and whatnot, would not vote for separation. The only reason the last referendum was as close as it was was because the question was extremely convoluted and people like Bouchard and Parizeau were dissembling about what it meant, and what they'd do if they got a yes on it.
I'm fed up with this issue. It's dominated the national agenda all my adult life, sometimes to the exclusion of more important things. Hard core separatists are a minority, and will probably never go away, but we've granted them far more power and influence than their numbers would justify.
ukeright:
