Shall We Dance?: A Patriotic Politics for Canada 9780773571099

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SHALL WE DANCE?

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Shall We Dance? A Patriotic Politics for Canada CHARLES BLATTBERG

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2003 isbn 0-7735-2547-5 (cloth) isbn 0-7735-2596-3 (paper) Legal deposit second quarter 2003 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for its publishing activities. It also acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing program.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Blattberg, Charles Shall we dance?: a patriotic politics for Canada / Charles Blattberg. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-7735-2547-5 (cloth) isbn 0-7735-2596-3 (pbk) 1. Federal-provincial relations – Canada. 2. Communication in politics – Canada. I. Title. 320.471 ja85.2.c3b58 2003 c2003-900982-3

This book was typeset by Dynagram Inc. in 10/13 Palatino.

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To the memory of george luscombe

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Contents

Preface

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1 Introduction: A Canadian Home? 3 2 Responding to Conflict: Three Ways, Three Canadas 3 Who We Were 4 Who We Are

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5 Who We Could Be

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6 Conclusion: Divide and Listen 136 Notes

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Bibliography 171 Index

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Preface

They say there are benefits to a “perspective from afar.” I certainly hope so. I was living in Israel when I first began writing this book. Before that it was Britain and France, making for a total of almost seven years away from Canada. Of course that amount of time and distance can also put one completely out of touch, which is why it is, needless to say, for the reader to judge whether I have suffered that fate here. I sometimes liked to astound Israelis, and Canadians during trips home, by saying that I considered Canadian politics to be more interesting than the Israeli. To be sure, I would say “interesting,” not “exciting.” What I meant is that, while I’m a political philosopher by trade, the most important issues at stake in Israel still, regrettably, turn largely on matters for which the soldier – and not the thinker – has the greater contribution to make. For a time the peace process changed this somewhat, giving dialogue rather than force a central role. But even then the dialogue enjoined tended to take the form of negotiation rather than conversation, a distinction that plays a central role in the arguments of this book. Put succinctly, when negotiating people struggle to make appropriate trade-offs or compromises in the values or goods at stake, the aim being to bring their conflict to a close by reaching a balanced accommodation. When conversing, however, the goal is to arrive at a shared understanding. This demands something quite difficult

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of interlocutors, namely, a willingness to really listen to each other and so an openness to transforming their values or goods so that they can be, not compromised, but integrated, reconciled. A politics that involves conversation is thus going to be a deeper, more profound, and potentially more progressive politics than one restricted to negotiation. Yet such a politics is, of course, not always on offer. Apparently, the clandestine Oslo talks between Israelis and Palestinians actually began with an attempt at conversation, but, as Professor Shlomo Avineri of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem once pointed out to me, the effort so inflamed the participants that it quickly became clear to all concerned that either the attempt to reach an understanding would have to be abandoned or force – not negotiation – would again become the only available option. While negotiation has tended lately to dominate Canadian politics as well (its chief rival being, alas, not conversation but the pleading that is required when political issues are dealt with in the courtroom), it seems to me that Canada’s history at least offers the luxury of giving conversation a greater role. Indeed, as I claim in this work, some of our key political issues and controversies actually demand this if they’re ever to be dealt with successfully. And here the political thinker does have something significant to contribute. Or that, at least, is my hope. It has been over two years now since my return to Canada. “Guess I just missed the cold,” I jokingly tell those who ask. One of the real reasons for returning, however, was quite simply that I began to feel rather homesick. That is also one of the reasons why I’ve written this essay. For homesickness is not, of course, a pleasant feeling, yet it seems to me that far too many Canadians feel homesick, even those – and I realize that this may sound strange to some – who have never left. Giving an account of how and why this is so, as well as of what can and should be done about it, is my central aim here. Political writing ought never to be an isolated affair. This is particularly so when one subscribes, as I do, to a “practical,”

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as distinct from ”theoretical,“ approach to political philosophy. And so, I would like to thank Mark Cohen, Yves Couture, the Honourable Stéphane Dion, Marc Fabien, Alain Noël, Avery Plaw, Philip Resnick, Rod Tweedy, Linda White, and two anonymous reviewers from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada for having read and provided constructive comments on all or parts of the manuscript; Magdalene Redekop for having once, long ago, introduced me to English Canadian literature; and, more than anyone, Yael, just for being there and putting up with it all. Montreal January 2003

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SHALL WE DANCE?

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1 Introduction: A Canadian Home? The snow is so merciless on poor old Montreal in spite of everything that’s happening in spite of it all The Tragically Hip, “Courage (for Hugh MacLennan)”1 Next time un peu d’effort. Jean Leloup, “Le Monde est à pleurer”2

Moi, Lucien Bouchard, je jure fidélité et sincère allégeance à sa Majesté la reine Elizabeth ii. Lucien Bouchard, 9 November 1993

How was Lucien Bouchard, a leader of the Québécois sovereignist movement, ever able to say such a thing? On the face of it, he did so in order to take his seat in Canada’s Parliament as the leader of the secessionist Bloc Québécois, then the country’s official opposition. But the matter is not quite that simple. For when Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness, leaders of Northern Ireland’s republican Sinn Féin party, were elected to Westminster they refused to take a similar oath, even though it meant that they would not be able to take their seats in Britain’s Parliament. There are, of course, many historical, strategic, and other differences between the republicans of Northern Ireland and

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the sovereignists of Quebec. So one could take a cynical view and say that it was more in the sovereignists’ interests that Bouchard break his word and take the oath, while the benefits to the Irish republicans of attaining a podium in London were comparatively minor. Or one might try to argue that, since official sovereignist policy does not assert that an independent Quebec must abandon the structures of a constitutional monarchy or even leave the Commonwealth, pulling Quebec out of Canada does not necessarily entail infidelity to the queen. Or perhaps, in the spirit of tough love, one might claim that it is actually in the queen’s best interest, whether she knows it or not, that Quebec leave; that an independent republican Quebec would ultimately be a better ally to the monarch than one begrudgingly ensconced within Canada. But that, of course, would be really pushing it. No, I want to suggest that there is another reason why Bouchard was able to take that oath, namely, that it really does speak the truth for at least a part of him. Not that I’m claiming he’s a monarchist; as everyone knows, what the queen stands for in the oath is Canada, and so what I’m saying is that Bouchard is a man who is at least partially loyal to Canada. This should not come as such a surprise. After all, Bouchard was once a leading member of a federalist party. He was also one of the architects of the failed Meech Lake Accord, that set of constitutional amendments designed to reform Canada so that Québécois nationalists could forgo separatism. It was only when it became clear that the accord was going to fail that he came to endorse sovereignty association. To him, as to many other Québécois, Meech Lake was simply Canada’s last chance.3 To many, but not to all. Because there are, of course, Québécois for whom Meech was just not enough; for whom, indeed, only a full and complete separation, severing all connections other than those that exist between Canada and any other sovereign country, would be enough. In other words, there are many different possible interpretations of

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what it means to be a Québécois nationalist. For some, what matters most is the achievement of a fully independent Quebec, in which the Québécois nation could lay exclusive claim to a single state all its own. Such people are even willing to pay a great deal economically for this – a fact that fills me with both admiration and sorrow – though the claim has been made that Quebec would function more efficiently as an independant entity than as a Canadian province. For others, and this includes some of the province’s citizens, it makes no sense to recognize the existence of la nation québécoise at all other than, perhaps, to wish that it would just disappear. Some go so far as to assert that Québécois nationalists, like all nationalists, are simply irrational, not to mention dangerous, because they’re committed to a form of community that has a rather poor historical record, to say the least. As they see it, Quebec should remain in Canada as a province like any other, meaning that we should oppose any form of constitutional recognition of the nation contained within. Most of Quebec’s citizens, however, cannot be included in any of these camps. Most of them are like Bouchard in that they feel something, if only implicitly, for the Québécois nation and Canada,4 conceiving of both, to use the language of moral philosophy, as real intrinsic goods. They certainly may not value them equally; their concern for Canada, for example, sometimes has to be shored up by distinctly economic interests. That being said, and the constitution of the country being what it is, the two are still considered to matter enough for these “Québécois Canadians,” as we might refer to them, to feel pulled in opposing directions. Sometimes they will be found leaning to one side – at the time of this writing sovereignty tends to be looked upon with a sceptical eye – sometimes to the other, but the idea that the two can somehow be fulfilled together has just never seemed feasible. To Québécois Canadians, and I’m surely saying nothing new here, there is a genuine conflict taking place between their fundamental political loyalties.

