Quebec Crisis(3): Who saves Canada?

By winning a clear majority of seats in Quebec’s Assembly, can Pauline Marois inspire Quebec’s arthritic independence movement and return to Canada’s political stage the fear and winged rhetoric of the Trudeau-Mulroney-Chrétien years?  

Can an ordinary chauvinist in Quebec succeed where an ordinary socialist in France has failed — make punditry and politicians exciting again? Can a lifelong calculator turn Stephen Harper into a ditherer? Can the same bland politician turn Justin Trudeau into an avenging warrior? Who will be “Captain Canada”?  

The scripts are being sketched out already; once Marois wins her majority next month, Canada’s politics will be transformed. Jeffrey Simpson and Michael Den Tandt offer two tentative themes: In next year’s national election, the Rest of Canada will be thinking about Quebec when they elect either Harper, Trudeau, or Mulcair. Who the ROC favors will depend not only on the aspirant’s personal merits but also on what voters feel about Quebec.

As a blogger determined to stay as young as Jeffrey Simpson, I’m offering a few premature guesses of my own. (They are based on the assumption that Marois wins a majority and that by this time next year she will have given Canadians sufficient reason to expect that the next prime minister will face another Quebec referendum.)

One: The next federal election will not be decided over who can best appeal to Quebecers as the prime minister of Canada.

Trudeau’s empathetic personality and Mulcair’s emphatically Quebec style are two-edged. Most of the rest of Canada will want Quebecers to stay in the federation but few will pick a PM to seduce them. In addition, they won’t be entirely positive about the prospect of a new prime minister whose survival in Parliament will depend on winning and — retaining — a majority of federal seats in Quebec.

Two: The Liberals and the New Democrats will be forced to expend far more time in Quebec and take more risks in Quebec than Harper.

This will further marginalize Harper where he can’t win but will do nothing to build their credibility on economic issues that will continue to dominate suburban English-speaking Canada.

Three: Even assuming — as I do — that swing voters outside Quebec will be concerned that Quebec stay in Canada, Harper has a decisive edge.

He already has the job of "standing up" for Canada and has a successful record of negotiating as a respectful federalist with Quebec and other hostile provincial governments.

This may sound reckless. However, I don’t think Quebec will leave because they’re embarrassed by Stephen Harper’s style or Alberta’s oil revenue transfers. They refused to be impressed when our politicians were passionate about Quebec and national unity. And they’re not outraged today by Harper’s reticent personality.   

Keeping Quebec in a workable Canada is a management challenge today, not a test of Canada’s soul.

Scotland’s Quebec touch: a ‘sovereignty-association’ referendum

"Sovereignty-association" isn’t a new idea. It’s a complicated and rather unemotional concept and has been defeated before. Free trade, however, isn’t a new idea either. Yet in 1776, Scotland’s Adam Smith and his book Wealth of Nations launched it’s eventual global takeover.

In the 1960s and 1970s, nationalists assumed that if the superpowers’ Cold War ended without blowing us up, distinct societies of viable size could achieve genuine national independence. Canadians and nationalists in the province of Quebec imagined that they could manage their affairs independently of the US and, conceivably, of each other. Consequently, when the René Lévesque sovereigntist government asked Quebecers in 1980 for a mandate to negotiate merely a new partnership — ‘sovereignty-association’ — the Government of Canada responded with scorn.

It was a sleazy trick. Quebec nationalists, like serious nationalists everywhere, surely would never stick to any arrangement that would significantly limit their national power. In two referendums, Ottawa insisted that Lévesque’s model was merely a Trojan horse; inside its clapboard shell crouched wild-eyed Anglo-haters, with fascist undergarments. Pierre Trudeau would snip that his ideas were both naïve and deceitful. 

Last week, in a 667-page plan, Scotland’s nationalist first minister Alex Salmond put forward a similar sovereignty-association proposal in a much calmer time — a time when nationalist romantics are less certain and taken less seriously. Political interdependence is now the normal way groups of affluent and civilized people organize their affairs.

