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"MAINTAINING NATIONAL UNITY
IN A PLURINATIONAL CONTEXT"

NOTES FOR AN ADDRESS AT
THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

LONDON, U.K.

MAY 19, 1998


Indira Gandhi, who knew what she was talking about as a leader of a country made up of 3 principal ethnic groups, 6 major religions and 24 major linguistic groups, saw Canada as proof that "diversity not only enriches but can be a strength". I hope that Canada will indeed prove equal to that ideal of tolerance and respect for diversity. I think that a school that has received students from throughout the world and from all walks of life, from John F. Kennedy to Mick Jagger, must be the right place to talk about diversity! A school that has had faculty such as Harold Laski and Friedrich Hayek must have a pretty good idea of what pluralism means! And a school that has helped mould both the champion of Canadian unity and former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and the historic separatist and former Quebec Premier, Jacques Parizeau, must have something intrinsically Canadian about it!

And so, I am going to talk to you about Canadian unity. At the invitation of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, I entered his Cabinet on January 25, 1996, without any direct political experience, but driven by my convictions on Canadian unity. The Prime Minister appointed me Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs. In that role, I have the mandate of advising the Government on all matters pertaining to the functioning, improvement and maintenance of the Canadian federation.

So, 1) why Canadian unity? and 2) how to guarantee it? These are my two topics today. I think they will reveal the reasons why I am very confident in the unity of my country.

1. Why Canadian unity?

Canada is a country that Indira Gandhi and many others have seen as a model of openness and tolerance, and which is admired for its ability to bring different peoples together, yet it is the only well-established democracy that has faced the threat of secession for some 30 years now.

It is easy to imagine the reaction throughout the world if Canada were to break up. It would be said that this defunct federation had died from an overdose of decentralization and tolerance -- in short, from an overdose of democracy. "Don't be as tolerant, decentralized and open as Canada was, or else your minorities will turn against you, threaten the unity of your country, and even destroy it." That's what would be said.

This is what was heard from some of the "NO" supporters in your recent referenda: "Don't give Scotland and Wales their own parliaments, or else you'll create ‘Quebecs' within Britain."

And in the U.S. Congress, which recently considered offering statehood to Puerto Rico, we heard some representatives oppose the idea of creating a "Quebec" within the United States.

I entered politics precisely because I want to hear the opposite point of view. I want countries throughout the world to say: "We can have confidence in our minorities, and allow them to develop in their own way, because they will make our country stronger, just as Quebec makes Canada stronger."

Canadians are modest folk, who have no idea how much the debate on the unity of their country is universal in scope. If a country so blessed as Canada fails to stay together, Canadians will have sent a most unfortunate message to the rest of the world at the dawn of the new century.

Indeed, Canadians are now debating what could be the most important question of the next century: how to enable different populations to live together within the same country. And while it is true that Canadians are talking about it calmly and peacefully, we have seen elsewhere that things often go very much awry.

Since the end of the Cold War, the number of conflicts within states has greatly exceeded the number of conflicts between states, according to a commission of the Carnegie Corporation, which has identified 233 ethnic or religious minorities that are calling for improvements to their legal and political rights.

According to Professor Daniel Elazar of Temple University in Philadelphia, there are some 3,000 human groups in the world who are conscious of a collective identity. And yet, there are not even 200 states in the UN. To each people its own state is an impractical idea that would make the planet explode. As former United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has said: "Yet if every ethnic, religious or linguistic group claimed statehood, there would be no limit to fragmentation, and peace, security and economic well-being for all would become ever more difficult to achieve."

Separating peoples is not only impractical, but is often a moral error. I feel it is very difficult to justify secession within a democracy. Democracy calls on us to show solidarity to all our fellow citizens, while secession obliges us to pick and choose, keeping some, rejecting others, according to criteria that will inevitably be ethnic, religious or linguistic.

Democracy, on the other hand, invites us to help our fellow citizens who are different from us, and to accept their help, and to see our sometimes difficult cohabitation as a process of learning a more complete citizenship that is closer to universal values.

It is a recognized fact that no wealthier regions of a democratic state have been known to reject their poorer regions. The separatists in Northern Italy are wasting their time. Unless I am completely mistaken, they will never succeed in breaking the solidarity that unites the Italians.

