An Indepedent Quebec - 15 June 1990

I sincerely hope that you're breathing a little easier after the settlement of the Meech Lake Accords.

I pause. I must relieve you at once of any embarrassment – I can actually see the blank faces, the look of guilty puzzlement which greets that sentence.

No need to feel guilty. I regret to say that any audience of listening Americans would feel equally baffled, equally stupid. Because Americans know as little about Canada as Britons or Europeans, perhaps less. Why this should be so, I've never been able to work out.

Canada is the closest neighbour, is the chief trading partner of the United States, like the United States, derives most of its laws, and many customs, from Britain and talks American English.

It may be that Americans' woeful ignorance of Canada is a kind of compliment. They look on it as almost another state, one of their own, as they look on one of the big western states, Montana or Idaho.

They know it's up there to the north and it's big. I think they'd be surprised to know that it's the second largest country, after China, in the world.

An old American sociologist who's taken a special interest in Canada says, "Americans think of Canadians as Americans who live in another house across the street, rather than in the same house, or in the same family compound".

When, if Americans ever think of Canada, and I must say that in 50-odd years of listening to them I don't recall a single evening that turned into talk about Canada, its people, habits, political system. When they think of Canada, they most likely call up images implanted by travel brochures and by one famous movie, musical, Rose-Marie – the good old Mounties, the Canadian Pacific Railroad, the maple tree and its syrup, some vague picture of a great strip of tundra, lakes and mountains.

Tourists will fondly recall, in the west, the splendid mountain landscape of Lake Louise and Banff. In the east, the majestic float down the Saint Lawrence River, and the quaintness of Montreal, Montréal, the surprise of French-speaking Quebec.

Quebec, Québec, where by law all the public signs, items for sale, ballot forms, printed ads of any kind, a ferry ticket, a pack of cigarettes, the debates in the provincial legislature, must be in two languages, French and English.

Quebec is the root of the present troubles, the centre of rebellion. The province that 10 years ago narrowly voted down a move to separate from Canada and that, just now, threatened to secede as an independent nation if the other provinces did not agree, from now on, to look on Quebec as something special, to grant it distinct status.

Over last weekend, the provincial governors met and all of them, except one, agreed to yield to Quebec's demand to be considered a foreign-speaking entity in the Canadian Confederation.

Now this may sound, when you first hear about it, a perverse, whimsical political gesture, like say a movement on the part of the Welsh to ban the speaking of English. Not at all. It's a heartfelt expression of the fear of the people of Quebec, a majority of whom are French-speaking, that French will, as in the rest of the provinces, begin to fade out.

The Canadian Constitution establishes both languages as equal in the whole country and assumes that French will be the main language of Quebec. But the birth rate there is declining and the new immigrants there, as elsewhere, are usually English-speaking, accordingly Anglo-Canadians are beginning to dominate the province's economy.

Last weekend's accords, which kept Quebec in the nation but gave it a unique special status has not, by any means, weakened the threat of secession or sweetened the bitterness between the English and the 60% of all Quebecois want to separate from Canada.

The old separatists teach the young about what was, to them, a great day in the history of Quebec. The day in 1967 when President, once General, De Gaulle, was abruptly asked to cut short his visit to Canada after he gave a speech in Montreal that shocked the nation with its final sentence, "Vive le Québec libre!" – Long live free Quebec!

To the English-speaking majority of Canadians that was the day of mischief. I don't suppose there's another old newsreel clip that's played more often on Quebec television than that speech.

If the present majority of Quebecois in favour of secession, stays steady or increases, then the Quebec Party, the Parti Québécois, will win the next election, and its declared aim is to set up an independent nation.

This would not mean simply one odd man out. Quebec is a buffer state between the land mass of middle and western Canada and the Atlantic provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia which, if Quebec left the union, would become marooned, hundreds of miles from English-speaking Canada, rather like the isolation of old Pakistan.

Canadians are well aware of the possible effects of this rift and many serious Canadians doubt if Canada can then remain intact as a nation. A substantial number of Canadians, not by any means the majority or a powerful force yet, have said that the best thing left for Canada, if it broke up, would be for the remaining provinces to seek to join the United States.

That alarming idea, as you might guess, has been the main item of news reported on the American networks about this crisis of Canadian sovereignty.

Always, I ought to say, with the exception of public television's nightly MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour which gave a whole week to this crisis and which is unmatched by any other English-speaking news programme I know, for its clear exposition of the news and issues around the world, and its thoughtful probing of them, not by prominent journalists but by the statesmen and the experts immediately involved.

Now, before any American gets heady with the prospect of Canada becoming a 51st state, we ought to note that the Canadian opposition to the idea, would be, just now anyway, probably overwhelming. Canadians do not think of themselves as alternative Americans.

By physical association and by long, shared history as North Americans, they have, of course, much in common. Their climate, for one thing, has made them enjoy, or suffer, the same winter and summer extremes, and so the physical devices to guarantee comfort, not to say survival, are much the same, by way of clothing, transport, air-conditioning, home and office heating, domestic architecture, snow ploughs.

And by long and close association with America and its teeming products, similar preferences in foods, amusements, television. The four American networks, the three commercial ones and the American public television network are all available along and just above the 3,000 mile border where most of the 25 million Canadians live.

After a train trip once from Toronto to Ottawa, I wrote that the only certain sign that I was in Canada and not the United States was that if you walked into a railroad car and shouted, "Duncan" and "Stuart", ten men would leap up. Their names would be Robert Stuart or Stuart MacNeil or Colin Duncan or Duncan Fraser or some other Scottish combination.

And then moving into the fringe of the great wastes to the north, it occurred to me then, and it was in the way of admiration, that only the Scots would have had the gall and the guts to knot a lifeline along 3,000 miles of tundra, which is why the four million square miles of Canada house only 25 million people and the three million square miles of the country to the south support a population of over 250 millions.

Canadians, too, have a system of government which, in their view, combines the best of the American federal system and the British parliamentary system. They have a Constitution drawn in many ways along the lines of the American Constitution, with one important difference. The powers not expressly given to the provinces are reserved to the national government – the exact opposite of the American system.

Canada has a House of Commons, and also a Senate. But it's not so much pride in the structure of their government that makes Canadians prefer to remain Canadian, it's differences between the two societies which, in their view, come down in their favour.

Canada is much more completely a welfare state. They spend much less than the United States on healthcare, but it goes to the whole population. Some provinces have moved, and others will follow, to strict laws which pay women at the exactly same rate as men for the same degree of skill.

The trade unions in Canada are still a very powerful force, while in the United States they have declined dramatically in membership and political clout. You'd think that in a land which composes such a huge and nearby wilderness, Canadians would be more zealous than rural and western Americans to assert a right to bear guns. But Canada, across its whole length and width, has extremely strict gun control laws.

If there's one thing more than another that would make the ordinary Canadian think twice about joining the union to the south, it's the hard fact that the murder rate is barely a quarter of the American rate. And the general crime rate, while not negligible, is very much lower.

Now there is also, as you might guess, much ignorant prejudice and bigotry against America. Overall, a rather complacent conviction that Canadians are quieter, less materialist, more deferential to authority.

But popular prejudice apart, there are demonstrable good reasons for Canada's pride in its system and heritage, to make it unlikely, even in the break-up of the Confederation that it will, any time soon, become the 51st state.

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