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"RESPECT FOR DEMOCRACY IN CANADA"

NOTES FOR AN ADDRESS TO THE FACULTY OF LAW

UNIVERSITÉ DE MONTRÉAL

MARCH 18, 1998


"Canada was born, 121 years ago, as the result of a process that drew on the sources of dialogue, negotiation, and openness." [translation] Lucien Bouchard, July 1, 1988

Today, as I have the pleasure and the honour to be the guest of the Students' Association of the Faculty of Law of the Université de Montréal, I have many memories of the 11 years I spent teaching political science just a stone's throw away, at Lionel Groulx Hall -- I won't comment on the name of the hall... They are fond memories, because I believe that I have always succeeded, with your help, in overcoming an even greater barrier than political partisanship, namely, academic rivalry. There is little love lost between the noble disciplines of law and political science. A jurist once told me that, outside the rule, there is only anecdote, and so political science is the science of anecdote... but I won't tell you what political scientists have to say about jurists! I prefer to think back happily on the law students I have known who have ventured into political science, on your library, in which I have spent many long evenings, and on your professors, including the one who now sits across from me in the House of Commons, Professor Daniel Turp.

I would also like to pay special tribute to another of your professors, André Tremblay, speaking as one pro-democrat to another. Because democracy, of course, is what we will be talking about today: respect for democracy in Canada.

I will affirm that the history of Canadian democracy, even with its shortcomings and its darker pages, compares favourably with the progress of democracy in other countries. There are few histories closer to the democratic ideal than the history that Quebecers have written with other Canadians. Of course, Canada can learn from other democracies; for example, we cannot boast of the most democratic Senate in the world! In general, however, democratic progress has been achieved in better conditions here than elsewhere.

March 11 marked the 150th anniversary of responsible government in Canada. On this occasion the historian Ged Martin, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, wrote:

"In the crucial combination of mass participation, human rights and self-government, Canada's history is second to none in the world."

I can think of no achievement of which a country could be more proud.

If we were fully aware of this, we would have no doubt celebrated the 150th anniversary of responsible government in Canada as loudly as the French rightly celebrated, on January 13, 1998, the 100th anniversary of Émile Zola's article "J'accuse".

We must understand the extent to which parliamentary democracy is for humanity a very recent and still incomplete victory. When I was a university student in the late 1970s, Eastern Europe, almost all of South America, a large part of the Mediterranean region and Asia all lived under authoritarian or totalitarian regimes. Even in democracies, parties advocating the dictatorship of the proletariat found a wide audience. Here in Canada, leftist theories hostile to parliamentary democracy were making inroads in the labour movement and in our universities...even our law faculties.

The wave of democratization that has swept through the last two decades of this century is one of the most extraordinary phenomena in the history of humanity. Millions of human beings now enjoy democratic rights that their parents never had. This must make us, as Canadians, see how lucky we are to belong to a country that has been a pioneer of democracy.

1. The advance of democracy in Canada

A pioneer of democracy is an apt description of our country. It is true that elected assemblies were established in Virginia in 1619 and in Massachusetts in 1634, but we followed, with Nova Scotia in 1758, Prince Edward Island in 1773, New Brunswick in 1785 and Lower and Upper Canada in 1792. It is an exceptional and admirable fact that, since 1792, our country has almost always been governed by a political regime comprising an elected assembly.

Those assemblies were elected by limited suffrage, in accordance with rather rudimentary procedures. Expanding the franchise and cleaning up electoral practices turned out to be difficult achievements for all fledgling democracies. There again, the Canada of the 19th century was a leader.

Census-based suffrage was established in Canada following essentially the same rules as in Great Britain, but because our social structure was more egalitarian and property less concentrated, suffrage was in fact less restricted in Canada.

The powers of the first elected assemblies were much more limited than those of parliaments today. Here again, Canada was at the forefront of reform. As I said earlier, the system of responsible government in Canada is now 150 years old, one of the oldest in the world. Specifically, it was on March 11, 1848, that Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine became the first Prime Minister of Canada -- which was then known as the Province of Canada -- after the coalition of reformer parliamentarians in the two Canadas that he led with Robert Baldwin convinced the Governor General to appoint a Cabinet that had the support of the majority of the assembly. From that moment onward, the legitimate link between government and governed was established. Responsible government had also been established in Nova Scotia a few weeks earlier. Those elected assemblies had powers that were quite extensive for that period, especially since, because we have never had a real aristocracy, our non-elected upper chambers did not have the same influence as those in Great Britain.