The same must hold true for fellow citizens who don't speak the same language or don't have the same cultural references. The compelling idea that should convince them to stay together is that of plural identities. I have the good fortune to be a Quebecer, and I am proud and happy to be a Canadian at the same time. I know that someone from Calgary or Vancouver will be quite different from me in cultural terms and is very unlikely to speak my language. And yet, I also know that our life in common is a learning process in citizenship, which is sometimes difficult, but which is the true greatness of Canada.

And now let me tell you why I am confident about the unity of my country. It is because poll after poll confirms very clearly that Quebecers also feel Canadian. Only 20% to 25% no longer recognize that they have a Canadian identity. I'll admit that if the numbers were reversed, if between 75% and 80% of Quebecers no longer wanted to be Canadian, I'd be worried.

And so we must promote plural identities. Let every Quebecer be able to say: "I am a Quebecer and a Canadian, and I refuse to choose between the two".

2. How to guarantee Canadian unity

To maintain national unity in a pluri-national context, there are two false solutions that I feel are doomed to failure, certainly in Canada: assimilation and forced inclusion. I believe the solution lies instead in maintaining the balance between the primacy of individual rights and recognition of collective realities, between integration and autonomy.

Assimilation was actively sought by liberal thinkers in the 19th century everywhere in the Western world, including by means of one-size-fits-all public education. They saw it as a precondition for equality of opportunity among individuals. Lord Durham, the governor sent to Lower Canada by the British Crown after the rebellions of 1837-1838, who advocated the rapid assimilation of French-Canadians as a solution, was a progressive in Britain, and a supporter of public education, voting rights, and land reform for small farmers, so much so that he was given the nickname "Radical Jack". He believed that it was all very well to be French if one lived in France, but that the French-Canadians, in an Anglo-Saxon context, would be unfairly penalized, stymied in their development, if they were not assimilated.

Assimilation has existed and still exists in Canada today, but on the whole, it has failed. Francophones and Anglophones learned first to tolerate each other, then to better respect each other, and then to help each other, and that difficult learning process, although it has had its dark moments, made them better disposed to welcome new citizens from throughout the world.

Now let's look at forced inclusion, that is, prohibiting secession. A number of democratic states prohibit secession in their constitutions, explicitly or implicitly. They believe that every portion of the national territory belongs to all the citizens of the country, which is thus indivisible.

This principle is defensible, but one needs to ask nevertheless whether a democratic state can keep against its will a population that is concentrated in one part of its territory and that very clearly wants to leave.

In Canada, we believe that our country would no longer be what it is if it were not based on a voluntary decision by all of its component groups to remain Canadian. None of the political forces in Canada want Quebecers to be held in Canada if it is against their clearly expressed will. The Government of Canada believes, however, that it has a duty to ensure that secession does not occur without the assurance that this is very clearly what the population wants. The Government of Canada has asked the Supreme Court to specify whether the separatist government now in power in Quebec has the right to effect independence unilaterally. The Government of Canada believes that this claim by the Government of Quebec has no legal foundation, and certainly no moral foundation.

Another false solution, in my opinion, is what I would call "internal separatism", which consists of giving separatists everything they want inside the country, hoping that they will lose interest in separating. For Canada, a federation that is already very decentralized, this would mean gradually handing over almost all public responsibilities to the Government of Quebec. It is hoped that the vast majority of Quebecers would thus be satisfied with such broad autonomy, and the separatist hardliners would be marginalized.

I believe it would be mistaken to follow such a strategy. Every new concession made to appease the separatists would lead Quebecers to withdraw ever further into their territory, to define themselves by an exclusive "us", to see other Canadians increasingly only from afar, and to reject the Canadian government, common Canadian institutions, as a threat to their nation, a foreign body. This is not the right way to promote plural identities.

Moreover, every concession made to one province would spark jealousy in the other provinces, which would call for the same powers in turn, leading in fact to a sort of balkanization. And yet if the federal government refused to grant the other provinces the same powers as Quebec, it might give rise to a powerful backlash.

"Internal separatism" is a strategy that is doomed to failure; it cannot make a country work in unity. To be sure, a human group concentrated in a territory which is conscious of a collective identity, as a people or a nation, must have an autonomy, institutions in which it can recognize itself. But at the same time, if the concept of plural identities is to have any meaning, those citizens must also feel that they are members of the country as a whole. They must feel solidarity with their fellow citizens, in complementarity with them. They must play their role in common institutions. They must be invited to see life in society other than through the single grid of their nationalism.

