Dear Quebec, do we need to do this again?
Two decades of constitutional angst is plenty
Waves of nostalgia, waves of dread, waves of ennui: to read the government of Quebec's new list of old demands for constitutional change is to return to a world I had thought we left behind. I lost a good part of my youth to the Twenty Years War over the Constitution, 1980-2000; the thought of wasting the rest of my career in the same way is too horrible to contemplate.
What is astonishing — beyond the suicidal madness of the whole exercise — is how little has changed. It's all there in the document (“Quebecers: Our Way of Being Canadian”), much of it written in that familiar, exalted style known as Nationalist Baroque, in which Quebec is forever serenely marching towards its rendezvous with destiny and whatnot.
There is the same tendentious history, the same omission of inconvenient facts or contrary interpretations. Thus for example the “compact theory” of Confederation is treated as if it had some significance to the people who actually negotiated it, instead of being dreamt up in subsequent decades to rationalize the ambitions of the premiers of Ontario and Quebec. Thus George-Etienne Cartier is quoted reassuring his compatriots that Confederation offered protections for the “French Canadian nationality,” without also mentioning his belief, proclaimed on more than one occasion, that it would give rise to a new “political nationality,” singular, that would transcend, without diminishing, our cultural and linguistic differences.
There is the same constant, unstated assumption that whatever is in the interests of the government of Quebec is in the interests of Quebecers, and its corollary, that only the government of Quebec can speak for Quebecers: the sole basis for the specious complaint that Quebec has not “signed” the 1982 Constitution, as if that were necessary. Thus the story is recounted yet again of the Great Betrayal of patriation, wherein an alien constitutional vision was imposed on Quebecers by … a federal government headed by a Quebecer, with the support of 72 of the province's 75 members of Parliament. Oh, right: them.
There is the usual heads-we-win, tails-the-federation-loses approach to the division of powers: any exercise of federal jurisdiction that gets up the government of Quebec's nose, as through the federal spending power, is an unconscionable violation of the Confederation bargain, whereas Quebec may blithely expand into any jurisdiction it likes, even those — foreign affairs, say — that are explicitly federal. And there is the same endless moving of the goal posts, every new concession simply becoming the platform on which to build demands for the next.
When the Harper government passed a motion in the House of Commons a decade ago recognizing “the Québécois” as “a nation,” those of us who warned it would not end there — including Michael Chong, who resigned his cabinet seat in protest — were treated as antiquarians and nitpickers. This was surely — the phrases are always the same — pure symbolism, mere recognition of a sociological fact. If it made people happy, where was the harm? And with the decline of separatism, it seemed there might be something to it.
But it is always when separatist fortunes are at their lowest that federalists throw them a lifeline. When Meech Lake was first sprung upon the public, support for sovereignty was at historic lows. By the time it and its successor, the Charlottetown Accord, had come and gone, the separatists were within a half a percentage point of winning the referendum.
And so, having learned exactly nothing from the experience, the Quebec Liberals are back with almost exactly the same demands as those that nearly tore apart the country 30 years ago: a constitutional veto, effective control over appointments to the Supreme Court, constitutional limits on the federal spending power, constitutionalization of its current role in immigration, and … why no, it's no longer the “distinct society” clause, through which lens the courts are to interpret the entire Constitution. The phrase now is “the Quebec nation.” After all, hasn't Parliament already voted to recognize it?
Aside from the slippery rewriting of the province's “historic demands,” there is also the slippery rewriting of the phrase itself. The Harper-era resolution was specifically worded to say, not Quebec, but “the Québécois,” meaning the province's Frenchspeaking majority. The new demand is for constitutional recognition of Quebec as a nation — less sociological fact, more nation-state. Lest there be any doubt as to what kind of interpretive weight this would have, the document goes on at some length in praise of the principle of “asymmetry,” wherein some provinces exercise powers not given to others.
What's wrong with that? Don't we already have examples of asymmetry in our governing arrangements? Yes, we do, most of them illadvised. But there's a limit to how far you can stretch that elastic. The objection to asymmetry isn't a mulish insistence that every province is like every other. It's that, past a certain point, it is unsustainable.
People in the rest of Canada would not stand for members of Parliament from Quebec legislating for them — raising taxes, say — in matters over which Parliament has no jurisdiction in Quebec. Federalism is about diversity, yes: that's an argument for leaving certain matters to provincial jurisdiction, not for recognizing federal authority in some parts of the country but not others.
Oh God. I'm doing it again, aren't I? I've gone back 30 years myself. The same debates, the same fallacies, the same doubletalk, and all of it just as pointless and unnecessary as ever. There is no problem these proposals would solve, no power Quebec needs it does not already have. There is only the inexhaustible self-importance of its political class. How about we just don't?