It would have been far preferable if the colonial authorities had consented to responsible government without a single drop of blood being spilt, that is, without the rebellions that were put down in Lower and Upper Canada, as Quebec and Ontario were then known. On the whole, however, the victory of democracy was achieved here under much more peaceful conditions than elsewhere, without the need for bloody revolution to abolish royal despotism or civil war to abolish slavery.

As well as their democratic dimension, the rebellions of 1837-38 in Lower Canada had a national dimension, to which the Durham Report's advocacy of the assimilation of French-Canadians reacted. But it must also be realized that the emerging liberal democracies of the 19th century considered active homogenization of their populations and linguistic assimilation to be the standard to follow, in particular by means of a one-size-fits-all public education system. In the words of the linguist Jacques Leclerc:

"The centralizing authoritarianism which consists of unilaterally imposing a single language throughout a territory and ignoring linguistic pluralism [...] was standard practice in the 19th century." [translation ]

Today, we tend to forget just how recent the value of linguistic and cultural pluralism is in democracy. Even the liberal and progressive thinkers of the last century tended to see assimilation as a necessary condition for equal opportunity for individuals. Durham, for example, while certainly a staunch imperialist, a narrow-minded advocate of assimilation, un "mange-Canadiens", was also, and here is the paradox, a liberal enamoured of equal opportunity, who was nicknamed ‘Radical Jack' at home and supported the right to vote, public education and land reform. His report recommended that responsible government be established in Canada. In the same era as Durham, one of the great thinkers in the history of liberalism, Tocqueville, sought the means to assimilate Algerians into French civilization.

What is exceptional in Canada is not that assimilation was sought, but that it was not achieved. The union of the two Canadas by which Durham hoped to assimilate French-Canadians instead paved the way for the alliance of Baldwin and Lafontaine. The English Protestant and French Catholic populations laid the foundations for agreement, rather than scrapping, as they had hitherto done too often wherever historical circumstances had brought them together. Without that agreement, who knows what would have become of the French fact in Canada? There have been and still are too many Francophone Canadians who have lost their language, but it would be difficult to find a country with a better counterbalance to the forces of assimilation, in today's world where, for the first time in the history of humanity, the number of languages spoken is decreasing rather than increasing.

We must always place ourselves in the context of the time. For example, one might feel that it would have been better if the Constitution of 1867 had been put to a referendum, rather than simply being approved by the Parliament of the Union. But the fact remains that the parliamentary system that prevailed in the united Canada in the 1860s "was in some respects in advance of any other in the world at that time" (S. J. R. Noël, Patrons, Clients, Brokers, p. 174). Even today, there are too few countries which, like Canada, were born in their modern form from an act of Parliament rather than an act of violence.

2. Five conclusions drawn from our history

If I had the time, I would continue this retrospective on our history to try to explain why Canada is seen throughout the world as a country which is one of the most respectful of democracy and universal values. But it is time to sum up and to each draw our own conclusions about the birth of our democracy. Here are five conclusions that I propose.

1. Let us never forget that the advanced democracy Canada has inherited from its history is also a Quebec achievement. It didn't come about against us or in spite of us, it came about with us. We can be proud of that. It is in this democracy that we have developed our own culture and our own spirit. We shall never know what might have happened if Canada had remained under the French regime. Perhaps Napoleon would have sold us to the United States at the same time as Louisiana to bankroll his European wars, and we would have been swallowed up in the ‘melting pot'. But history is not made of ‘what ifs'. It is in Canada, with mutual assistance between Quebecers and other Canadians, that Quebec society has flourished with its own character.

2. Let us remember that we have learned from our history tolerance and respect for opposing opinions. Especially since we are involved in one of the most difficult debates a society can have, that of secession, we must steer clear of impugning motives, demonizing opponents and voodoo politics.

That leads me to some comments on the Supreme Court reference. I will never say of those of you who disagree with the reference that you are bad democrats. I simply think that you seriously underestimate the difficulties posed by trying to reconcile secession with democracy. As fellow democrats, allow me to outline the viewpoint of the Government of Canada.

It is customary in democracy that when there is a major disagreement not only of substance, but also about the legal procedure that ought to be followed to resolve that disagreement of substance, the parties turn to the courts to obtain the necessary legal clarification. That is exactly what the Government of Canada has done in this case. It has not asked the judges to decide in the people's stead whether secession is the right choice. It has asked them whether an attempted unilateral secession by the Government of Quebec would have a legal basis, as that government claims, or would not, as the Government of Canada claims. This is a purely legal question, to which the answer, in the circumstances, will clarify the democratic debate.

