Stephen Carter, the prime minister of Canada, stunned the country last month when he proposed a resolution recognizing that the seven million “Québécois form a nation within a united Canada.” Anyone who has traveled to Montreal or Quebec City will recognize that Mr. Harper was merely stating the obvious, at least where the term “nation” is concerned. But for Canadians, Mr. Harper’s words reopened a long, tortured debate over national identity, and recast it in stronger terms than ever.
The background to his declaration is, of course, Quebec’s secessionist movement — strong enough to have monopolized Canadian politics for the last 50 years, but not quite strong enough to actually win a referendum on independence. The struggle has largely been a war of words.
Since the 1940s, Canadians have been looking for the right word — some say formula — to answer the question: “What does Quebec want?” For the last 20 years, the thinking has been to give Quebec some kind of recognition.
In 1990, many believed the Meech Lake accord held the answer to this riddle. Promising constitutional protection for Quebec’s efforts to preserve its French language and culture, the accord was an attempt to re-integrate Quebec into the constitutional family (although Canada’s Constitution was repatriated from Britain in 1982, making Canada a fully independent country, Quebec has still not signed it). The accord, however, got stuck when a debate started over the significance of two words, “distinct society,” a phrase intended to satisfy Quebecers’ desire for recognition without alienating everyone else.
When a significant segment of the Canadian population disapproved of the accord, arguing that it gave French Canadians too much power, some provincial governments refused to ratify it, and Canada nearly broke up. In 1995, the separatist Parti Québécois, which controlled Quebec at the time, came up with its own solution: a provincial referendum on separation based on perhaps the wordiest — and most ambiguous — question ever formulated. Separatists lost the vote by only a narrow margin.
In 2000, the national Liberal government rebounded with the Clarity Act, which it thought was a foolproof formula to prevent separatists from taking advantage of an ambiguously worded question to win an independence referendum.
But now, Stephen Harper has created new ambiguity in the question — all the more interesting since he probably thought he was clarifying things. And he was so hasty in pulling this rabbit out of his hat that he didn’t even consult his minister of intergovernmental affairs, who later resigned over the issue. Yet Parliament voted resoundingly in favor of his resolution.
This suddenness had a lot more to do with political maneuvering than an awakening to Quebec’s aspirations for statehood. Mr. Harper, a Conservative, saw a good opportunity to steal some thunder from the separatist parties and to increase his popularity in Quebec — much reduced by his opposition to same-sex marriage, his refusal to respect the Kyoto accord and his support for Israel during the war in Lebanon last summer.
Since the “nation” declaration, politicians and columnists have been dissecting and debating the word, and they probably will for decades to come, since French Canadians tend to see Canada as a country made up of two nations, while the English tend to think that “country” and “nation” are one and the same. Mr. Harper used the French term Québécois rather than Quebecer in the English version of the resolution, and everyone is puzzled by the choice and hesitant about its possible implications.
Some critics wonder if the federal government has unwittingly created a new ethnic category. Others point out that if the Scots or the Catalans can be called a nation within Britain or Spain, why not the people of Quebec?
Meanwhile, the Quebec government, led by the very federalist (that is, anti-separatist) Jean Charest, maintains that the territory of Quebec (not Quebecers) constitutes a nation, thereby refusing to associate “nation” with ethnicity. Tribunals, politicians and voters will be called on many times to answer these questions.
Nonetheless, as people living in Quebec, we feel that Mr. Harper has come up with a promising formulation. Most people in Quebec, apart from hard-line separatists, will probably be satisfied by the word nation.
And English Canadians ought to be, too, despite their resistance to the idea that Canada has two founding cultures. The problem is, ever since 1990 English Canadians have been traumatized by the failed attempts to make the Constitution acceptable to Quebec, so they are hesitating, as polls show.
Stephen Harper has created either a new basis for talks about Quebec’s status or contributed a new weapon to a nastier debate. No one has quite figured out which it will be.
Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow, the authors of The Story of French.