Regarding Quebec, stop believing the prophets of doom
MONTREAL—Before invoking the name of Pierre Trudeau to justify a political battle against Quebec’s new language and constitutional policy, it would be worth remembering that the late prime minister’s take on the consequences of Bill 101 in 1977 turned out to be very far off the mark.
The same can be said of most of the prognostications of the doomsayers who have spent the past decades raising red unity flags at every turn of the Quebec constitutional and linguistic debates.
Take Pierre Trudeau, whose son was accused this week of having caused the former prime minister to roll in his grave by declining to take up arms against the Quebec government’s bid to amend the Constitution.
It is true that Trudeau the father had little time for Quebec’s language laws or for its aspiration to have its distinctiveness enshrined in the Constitution.
But infallible he was not. Back when Bill 101 was introduced by the Parti Québécois in 1977, he warned it would plunge the province into obscurity and lead to an ethnicbased society.
As it turned out, the opposite happened. Channelling immigrants to the province’s French-language school stream resulted in a more diverse francophone society.
It is not an accident that the younger generations of Quebecers — those who were raised in that more-culturally secure but also more diverse French-speaking education environment — tend to also be much less inclined to support sovereignty or to see Canada as a threat to their collective identity than their elders do.
Moving on from Bill 101 to the 2006 introduction by Stephen Harper in the House of Commons of the Quebec nation resolution, here again, forecasts of a unity Armageddon turned out to be anything but prescient.
Andrew Coyne, my panel mate on CBC’s “At Issue,” warned that the adoption of the motion spelled the end of Canada as we knew it.
The Star’s editorial board predicted it would embolden Quebec’s separatists and lead to bitterness and division in the country.
Instead, over the 15 years that have elapsed since that House of Commons vote, peace of a sort has broken out on the Quebec/Canada front,
The most significant change on the unity landscape has been the fading away of the Parti Québécois.
Quebec’s once proud sovereigntist party now sits in fourth place in the national assembly, with little or no prospect of a recovery in the next provincial election.
Some observers believe its days may be counted.
Over the same period at the federal level, Canada’s national parties have carved a larger place for themselves on the Quebec electoral battlefield. Harper’s Conservatives grew strong roots in the francophone strongholds of the Quebec City area.
The NDP was the dominant federal party in the province for almost one third of the last 15 years.
Under Trudeau, the Liberals have staged a comeback in francophone Quebec.
Earlier this year, a Mainstreet poll showed that seven out of 10 supporters of Quebec’s governing party, Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), voted for one of the federalist parties in the 2019 federal election. There are reasons why the word coalition is part of the name of Premier François Legault’s party.
Notwithstanding the prophets of doom, Quebec over the past decade has become less polarized along the sovereigntist/federalist axis than at any time in its recent history.
That is not to say that it’s not perfectly legitimate — to borrow the phrase used by the prime minister earlier this week to describe Quebec’s latest constitutional bid — to debate the merits of the province’s plan.
Ditto in the case of Legault’s pre-emptive use of the notwithstanding clause to shelter sensitive legislation from court challenges based on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
And while the debate over Bill 96, as the new language law is known, has only just begun in the National Assembly, given that the Bloc Québécois plans to bring the issue to the Commons, parliamentarians should not ignore the invitation to discuss it.
In time, the Supreme Court will almost certainly get to determine whether, as the CAQ argues, it is playing by the rules of the Constitution or whether as its critics allege, it is drawing well outside the lines.
Meanwhile though, it would be useful for the prime minister to share his government’s full legal analysis of the province’s proposed amendments.
Trudeau says he has advice that backs Quebec’s contention that it can amend the Canadian Constitution to recognize the province as a nation and French as its only official and common language without securing the support of the other provinces or Parliament
Surely the same jurists must have provided him with an opinion as to the potential impacts, if any, of Quebec’s proposed unilateral changes.