The fundamental question in this case is as follows: if the Government of Quebec proclaims itself the government of an independent state, do citizens and other governments have a legal obligation to consider it as such? If, as the Government of Canada believes, the answer to this question is no, from the perspective of both domestic and international law, this is something that it is better to know as soon as possible. There are few things more dangerous in democracy than a government that places itself outside the legal framework yet still demands obedience of citizens. As law students, you well know that the rule of law is essential to democracy, whereby no one is above the law, especially not the lawmakers. You well know that majority rule is not the be-all and end-all of democracy, and that a simple majority obtained in a referendum does not give any government the right to annul unilaterally the constitutional guarantees that a country grants to its citizens and its minorities.

The Government of Quebec, for its part, wants to disregard the Constitution and yet demands obedience of its laws. It wants to portray secession as a purely political act which does not bind that government to the law, and yet, that secession would bind citizens and other governments to its conception of the law. In our opinion, that is just not done in democracy. Not in an exemplary democracy such as Canada, which Quebecers have built with their fellow Canadians.

With a clear and honest question and procedure, Quebecers will never renounce Canada. I truly believe this. Nevertheless, if Quebecers were to indicate very clearly that they wanted to renounce Canada and make Quebec an independent state, then the break-up of the country would have to be negotiated within the legal framework. That would be the only way to proceed if we want to respect the rule of law and democracy for all and minimize the serious risks of derailment.

3. Let us compare with other democracies so as better to judge our own. The hue and cry being raised about this or that situation in Quebec or in Canada as a whole is utterly surreal when compared with what is going on in other democracies. I sometimes wonder whether the way to settle the constitutional problem might not be to insert in section 2 of the Constitution: "Canada has been unfair to everyone", after which the case would be closed and we would enjoy together the benefits of our country.

Let me give just two recent examples that closely affect us Quebecers: the constitutional change of 1982 and, once again, the reference to the Supreme Court.

The events preceding the Constitution Act, 1982 can be interpreted in different ways, but the separatist leaders are dreaming if they believe that this episode from our recent history might mobilize international opinion in their favour. It is impossible to see how a constitutional change supported by every constitutional entity but one, and by almost every Quebec Member of Parliament, whose centrepiece is a charter of rights and freedoms that is admirable relative to what exists in the world, could be condemned by international opinion. On the contrary, our separatist leaders evoke incredulity when they present grievances that are so bizarre by international standards.

You know that the federal government has argued before the Supreme Court that unilateral secession is not a right in democracy. Those who condemn that position should first ask themselves why a number of other very respectable democracies believe that their country's territory belongs to all its citizens and could therefore not be divisible. They should also ask themselves why the international community is so opposed to the idea that nations or regional communities could automatically have a right to effect secession unilaterally. I suggest that it is because it would be very difficult to determine to whom that right might be granted, that such an automatic right to secession would have dramatic consequences for the international community, with more than 3,000 human groups in the world claiming a collective identity, and that the creation of each new state would risk creating minorities within the state who would claim their own independence. On a more basic level, a philosophy of democracy based on the logic of secession would incite groups to separate rather than to work at coming closer together and understanding one another.

Rather than advocating a right to secession, the international community focuses on the rights of populations with distinct characteristics to preserve their culture and have their own institutions within a larger community. In other words, the right of self-determination translates in democracy precisely into the type of arrangements provided by our federation.

4. We need to strengthen and improve our democracy, and the best way of succeeding is to do it together. Together, different populations, speaking different languages and not always having the same cultural references, have learned to tolerate, appreciate and help one another. That difficult learning process has won us international recognition today as one of the countries most tolerant and open to ethnic diversity. To separate, especially along French-English fault lines, to undo what has united us from the outset, would mean much more than the economic problems predicted by the vast majority of economists: it would be a moral defeat. We have learned too much from our history not to see that sharing this generous federation together makes us all better citizens.

5. Let us realize that our country's true greatness lies in that ability to give tangible expression to universal values. What is most admirable in Canada has less to do with what is particular to it, such as its oft-sung vastness, than with what is universal. The Canadian ideal is that of a country where human beings have the best chance to be considered as human beings.

"Wherever I see what is beautiful, what is good, what is true, that is my country."

Those words by Rousseau sum up the Canadian ideal. We must do everything to achieve that ideal, but to do so, we must stay together. We must keep Canada united and make it even better, for ourselves, for our children, for future generations of Canadians, but also for all those human beings throughout the world who love our country as a paradigm of what the world can become.

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