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One of the main aims of this book is to show that the approaches that have had the greatest influence on our constitution and politics have, to a significant degree, served only to make dilemmas such as this more acute. One significant result is that we Canadians have never been able to lay claim to anything like a constitutional “home” for our country. That is, almost every one of us feels somewhat alienated either from the constitution itself or from the many other citizens who can’t seem to reconcile themselves to it. What’s more, experience indicates that getting Canadians to feel more at home in their own country is an unattainable goal, at least for the foreseeable future. One of the reasons for this, I suggest, is that many of us are confused about what, exactly, it would mean to have achieved such a home. I address that question in this chapter’s final section. With the goal a little more clear, the rest of the book asks how we have arrived at our current disconcerting state and then offers some suggestions as to how we might get out of it. Thus, in chapter 2, I describe three ways of responding to political conflict, two of which tend to serve as barriers to our attaining any kind of constitutional home in this country. In chapter 3, I show how those two have encouraged misunderstandings of our past, in particular, of our relationships to nature and the land we occupy, as well as of the various cultural communities that constituted this “we” in the first place. Chapter 4 offers an account of who we are today, specifically, of the communities of which we are members. And chapter 5 turns to our (potential) future, to an engagement with some of the issues that serve (or should be serving) as the loci of our contemporary politics, my aim being to demonstrate the significant difference in practice between what I call a “patriotic” approach and those of a more conventional bent. Finally, in the concluding chapter, I write in more general terms about how we might “get there from here,” that is, about how we might achieve a genuine “home” for our citizens, and I go on to describe a successful contribution to this project. My hope, of course, is that this will only encourage us to try again.

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Throughout, I shall assert what for many will be a new conception of what a country (or indeed any sort of political community) is, or at least should be: a “citizenry” as distinct from a “nation.” The understanding of patriotism associated with this draws, albeit critically at times, on an approach that has ancient roots, the ideology of “classical republicanism,” whose defenders referred to themselves as patriots long before nationalists laid claim to the term. That is why it will, I hope, become clear that patriotism as I conceive of it is something both old and new; for it asserts that who we ought to become requires retrieving – but also transforming – some of the best of who we have been. Constitutions are, for the most part, collections of rules. What are rules, and how do they work? One of the best answers to these questions has, I think, been given by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. He did so largely by raising questions of his own, questions such as the following: “A rule stands there like a sign-post. – Does the sign-post leave no doubt open about the way I have to go? Does it shew which direction I am to take when I have passed it; whether along the road or the footpath or cross-country? But where is it said which way I am to follow it; whether in the direction of its finger or (e.g.) in the opposite one? – And if there were, not a single sign-post, but a chain of adjacent ones or of chalk marks on the ground – is there only one way of interpreting them?”5 Before Wittgenstein came along, of course, few had bothered to articulate the notion that sign-posts point in the direction of the finger. This has always been the practice, and it has been a prereflective, unarticulated one with which all of us have implicitly agreed, carrying it out, we might say, out of pure habit. There are, of course, many other such rules and practices. For example, there’s a sense in which a chair, just like a sign-post, “expresses” a rule constitutive of a particular practice, namely, that it is there for sitting on. Or, to invoke another case, while individuals stand for many things, one of the most important of these