For a while in Canada, we lost that balance to be maintained between autonomy within a country, on the one hand, and solidarity throughout the country, on the other. And we lost it in connection with what is perhaps the most sensitive issue in this whole situation: the issue of identity. Following various rounds of constitutional discussions, a proposal was put forward to recognize Quebec as a distinct society within the Canadian Constitution. That proposal failed to be ratified in June 1990, with a substantial proportion of Anglophone Canadians seeing it as a source of privilege that would give Quebecers the upper hand in the federation.

But many Quebecers saw that constitutional failure as a rejection of their identity and their culture. The independence option then took an unprecedented upturn. The Quebec leaders in favour of Canadian unity wanted to counter that separatist upswing by demanding of the rest of the country a massive transfer of powers from the federal government to the Government of Quebec. That transfer was not forthcoming, making many Quebecers frustrated and disappointed as they went to vote in the referendum on October 30, 1995. Almost half (49.4%) voted YES to Quebec sovereignty, albeit on an ambiguous question, with the separatist vote artificially inflated by a protest vote. In fact, the polls showed that many YES voters hoped that their vote would improve Quebec's place within Canada.

Today, two and a half years later, the polls show that, even with the same ambiguous question of October 30, 1995, support for secession hovers around 40% in Quebec. Secessionnists would get even less support with a clear question on separation. Two thirds of Quebecers say they do not want another referendum. The Liberal parties, which support Canadian unity, are leading the separatist parties in the polls, both federally and provincially.

Of course, polls are polls are polls, and variations can be linked to specific current events, such as the fluctuating popularity of leaders. Nevertheless, I believe that a fundamental change has been gradually taking place over the past two years. We have returned to a better balance between Quebecers' need for autonomy and their desire to feel that they are an integral part of Canada.

Canada is doing better economically, and that recovery has been spearheaded by Quebecers: Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, Finance Minister Paul Martin, and Treasury Board President Marcel Massé. Natural disasters in Quebec and Manitoba have led Canadians to demonstrate their powerful solidarity with one another. Improvements have been made to the way the federation works, not to please separatist leaders but to improve the capacity of the governments of Canada and of the provinces to work together within their respective jurisdictions. The other provinces have adopted a declaration recognizing Quebec's unique character and the equality of status of the provinces; while this declaration is not a legal text, it is seen nonetheless as a positive step toward reconciliation.

At the same time, a debate has been initiated on what secession would mean, how it would be effected, and what consequences it would have on relations between Quebecers. For too long, secession has been described as a negotiation between two monolithic blocs: Quebec and Canada. It is now increasingly seen as a source of division between Quebecers, where Quebecers who no longer wanted Canada would try to take it away from those who wanted to keep it. More and more, Quebecers are aware that this would be a difficult process.

Conclusion

Often, authoritarian regimes only put a lid on ethnic hatreds. Once the authority disappears, the conflicts resurge as if they had never stopped. It may be, conversely, that a democracy cannot survive over decades without forging genuine ties between its populations. Those ties should be able to hold plural identities together.

The German philosopher Herder wrote that "the most natural state is one nationality with one character." I don't know what a natural state is, but I know that a country gains in humanity when it draws on the best of what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, a Quebecer, calls "deep diversity".

Of course the Quebec people exists. So does the Canadian people. The vast majority of Quebecers have the good fortune to feel that they are members of both peoples at the same time. It would be a grave error for them to see that dual allegiance as a source of tension, an anomaly, a contradiction to be resolved.

In Canada, we often talk about the "two solitudes" to describe the difficulties between Francophones and Anglophones. We have forgotten that this expression is taken from a letter by Rilke, who was trying to express love, rather than isolation. "Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect, and touch, and greet each other," wrote the poet, expressing this dual quest for autonomy and sharing, for defining oneself and opening up to others, which is necessary both for relations between persons and relations between populations.

In fact, in this global world, where populations are increasingly intermingled, the capacity to interiorize different cultural values, the opportunity to rely on fellow citizens who complement us in their own way, the marriage of autonomy and solidarity, will more than ever be a strength. When you are fortunate enough to have more than one identity, you keep them all.

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