Oh? Canada?

National Review, Nov 30, 1992 by Peter Brimelow

MONTREAL

FIGHT or switch: these are the classic options when a minority is in danger of being swallowed by a majority. In Canada, as the province of Quebec has emerged as a French-speaking state on the European model, a few ordinary Quebec Anglophones (Ottawa jargon for English-speakers) are fighting, through their own Equality Party. And many have left. But their leaders, who historically have also been Canada's leaders, pioneered a third course. They escaped into fantasy,

Canadian politics since mid century have basically been a series of increasingly absurd attempts to bribe Quebec to stay in the confederation. The losers have been the rest of English Canada, particularly the West. The short-term winners (since the Francophone Quebecois aren't really interested) have been the disproportionately bilingual Montreal Anglo elite, who get to dream up and administer the bribes--most recently, Canada's Quebec-based prime minister, Brian Mulroney.

The trees were bare and the year was clearly dying when I visited Montreal to film an episode of PBS's U.S.-Canadian talk show The Editors just before the October 26 referendum on Mulroney's latest constitutional bribe. But the heavy Quebec snow had not yet appeared--and the Anglo elite was still talking about a last-minute turnaround in the polls, although they were looking pretty stressed.

In the event, the referendum was a devastating and richly deserved defeat for Canada's entire political establishment. Mulroney's proposal was supported by all three major political parties, by every major media outlet, including the nominally impartial government-owned television network (radio talk-show hosts, being more skeptical, were ordered by federal regulators to balance call-ins between Yes and No every 15 minutes), and by massive advertising spending shaken loose from credulous corporations. But it still lost everywhere.

It lost overall, 45 to 55 per cent. It lost in Quebec, 43 to 56, but even more heavily in the West--32 to 68 in British Columbia. It lost in the electoral districts of each of the three main party leaders. It even lost in establishment-dominated Ontario, outside the Toronto metropolis, carrying the province overall by a fraction of a percentage point. The main Indian ("native peoples") negotiator denounced the result as racism, since the package constitutionalized special bribes to Indian politicians as well as other powerful spending constituencies. Then it turned out that a majority of Indians had voted No too.

I must admit that I view all this with a certain grim satisfaction. I occupy a narrow ecological niche in Canada as one of the few conservative commentators on the country. Six years ago, I published a book, The Patriot Game: Canada and the Canadian Question Revisited, which achieved a cult notoriety by arguing that it was impossible to square the Canadian constitutional circle in such a way as to prevent Quebec's historically inevitable separation. And actually undesirable--such efforts simply worked to keep the English Canadian centerLeft in power, just as the Democratic Party survives by manipulating minorities in the United States.

The whole Quebec problem (I said) was nothing more than a bone in English Canada's throat. Eventually, English Canadians will come to see the problem differently: not as, Will Quebec secede? but as, Should it be expelled? Which is what the Malaysians did with Singapore. And it's what the Czechs are doing with the Slovaks right now, a parallel so striking that almost no Canadians seem to have been informed about it.

But still, while taping The Editors, I was drowned out by my Canadian fellow panelists' cries of shock and horror when I started talking about Quebec's inevitable exit. My next point was lost in the din: that it will sooner or later dawn on Western provinces like British Columbia and Alberta, net tax contributers to Ottawa, that there is no reason to be pushed around in the Confederation when the U.S. is guaranteeing them defense and free trade.

There is some hypocrisy in the public protestations. Many members of the Canadian establishment have long been privately pessimistic about keeping Canada together. At least one came out of the closet after the referendum disaster. Journalist Peter C. Newman, the Great Cham of the antiAmerican "Canadian Nationalism" invented by Canadian liberals in the 1960s, told the New York Times's Andrew H. Malcolm that "I hate to see it, but yes. I think Quebec will drift into separatism. The Atlantic provinces have more in common with New England. Out West ... British Columbia, Alberta, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana are discussing regional cooperation."

Newman is not a serious political thinker, but he is a good gauge of what's safe to say. Of course, the Canadian elite's inhibition has led to intense cognitive dissonance, often cruelly deceiving foreign Canada-watchers. Thus, Malcolm's own 1985 book on Canada contained virtually no reference to the Quebec problem or to bribes like the bilingualism policy.