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things politically, at least since the advent of modernity, is that each person should be treated with a certain basic level of dignity or respect, one equal to all others. And so on. Indeed, for the most part the vast majority of our practices are prereflective and so harmoniously integrated with each other that we may even speak of a whole mode of being wherein we carry them out habitually, without reflecting upon them and so without their ever having to be articulated. Rules and the practices they guide cannot be said to be wholly prereflective, however, because they are, after all, articulated in language. Yet we are most “at home” with rules – they being, we may say, “at their best” – just when they express practices that we could still participate in prereflectively, without their being articulated as rules. It is exactly rules of this “expressive” sort, as I refer to them, that Wittgenstein wishes to invoke when he writes that rules are things that we follow, that they express practices that are understood by us, practices that we affirm so profoundly that they may be considered expressions of our very selves, of our identities as persons. This, I think, is what he’s getting at when he says that a rule “intimates to me”6 what to do such that he feels “under the compulsion”7 of it, as if “a voice within me says: This way!”8 Indeed, when one has “listened to their inner voice and obeyed it,”9 Wittgenstein adds, one has “a feeling of being guided by the rules as by a spell.”10 This is one way of referring to what we might understand as the fundamentally reconciled, or unalienated, quality of following expressive rules, a point that Wittgenstein himself can be interpreted as making when he asserts that “the word ‘agreement’ and the word ‘rule’ are related to one another, they are cousins.”11 For when it is an expression of our selves or identities – of who we are in the sense of what we do in a given context – a rule is indeed something that we agree with, or affirm. Following expressive rules may, moreover, be understood to entail agreement in a second sense in that when more than one person follows the same rule they can be said to share an understanding of that rule, this constitut-

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ing an agreement between them. And when enough agreements of this kind are present, Wittgenstein points out, we may speak of a shared “form of life.”12 Now the central claim I want to make here is the following: it is the extent to which citizens can be said to agree with the rules of their country’s constitution – agree both as individuals, as if the rules were an expression of their selves, and with each other about them, to the extent that they can be said to share a form of life – that determines whether or not we can say that that constitution serves as a political home for their country. Otherwise put: a constitution made up of expressive rules is one that citizens can truly feel at home with.

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2 Responding to Conflict: Three Ways, Three Canadas

A significant number of Canadians, it must be said, have never been able to conceive of their country’s constitution as containing rules of an expressive sort. Originally, they consisted mainly of aboriginal and French Canadians, as well as all those who demanded but did not receive responsible government. A rebellion or two later, however, and those of the latter group ended up being more or less satisfied, while the abandonment of the attempt to assimilate the francophones meant that even they came to feel more secure. And yet the extensive social transformations that took place in the 1960s within Quebec, combined with the rise to power of Pierre Trudeau and his followers in Ottawa, have ensured that many of the francophones within the province now share the difficulty of aboriginals and others in feeling “at home” in Canada. Indeed, it is my claim that no Canadian, even those who think otherwise, ought to be feeling particularly at home in Canada today. One of the main reasons for this has to do with the influence of what I call the “monarchist” approach to politics. According to monarchists, justice demands that there be a single sovereign authority to which all those involved in the most important political conflicts must appeal, doing so by pleading their cases to that authority. This pleading, we should recognize, is not a genuine form of dialogue because it has no