Two huge, loose federations — the Eurozone and the United States — manage the world’s two biggest currencies, their open markets and business cycles, while the citizens in their dozens of sovereign member states manage what they don’t assign to the two giant associations. (Canadians, Englishmen, Quebecers, and Scots prosper today, in large measure, because these two gigantic concoctions work.)

It’s unsurprising and unimportant that the Government of Great Britain rejected Scotland’s proposals before the referendum; it’s the status quo’s nature to tell us that change causes trouble. However, it’s not reasonable for resolute liberal journals like The Economist to complain that Scotland’s plan is too utilitarian and too optimistic at the same time:

“He [Salmond] would also have to negotiate EU membership, continued use of sterling, the division of Britain’s national debt, NATO membership and much else besides. Voting for independence would be an act of faith.”

Certainly, the island of Great Britain has had limited experience with federal-style government. The English political class long-believed that even their descendants couldn’t make decentralized federal systems work in North America and that "Europeans" couldn’t make them work in Europe as well. Nevertheless, the elite that will do most of the fear mongering in Scotland’s referendum debate will, at the same time, deeply treasure their international alliances and associations and the acts of faith — as negotiators and traders — that made Britain great.

If Scotland votes yes, British leaders will set their feelings aside and, by morning, start working on how to maintain every mechanism and institution with the Scots that serves their mutual interests.

"Sovereignty-association" isn’t unworkable. It simply may not be necessary for Scotland.

Fundamentally, it is just another way to think about how to encourage rigorous, responsible local democracy within a wider association. It’s too bad that on this continent it is only advocated as a way to break up federations rather than as a way to create a closer union of Canadians and Americans.

Justin Trudeau’s one-liners on a Quebec referendum

Yesterday, less than a week before a crucial by-election in Toronto’s establishment constituency, Justin Trudeau effectively ghosted editorials in both the Globe and Mail and the National Post — Toronto’s small-"c" conservative papers — echoing his deadly accusations that New Democrat leader Thomas Mulcair is playing politics with Quebec separatists. Neither opinion piece questioned Trudeau’s arguments or his persistent determination to resurrect the most divisive tactics of his father’s generation of Liberals.

Maybe it’s his cheek that’s irresistible.

Justin Trudeau is a professional politician who was raised in a professional politician’s home, and entered his father’s profession in Montreal — the cauldron of Quebec’s fight over whether to stay in Canada. He’s obliviously highly competitive, loves campaigning, and is as ready as his father ever was to get personal about the motives (as well as the utterances) of his opponents.

Apparently, however, he’s still too young to be closely fact-checked by Toronto’s best newspapers or expected to sustain difficult arguments. It’s as if he gets to decide when to stop racing with a training wheel on his bike.

For the record, anyway, here’s the story by Shawn McCarthy that informed the Globe’s attack on Mulcair for saying that 50% plus 1 could constitute a clear majority, a mandate from Quebecers — on a clear question — to negotiate with Ottawa on independence for Quebec.

“Mr. Trudeau said the Supreme Court made it clear that a 50+1 vote was insufficient to break up the country.

“And he said the court also said it would be inappropriate to set a specific figure before another referendum was held.”

Here, as reported by Tristin Hopper in the Post, is what Justin Trudeau thought on the same subject — with the same intended political target — back in February:

“'If we are going to change the Canadian constitution and the state of our country so profoundly, it should at least require the same level as that required to change the constitution of the New Democratic Party, which is two-thirds,' said Mr. Trudeau as quoted in French by La Presse."

There are glaring, premeditated errors of fact and common sense in both declarations.

Trudeau’s most recent statement misrepresents what the Supreme Court said. The Court didn’t rule against a low number or for a high number, but against the authority of a referendum to “break up” Canada unilaterally. Furthermore, it didn’t muzzle any politicians or instruct them on when to define a "clear majority" — that is, before or after the referendum vote. Appropriately, it left that political burden to them.

