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Posted on 06/28/2006 6:02:15 AM PDT by GMMAC
Harper did the right thing
Andrew Coyne
National Post
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Gilles Duceppe is very upset. Or at any rate, he is doing his best impression of a man who has been deeply affronted. The source of his distemper? The Prime Minister of Canada, on a visit to Quebec City last Friday -- the day before St. Jean-Baptiste Day -- refused to say whether he thought Quebec was a nation.
The insolence! The nerve! Why, I've never been so insulted since last Thursday! It's just as if ... well, let Mr. Duceppe tell it: "If I went to Ottawa next Friday, on the eve of July 1, and I refused to recognize the existence of the Canadian nation, that would be an enormous scandal, and rightfully so."
As always with Mr. Duceppe, one must be careful: It's possible he was just having us on. The Bloc Quebecois leader spends most days of the year in Ottawa, and on every one of these he denies the existence of the Canadian nation -- at Canadians' expense. That he now considers this "an enormous scandal" is perhaps newsworthy, but hardly justifies his rage at Mr. Harper.
Nonetheless, a number of other commentators also took the Prime Minister to task, some of whom were not actively seeking to destroy the country. The Liberal leadership candidate Stephane Dion, for example, wondered why Mr. Harper could not have stated an obvious sociological fact. "There is no problem to recognize Quebec as a nation as long as it's the sociological definition of the word and not the legal one," Mr. Dion suggested in an interview with Canadian Press.
We are presented, then, with two questions: Is Quebec a nation? And, regardless of the answer to the first, should Mr. Harper have said so? Ah, but I have a third: Are Americans a nation?
People who declare nations to be sociological facts, which one can either recognize or not, mean they are defined by some observable sociological traits, like language or ethnicity. Quebecers, on this line of thinking, share a common language. How could anyone be so blind as to deny they are a nation?
But if that is the definition, one would be forced equally to deny that Americans are a nation. After all, they are bound neither by language, nor ethnicity, nor any of the obvious sociological signifiers. Yet they are perhaps the most nationalistic people on Earth. Clearly our original definition is in need of some work.
Quite simply, Americans are a nation because they believe themselves to be, a belief rooted not in innate or culturally derived qualities like blood or native tongue, but in the willingness of each to enlist in a common historic mission -- to be the light of liberty unto the world -- and to the political creed from which it is derived. In the the literature on nationalism, their sense of nationhood is said to be, not pre-determined, but self-determined.
But here's the thing: so is Quebecers'. The language of the majority may be a sociological fact, but the ascription of a political significance to this -- to say French-speaking Quebecers should, on that basis, consider themselves a "nation," with all that that word implies -- is no less deliberate a choice, and no less arbitrary, than the Americans'. If Quebec is a nation, it is a state of mind, like any other.
Indeed, it is one that has only been instilled by a conscious effort of propaganda, extending over many decades: the invention of the Quebec flag, the renaming of the National Assembly, the self-conscious neologism of "Quebecois" in place of "Canadien," and so on. But the more successful this campaign to convince Quebecers they are a nation has been, the more it has had to confront the question: Which Quebecers?
If the basis of Quebec's claim to nationhood is ethnicity -- a troublesome idea the nationalists consider politic to deny, but which keeps slipping out in unguarded moments -- it excludes a good part of the province's population. If language, scarcely less so. If, on the other hand, the Quebec nation is defined as a pluralistic, liberal society whose bedrock principle is the equality of citizens, how does that set it apart from the Canadian nation?
Perhaps it is true that francophone Quebecers form a nation. Should the Prime Minister have acknowledged this? We are enjoined to believe there is no contradiction between membership in the Quebec and Canadian nations, that we are each capable of multiple, overlapping identities. Which is true, up to a point. But it is not always and everywhere true: At some point the two may conflict. That, indeed is the separatist project, to force Quebecers to choose one over the other.
They can try. So, too, are others -- academics, provincial premiers, opposition politicians -- free to describe Quebecers in any terms they like. But it is no part of the duties of a prime minister of Canada to endorse a competing idea of nationhood. Mr. Harper did just the right thing.
© National Post 2006
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