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place for the real back-and-forth exchanges between, and so changes to, the identities of interlocutors that is essential to dialogue. It excludes such exchanges on the assumption that the sovereign authority appealed to must never itself be called into question. For unlike “the many” involved in a given conflict – the hoi polloi as the ancient Greeks used to refer to them – the sovereign is said to represent “the one,” a perfect unity that embodies no contradictions or conflicts within itself. That is why it is awarded the final word, and indeed why that word can be truly final in the first place, since nothing perfect ever has reason to question itself. By this reasoning, moreover, the sovereign is also said to be able to provide the basis of a foundation for the country; for in conforming to its rulings those who appeal to it are no longer divided or in flux but unified, settled, and solid. The reader has probably guessed that, although I refer to this approach as monarchist, I don’t mean to imply that it assumes the sovereign must always take the form of a single person such as a king or queen. Rather, my intention is to emphasize the “mono,” that is, the “oneness” of the “archy,” the ruler to whom the pleading is to be directed. And given that unity has, for some time now, been considered a property of the divine,1 we can see just how high is the esteem in which the sovereign authority is meant to be held. Indeed, the very word “sovereign” derives from the Latin superanus, meaning superior, which in turn comes from the preposition super, meaning above. No accident, then, that, in the West at least, the monarch is said to rule over its subjects much as the God of monotheism is said to stand over and above His cosmos.2 Of course the first form of monarchy in Canada, at least officially, has indeed been incarnated in a single individual, the institution of the Crown, which, since the time of the Roman emperor Constantine, has been said to “reign by the grace of God” (Deus Gracia Regina, as our coins declare). The Crown, the argument goes, lays claim to two “bodies,” that of the individual king or queen’s and that of the body politic, somehow fusing the two into an organic unity through its simultaneous

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presence both here on Earth (in particular, of late, as the Crown-in-Parliament) and in the realm of the transcendent.3 And it is its at least partial transcendence that is considered to be the source of its perfection, hence of the self-sufficiency and finality of its decisions. Since the advent of responsible government in 1848, however, almost all of the Crown’s prerogatives have been handed over to an executive responsible to the people’s representatives in Parliament, meaning that, while it is still present constitutionally,4 the Crown’s status as our monarch has for all intents and purposes been removed, neither it nor its representatives any longer having the final word. Curiously, our constitution makes no mention of responsible government. Indeed, since 1982 it has opened with the following: “Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law.” This, I suggest, communicates its intention to assert itself as the country’s monarch, which is to say that it would have constitutional law stand supreme here. And what is supposed to be the basis of that law? The Constitution Act of 1982 does not deign to say, but one possible answer is that “theory” is the source of its authority, that is, the systematic theory of justice of a political philosopher, in this case, of our very own Pierre Elliot Trudeau. A theory of justice can be considered as much like the rulebook of a sport or a game, although it is, of course, to judges rather than umpires or referees that any pleading tends to be directed. Originally, such theories were presented as if they had been formulated by the armchair contemplations of some wholly detached philosopher, the assumption being that only in this way could they be given an “absolutely objective” status such that they would be compelling even to someone from Mars. Of late, however, this absolute objectivity has for many philosophers become something of a chimera, with the result that theorists have given up trying to attain the level of detachment it was assumed to require. Instead, they have satisfied themselves with that degree of ob-

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jectivity said to accrue from rearticulating, in a systematic fashion, the practices and institutions already present within given societies – the result being a theory of justice considered appropriate for their members alone. Regardless of how they are formulated, all theories are assumed to lay claim to the quality of unity, an essential property, as we have seen, for any entity with monarchist pretensions. In the case of those “neutralist” forms of theory, moreover, the kind of unity that is asserted is often described as “systematic,” which is to say that while its principles are considered to be independently distinct from each other in meaning, they are nevertheless seen as interlocked in a wholly noncontradictory fashion. Hence the analogy with sports or games, for their rules are also, of necessity, systematic. Because if one rule, say on page six of the hockey rulebook, declares that icing of the puck is prohibited, while another, say on page twenty-five, says that it is acceptable, then when faced with a dispute over icing referees will be left to their own devices in determining what to do. There would be no way for them to claim that they’re just applying the rulebook, that they’re neutral vis-à-vis the players, and so that they stand, in some sense, above the fray. Similarly, if the neutralist theorist’s constitution cannot be said to be systematic, then the justices applying it cannot be said to deliberate in a way that is qualitatively different from that of ordinary politicians. Not only would this put them on the same level as the latter but they couldn’t even claim to have won an election to get there. So, it is only when based on a systematically unified theory of justice that a neutralist constitution can be said to provide a monarchist foundation for a country. No surprise, then, that the word “theory” originally had religious connotations, theos meaning “god” to the ancient Greeks and theoria referring to their witnessing of sacred festivals.5 Unity is also fundamental because, as we have seen, it is held to be imparted to the society governed by the constitution based upon it, meaning that the just state is one that serves a unified populace, the

