Canada Designing The Future

Strutting through a rippling forest of fleur-de-lis flags, some 200,000 Quebeckers staged a joyous wake for the accord that failed — the three-year effort to meet the province’s demands for special constitutional status. Time ran out on the so-called Meech Lake accord only two days before St. Jean- Baptiste Day, the traditional holiday of Quebec, and French Canadians made the most of the coincidence. Revelers and elaborate floats jammed three miles of Montreal’s Rue Sherbrooke last week, celebrating the pride and power of nationalism. “Quebeckers to the streets,” they shouted, “Canadians on the sidewalk.”

That was not the definitive answer to the question of what next for Quebec. The crowd in Montreal was venting some of the frustration that had built up during years of wearying constitutional dispute about the status of the Gallic province of 6.5 million people in the midst of a predominantly English- speaking country of 26.5 million. The fervor of the throng was real, but when the party was over, Quebec’s future course was no clearer.

With the collapse of the 1987 agreement that would have formalized the province’s right to “preserve and promote” its “distinct society,” centered on 5.5 million French speakers, Quebec remains outside the 1982 constitution. It must now decide where it wants to go: to full independence, to sovereignty inside an economic union or simply to a further loosening of Canada’s confederation. Like people from the Soviet Union to Western Europe to Southern Africa, Quebeckers will have to choose what compromise between central power and national autonomy will serve them best in the 21st century.

Most Quebeckers are perplexed. They find it hard to understand why a deal that was supported by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and approved by eight of ten provincial legislatures representing 94% of the population could have been blocked by a handful of politicians in provinces like Manitoba and Newfoundland. The answer, it seems, is not so much that the naysayers were hostile to Quebec as that they were determined that other Canadians must be granted the same recognition.

Canada’s 123-year-old confederation has been based on a “misunderstanding” all along, says Charles Taylor, a political science professor at Montreal’s McGill University. “Quebec already has a de facto special arrangement. We have our own provincial pension plan, immigration arrangements, income tax. But as soon as you say to the rest of Canada, ‘Let’s make it legal,’ all hell breaks loose.”

For the next few months, at least, no new attempt is likely, because Canadians of all persuasions are heading for their lakes and summer cottages. National leaders are counseling calm, and Jean Chretien, the newly elected head of the opposition Liberal Party, suggests that Canadians focus their attention on the pennant races of the Montreal Expos and Toronto Blue Jays. Not everyone took the advice to cool it. Quebec City and several other towns and suburbs announced they were canceling festivities marking Canada Day, the national day, on Sunday.

Robert Bourassa, Quebec’s premier, has a long record of opposition to separatism, but the abortive battle for the accord has diminished his faith in federalism. After the failure of Meech Lake, he served notice on Mulroney that , Quebec would no longer take part in constitutional conferences; instead, it will deal directly with the federal government in Ottawa. The leader of the separatist Parti Quebecois, Jacques Parizeau, hopes to form a breakaway alliance with Bourassa’s Liberal Party, but the premier’s chief negotiator with Ottawa, Gil Remillard, still refers to his job as “maintaining federalism.”

In the fall, Bourassa says, he will appoint a nonpartisan commission to begin a public debate on the province’s future. He will include members of the National Assembly, labor, business and community leaders. Though it is too early to say for sure, he does not rule out the idea of a referendum on the commission’s proposals. Next March a constitutional commission of his Quebec Liberal Party will complete an outline of the conditions under which Quebec will remain in Canada. In an interview with TIME last week, Bourassa expressed interest in the European Community, where jealously sovereign states like France and Britain are building a united economy and transnational institutions (including a Parliament) that will inevitably limit national independence.

That kind of creative thinking about political forms has become de rigueur as the 20th century draws to a close. When Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev visited Canada on his way to the U.S. last May, reporters asked him if he felt any sympathy for Mulroney’s problems with nationalism. He ducked the question with a long answer praising “national honor” but rejecting “negative” forms of “supernationalism.” In fact, Gorbachev’s troubles — with at least three of the 15 Soviet republics bent on full independence and most others demanding sovereignty — are far more severe than the Canadian Prime Minister’s.

But the dilemma in both countries has the same cause: the heritage of empire. The non-Russian Soviet republics were absorbed by expansionist rulers in centuries past and never assimilated. Quebec became a part of Canada when British troops led by Major General James Wolfe defeated France’s Marquis de Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham, a cliff overlooking the St. Lawrence river outside Quebec City, in 1759. Though nationalism is almost an anachronism in a world where economics is driving nation-states into larger units, the centuries of thwarted emotions are now catching up with multiethnic federations like Canada and the U.S.S.R. Gorbachev, like Mulroney, is trying to renegotiate the relationship between the central government and its constituent parts.

While Canada and the Soviet Union are being pried apart and the European Community is coming together, they are likely to end the process looking similar. For all of these states, war has become only a remote possibility. Economic strength has replaced military might as the measure that matters, and commerce is the principal field of international competition. In their own interest, all these countries will need to balance sovereignty with voluntary cooperation inside larger economic units.

In Canada the outcome may be, As Quebec goes, so goes the confederation. British Columbia’s premier, William Vander Zalm, has already said his province will “seek a different type of confederation,” modeled on what Quebec achieves. “We ought to be looking at what it is that might be negotiated for Quebec,” he says, “and we should be negotiating on a parallel stream.” Premier Grant Devine of Saskatchewan said last week his province too will need “more independence.”

Ontario, the most populous and richest province, which carries on $25.5 billion in trade annually with Quebec, is overtly putting economics first. Premier David Peterson quickly visited Bourassa last week to reassure all Canadians “that we will work together” to ensure that it will be “business as usual.”

That is what businessmen and officials in the U.S. are hoping for too. Two- way trade across the border last year totaled almost $170 billion. Washington hopes Canada will not break up and does not think it will. But if it does, the Bush Administration is prepared to live with whatever arrangement Ottawa and Quebec can agree on. Washington’s biggest concern is that the new Canadian entity retain its economic health. Like most Americans, officials in Washington seem to think Canada is such a stable, prosperous and rational society that it will resolve its problems sensibly.

A major change since the late 1960s, when Quebec separatism first became a serious political force, is that today no one questions Quebec’s potential ability to survive as an independent country. The province’s economic dynamism and cultural solidarity have given its politicians and businessmen a remarkable degree of self-confidence. Still, many participants in the debate do not believe a final split need occur. “When you come right down to it,” says Alain Dubuc, an editor of the Montreal daily La Presse, “Quebeckers don’t want to separate. What we need is a simplification of the relationship.” Dubuc envisions a Canada of regions rather than provinces, held together in a loose structure similar to the proclaimed goal of the European Community.

If something like the affiliated sovereignties of the E.C. turn out to be Canada’s future design, the relationship will not be simple. Europe’s growing pains show just how complicated a revised political blueprint can be. But the Community’s progress does suggest that some flexibility with the traditional concept of the nation-state may be a rewarding course for industrialized countries in the future. So when the baseball season is over, thoughtful Canadians may again be ready to turn from competition to cooperation.