In any event, Trudeau’s February statement eagerly picked an asinine number on behalf of an asinine attack on the New Democrats.

Seriously: would Trudeau insist that federalists fight a third referendum in Quebec without declaring themselves on the rules of the game?

Seriously: would Trudeau end up with his earlier two-thirds super-majority benchmark that wouldn’t fly elsewhere in the civilized world or, of more immediate concern, amongst other federalist campaigners in Quebec? In fact, is that number high enough to make it much easier for hundreds of thousands of so-called “soft nationalists” to vote yes on a mandate to negotiate with Ottawa?

Editorial writers and columnists may not want to bog Trudeau down yet on the details of an issue he so clearly delights in raising. After all, another referendum is entirely hypothetical; his election as prime minister is not imminent, and, besides, Harper is still the issue.

If all that’s true, then, please ignore both Trudeau’s vicious accusations along with his own tricky suggestions.

Charter of popular values: rejecting America and Canada’s liberal revolution

Quebec Premier Pauline Marois’s proposal that the people of Quebec gather round and write a legal Charter of Popular Quebec Values feels creepy for a good reason: it is literally anti-liberal. Liberal societies protect weak political ideas and peaceful minorities, not the Behemoth.

Rural, unilingual, and traditional Francophones might be able to squeak a Charter of Values into law. However, it’s really not conceivable that Quebec separatism can be advanced by campaigns that not only drive away "the others" but also put in serious doubt Quebec’s future as a liberal society. Without a cosmopolitan and liberal base, an independence movement on this liberal continent is doomed.

(Mounting a campaign of provocation against the rest of Canada is futile. Stephen Harper needn’t and won’t escalate. Besides, he just hasn’t got the charisma to radicalize his opponents in any part of the country.)

Canada’s government puts the Queen of Canada on its stamps and Quebec’s Government puts “Je me souviens” on its license plates. Otherwise, Canadians overwhelmingly want their governments to be as republican as Boston, as secular as Washington, and at least as liberal as San Francisco.

The Pope’s political authority in Quebec ended in the 17th century, and the inexorable passing of British conservatism was effectively sealed in the next century, in the liberal revolution of 1776.

North Americans divide over borders, official languages, and the merits of living in federal states. They cherish, however, their liberal Bill of Rights and the equally liberal Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Since the 1960s, all winning separatist politicians in Quebec insisted that they were liberationists, not reactionaries. They claimed, simply, that Quebeckers could use the tools of a modern liberal state more effectively if they had a national government of their own. 

Marois’s mandate from her party, and her only chance to advance their ambitious cause, is to govern at least as well as her neighbors, and embrace — along with our currency and North American open markets — either the Canadian or the American (or both) charters of individual rights.  

Conrad Black’s fix for a Divided Federation

Our late-fall reformer Conrad Black offers a new constitutional formula for Clearing the Quebec Air. Having spent millions of his own money on commercial lawyers, he’s found a way to re-employ teams of constitutional lawyers across Canada.

“What is needed now is an omnibus clearing of the air. Any province that votes by 60% or more to secede can do so, provided that any federal voting constituency that votes by 60% or more not to secede will remain in Canada, and referenda cannot be more frequent than every 10 years. Any seceding province will assume half the percentage of the Canadian federal debt that the seceding province has as a population of Canada’s (pre-secession) population. If necessary, joint censuses will establish these figures. Any federal government assets in the seceding province will be paid for, if the seceding province wants them, over 10 years, at a price agreed by joint commissions, with a casting vote, if necessary, from the International Court of Arbitration. If the province doesn’t want those federal assets, the federal government may sell or keep them as it wishes.”

So, off you go, everybody: this marriage contract can be kept inside your wallets for easy reference; it leaches out all the love, and it makes divorce impossible.

What would have happened if King George III had sent his rebellious North American subjects off to collect super-majorities in every county in his 13 colonies?