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latter, depending on the theoretical tradition invoked, being referred to as either a “people,” a “citizenry,” or a “nation.” At the heart of Trudeau’s theory is the assertion of the equal liberty of individuals, one interpreted to mean that, when it comes to their fundamental rights, every Canadian should expect uniform treatment from the state and its institutions.6 Those opposed to his theory, however, managed to ensure that he was never able to put it fully into practice. During his struggle to bring in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, for example, he was pressured into including a “notwithstanding” escape clause for Parliament and the provincial legislatures, as well as reaffirming aboriginal rights as distinct from those of other Canadians and accepting a clause that made way for affirmative action programs for disadvantaged minorities.7 All this meant that, while he could never view the constitution as perfect, he could at least claim that it was on its way to being so, on its way to establishing, as he once put it, “the unity of Canada.”8 Hence his vociferous objections to the damage he thought the Meech Lake Accord would do to it: “Say Goodbye to the Dream of One Canada”9 was how he titled the first of his many interventions against Meech. Notice that the people who are meant to be ruled by it are not given much of a role in this constitutional scheme other than that they are expected to conform. The theoretical philosopher makes the necessary formulations, the justices apply them, and the demos is simply supposed to go along. No wonder that Trudeau didn’t feel it necessary to have his Constitution Act endorsed by a referendum; nor can one fail to notice the extremely difficult amending procedure embedded within it, any amendment requiring a resolution of Parliament as well as of the legislative assemblies of at least twothirds of the provinces that have at least fifty percent of the population of all provinces. Of course, Trudeau had long harboured a mistrust of “public opinion,” viewing it as something that “seeks to impose its domination over everything. Its aim is to reduce all action, all thought, and all feeling to a

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common denominator. It forbids independence and kills inventiveness; condemns those who ignore it and banishes those who oppose it.”10 That said, democracy, that other potential monarch, was not completely circumvented. For the charter’s very first clause declares that it “guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law that can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”11 Paradoxically, then, democracy is presented both as part of the Charter and also as the basis of “limits” to it. So much for systematicity. But what could it mean to refer to democracy as a potential monarch? Aristotle was, in fact, the first to do so, having suggested that there is a form of democracy in which the people combine to rule as a single king.12 Today, this can be said to arise in democracies in which “the People” are held to be the sovereign authority, as they tend to be in republican but not parliamentary systems. In such democracies, the People are conceived of as a prepolitical entity that is said to attain unity once a majority has voted in favour of a particular proposition, thus giving expression to a monolithic public opinion. This, of course, is the same “We the People” that opens the us constitution, the one proclaiming not only “In God We Trust” but also “E Pluribus Unum” (“Out of many, one”) – all of which led Alexis de Tocqueville to conclude that “the people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe.”13 To the north, it was for this kind of democracy that the 1837 rebellions against British rule were fought,14 rebellions that, while quickly put down, nevertheless achieved at least a partial victory with the later granting of responsible government. To this day one can find Canadians who wonder whether that victory cannot be made complete.15 So although the rebels lost their battles, the war, it seems, continues. From the advent of responsible government, the People can be said to have vied both with the Crown and, since 1982, with the theory underlying the Charter for pre-eminence as the sovereign authority in Canada. Yet the struggle to be “king” of the Canadian hill had an even earlier beginning. For

