Sorry PKP, Canada is real
A flight of separatist fancy to say otherwise
It’s tempting to ignore Pierre Karl Péladeau, plug our ears with cotton balls and chant “wawawa” until he stops talking. Because, after all, isn’t provocation the Parti Québécois’ game plan? Hasn’t it always been? And isn’t it always wise for patient, stolid Canada, the St. Bernard of nations, to hang back and let the separatists sputter away in splendid isolation until they burn themselves out, as they have done for oh, 40 years?
Well, yes. But honestly. Canada, imaginary? How does he figure? Péladeau said this in the heat of rhetorical combat, in response to Quebec Premier Phillippe Couillard’s assertion that separation is an imaginary solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Perhaps the new PQ leader was trying to be clever. If so, he didn’t quite manage it.
This comes from a leader who, if the legends are true — and they can’t all be true, so take this with a grain of salt — once fired an underling for wearing white socks with black shoes. Visionary, impulsive, tyrannical — these were just some of the descriptors attached to Péladeau during his tenure at the head of Sun Media, where I worked for a time. The man has dash. That’s not up for debate.
But for a Quebec separatist to cast Canada as “imaginary,” from the grand promontory of his bully pulpit within an intellectual edifice that is itself full of holes, is distinctly odd. It suggests a disregard for the facts that goes above and beyond the well-worn PQ standard.
The first fly in the ointment is the federal Clarity Act, which received royal assent on June 29, 2000, and is the law of the land. Section 2 (4) reads: “The government of Canada shall not enter into negotiations on the terms on which a province might cease to be a part of Canada unless the House of Commons determines, pursuant to this section, that there has been a clear expression of a will by a clear majority of the population of that province that the province cease to be a part of Canada.”
The Supreme Court ruled in 1998 that the effective dissolution of the country would require, first, a determination by the House of Commons that a clear majority of a given province had voted to separate, on a clear question; and second, a formal constitutional amendment. Again, from the act: “Such an amendment would perforce require negotiations in relation to secession involving at least the governments of all the provinces and the Government of Canada, and that those negotiations would be governed by the principles of federalism, democracy, constitutionalism and the rule of law, and protection of minorities.”
Here’s what that means, put plainly: Separation is impossible. The only way it could happen practically would be by extralegal means, that is to say a revolution, driven by mass movements in the streets, such as occurred in Egypt and elsewhere during the Arab Spring.
Even with that, the Island of Montreal, anglophone pockets in the Eastern Townships and big swaths of Quebec’s north, homeland of the Cree and the Inuit respectively, would likely opt to stick with Canada. Ottawa would be legally, morally and politically bound to protect its citizens. Therefore this would be a cataclysmic mess at best. Unless PKP has a magic gambit up his sleeve, one no previous PQ leader has happened upon, the dream of independence is unattainable.
Obstacle 2? Quebecers understand obstacle 1, which presumably is one reason why they voted en masse to reject the Parti Québécois and its charter of Quebec values, in last spring’s provincial election. The PQ was reduced to 30 seats and the scandalplagued Liberals took 70. The charter was to be the lever that hoovered soft nationalists into the separatist camp and it failed, miserably.
Obstacle 3, which is like a bell tolling: Young people, once the separatist movement’s soul, are not interested. In a CROP survey of Quebecers aged 18 to 24 taken less than a year ago, just under 70 per cent of respondents said they’d vote no in a referendum. And there’s obstacle 4, not to be downplayed: Péladeau is notoriously mercurial. His notion of a town hall is a monologue. During his Sun Media days (he has since sold the newspaper chain to Postmedia) his tirades were the stuff of myth. Temperamentally, PKP may be ill-suited for modern politics, which occurs in a fishbowl.
At root, this is the separatist proposition: This eccentric fifty-something billionaire, who has known only privilege and unquestioning obedience for most of his life, is to somehow transform a dwindling army of grizzled true believers into a mass movement capable of ending one country and launching another. Ah, really?
Anything is possible, one supposes. But is it likely? In the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s this seemed an urgent and real debate. In 2015, based on the overwhelming weight of evidence, it’s a vanity project. Imaginary is an apt word. But it applies to PKP’s quixotic quest, not the entirely real country he spurns.