What’s the harm in Dr. Couillard reopening Constitution?

One assumes that a brain surgeon, before he or she zips open a patient's skull, has a pretty precise idea of how to perform the procedure and, most importantly, why the operation is necessary.

Philippe Couillard is a brain surgeon, and former professor of neurosurgery at teaching hospitals in Montreal and Sherbrooke. That means there are probably hundreds of Couillard-trained neurosurgeons out there probing brains the way he taught them to.

So, with the assumption in mind that Dr. Couillard, as premier of Quebec, knows what he's doing when he slices open the Canadian cranium, we are left to wonder what exactly is the hoped-for outcome of the procedure.

These medical metaphors refer, of course, to the premier’s mission to initiate a dialogue with the rest of Canada on Quebec’s place in Canada. To that effect, he released a document two weeks ago titled Quebecers: Our Way of Being Canadian, Policy on Quebec Affirmation and Canadian Relations.

Couillard says the 150th anniversary of Confederation is an appropriate time to launch a profound reflection on what has happened to the deal colonial politicians hammered out back then when all of them were white men and none women or aboriginal.

If you’re looking for some breezy beachside reading this 177-page tome is not for you. However, if you want a relatively accessible condensation of Canada and Quebec’s constitutional history and the current state of affairs the document may be worth the effort to plough through, what with its 253 footnotes, citing pretty much every political scientist who has ever weighed in on the debate.

Folks get a lot of informational bang for their tax buck spent on the two-year writing project. There’s really a wealth of research and useful data in the booklet, from economic and demographic statistics, to sections on the significance of the English-speaking and aboriginal communities in the Quebec nation there’s an awful lot of that word as well.

It’s pretty certain the community of politilogues will feast on the treatise, which, though expressing a decidedly favourable stance regarding the general notion of a country called Canada, promotes the theme of a 150-year-old pact gone wrong and in need of correction specifically, the absence of Quebec’s signature on the 1982 Constitution. The document acknowledges there is a debate over “the likelihood of the (Parti Quebecois) Government of Québec accepting a compromise had negotiations continued.”

Here’s the nub: “The need to gain recognition for the Québec nation has become more pressing over time, particularly with the development of the Québec state. This need is primarily due to the fact that the constitutional rules, especially the rules dealing with the division of powers, have not followed the evolution of the Canadian Federation. While the federal compromise was at first relatively consistent with the French-canadian national reality of the time, the failure to take into account Québec’s national reality in contemporary constitutional developments has been the main source of the difficulties experienced by Québec in fully adhering to Canada.”

Apparently the difficulties alluded to can be rectified by enshrining in the Constitution Quebec’s “famous five” bottom-line demands. To wit: Recognition of Quebec as a distinct society; limits on federal spending power; guaranteed Quebec representation on the Supreme Court of Canada; constitutional veto; and, increased control over immigration. There’s been much speculation about what is driving the premier to launch such a fraught crusade, entailing crosscanada consultations, for which he has few, if any, ready allies. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, for one, to whom Couillard did not provide an advance copy of his manifesto, dismissed the notion of reopening the Constitution, wisely wary of the explosive potential of such a move.

Is it a crafty strategy to undercut the mounting popularity of the Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) who will offer a credible federalist alternative in the election expected next year? Is it Couillard’s quest for a ringing legacy, with his 60th birthday looming later this month? Or is he finally fulfilling a vow he made when he ran for the leadership of the Liberal Party in 2013.

In any event, when it comes to matters constitutional, surely Dr. Couillard knows a type of political Hippocratic oath applies: First, do no harm.