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the Crown was not completely on its own at first, its ostensibly loyal ally, the mercantilists, having sometimes concluded that their chief concern, the making of money, was not always compatible with royal authority. The potential for conflict between these two was thus always present, although it only began to show itself publicly when the merchant class came to favour a Lockean economic liberalism over toryism. Indeed, many have even argued that, official documents notwithstanding, some form or other of what’s been called “the Divine Economy” has long constituted the real monarch in this country, whether it is viewed critically, given its control in the largely self-serving hands of the mercantilists or later of our very own “capitalist class,” or more benignly, given its ability to serve the welfare of the general public.16 I suspect that most Canadians would view the battle between all these would-be monarchs – the Crown, the Divine Economy, the People, the theory underlying the charter – as one that has never, and indeed will never, see a victor. To many of us, this is all to the good. For deep down we sense that monarchy has no place in politics; that it is but an antipolitics. This may be why, when confronted with the spectacle of our neighbours to the south virtually worshipping their constitution as if it were the basis of some sort of revealed political religion,17 many of us are moved to irony. There seems to be something so very idealistic, even simplistic, about American attitudes here, especially in the light of the undeniable complexity arising from our own divisions, both historical and contemporary. In consequence, many of us have turned to what I call a “polyarchist” approach, the rule of the many as opposed to that of the one. According to this view, the ideal of unity is a chimera; there are just too many incompatible visions of justice in the world for any one of them to be granted absolute sovereign authority. The more cynical take this as support for realpolitik, whereby politics, to reverse Clausewitz’s famous dictum, is viewed as war carried on by other means, those engaged in it being simply soldiers in politicians’ clothing.

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Words may be employed but no genuine dialogue ever really takes place. The struggle may occasionally end with a victor, of course, one who manages to achieve a kind of sovereign status and so bring a form of unity to the society,18 but this will never be anything like the absolute unity of the genuine monarch. Thus may we interpret the relatively recent concentration of power in the Prime Minister’s Office and the central agencies under its control, the prime minister having attained such an immense degree of authority in this country that some have wondered whether he isn’t leading what is, for all intents and purposes, an elected dictatorship.19 Others, however, argue that we Canadians have been far more willing to accommodate our differences than this realpolitik vision implies, and this leads them to affirm a “pluralist” form of polyarchy instead. To pluralists, genuine political actors are those who recognize the legitimacy of others’ right to disagree and hence the necessity of negotiating with them. They would, in consequence, heartily affirm Northrop Frye’s proud declaration that “the Canadian genius for compromise is reflected in the existence of Canada itself,”20 a point also made by John A. Macdonald while he was endorsing the resolutions that would later become the bna Act: “The whole scheme of Confederation, as propounded by the Conference, as agreed to and sanctioned by the Canadian Government, and as now presented for the consideration of the people, and the Legislature, bears upon its face the marks of compromise.”21 One thinks as well of that cbc Radio contest in which the late Peter Gzowski, searching for a Canadian equivalent to “as American as apple pie,” asked his listeners to complete the expression “as Canadian as …” In came the expected submissions: “as Canadian as maple syrup,” “as Canadian as hockey,” and so on. The winner? “As Canadian as possible, under the circumstances.” In the world of political thought, the chief concern of contemporary pluralists has been to oppose those who would build systematic theories to serve as the foundations for our politics.22 In general, however, pluralists can be expected to

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stand against any form of monarchy, calling on us to forgo pleading to some sovereign authority and instead negotiate among ourselves. Negotiation is central to pluralism because it assumes that there is a plurality of sometimes incommensurable values and so ways of life in the world, and that, through no fault of their supporters, these sometimes conflict. While those involved in these conflicts should ultimately be considered adversaries, they ought nevertheless to respect each other enough to be willing to engage in a form of dialogue in order to defend what they believe to be just, and this even though they know it means compromising their beliefs to some extent. Note that justice in this conception is strictly a matter of how one ought to be responding to conflict, that is, of the need for parties to negotiate fairly and in good faith. Little is said about whether the accommodations actually reached are in some way true to the society as a whole. Indeed, pluralism can uphold no such conception of “society-wide truth” because it conceives of societies, or at least the multicultural ones of the West, as fragmented entities, this following from the assumption that they contain a plurality of independent groups or ways of life. These may overlap to a degree, but ultimately they’re seen as made up of values that are present in some but not in others, which is why, conceptually speaking, they are considered distinct from each other in the sense of being independent. It is as a result of this that, when they conflict, pluralists tend to refer to those conflicts as involving their “clashing” or “colliding,” terms indicative of a confrontation between what are conceived of as originally separate entities. The call for negotiation follows directly from all this, for negotiation is about weighing values against each other, which is to say relating them in an essentially zero-sum fashion. And so, if the central organizing metaphor of neutralist theory is that of the referee applying a rulebook, we might say that that of pluralism invokes instead an image of the players – with no referee in sight – arguing about how their values are to be balanced, say, by placing them upon the pans of some immensely complex scale.

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Pluralist polyarchy, as I’ve said, differs from the realpolitik kind in its assertion that, when faced with conflict, one ought to be willing to compromise. No pluralist constitution, in consequence, will ever assert that any value or set of values should be in any sense supreme or above negotiation,23 and this means that citizens will be able to avoid making the allor-nothing choices that tend to be required by the various monarchist approaches. For example, those Québécois nationalists who accept the claim that Trudeau’s neutralist liberalism is a good representation of the ideology will feel compelled to choose between it and their nationalism, the two appearing as altogether incompatible. Adopting a pluralist outlook, however, means that nothing is placed above (or below) politics, all conflicting values becoming, at least in principle, negotiable. This eliminates the need to make such stark choices as it allows for compromise in the values being affirmed – some weight given, perhaps, to the needs of one’s nation here, some to the liberty of the individual there. As a result, though no one participating in a pluralist politics will ever be wholly satisfied, at least no one need lose out completely. For in the pluralist view, citizens do not stand upon some foundation established by an ostensibly unified monarch; instead, they resign themselves to the inescapable flux of politics, embracing the multiple conflicting values that, we might say, float along the river that is their political history. If the (often implicit) assumption of the monarchist is that the unified sovereign is in some sense divine,24 then it should come as no surprise that, when pluralist philosophers turn to the matter of religion, they tend to be critical of monotheism and even occasionally express a sympathy for polytheism.25 Whether one’s sympathies lie with the one or the many, my claim is that there is something fundamental to both approaches that has contributed to our inability even to begin establishing a constitutional home for this country. In essence, it is that both are directly productive not of the expressive

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rules constitutive of such a home but of rules of what I want to call the “regulative” sort, that is, of “regulations.” Unlike the rule expressing a practice with which we are reconciled, a regulation is something that we may be said to conform to rather than follow. Instead of being an expression of who we are, of our identities, a regulation is best conceived of as something that is virtually separate from us, the “application” of this separate thing being how one often describes the means by which it guides practice. A regulation, then, is a fixed external entity that is “brought to bear” on a context, realigning it according to its strictures, while an expressive rule remains immanent, intimately connected to the flow of context. This is because expressive rules, as I pointed out in the previous chapter, are agreed to by people in a particular way: we “understand” them, which is why they are able to provide guidance almost prereflectively and serve thereby as the source of that “inner voice” that “compels” us to follow them, to invoke Wittgenstein again. It is this agreement with the “spirit,” as we might identify it, of an expressive rule that provides us with the sense of how it should be followed in the most diverse contexts; for such a rule, being closely connected to the unarticulated background of our prereflective practices, does not have to be comprehensively specified. The regulative rule, however, guides practice in a fundamentally different way, one based not on our understanding of it in the sense of profoundly agreeing with it but rather on our having “consented” to it, and what one consents to is, as it is sometimes said, its “letter” as opposed to its “spirit.” For it is the specifications of a regulation “in letter” that are relied upon when it comes to applying it in different contexts, which is why these specifications, as with legalese, usually have to be quite precise and elaborate. Both monarchists and polyarchists tend to lead us to regulative, rather than expressive, rules. The former do so for two basic reasons. First, implicit in the monarchist approach is the notion that the sovereign authority, and hence its rulings, are to a degree separate from the people conforming to them.

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The Crown, for example, is held to be separate because the king or queen is said at least partially to transcend his or her subjects, an understanding that once paved the way for the doctrines of royal absolutism. With the neutralist theorist, alternatively, the assumption is that if a theory is to be objective the philosopher who creates it and the justices who apply it need to be significantly detached from the conflicts in question as well as from those involved in them. The rules are thus considered “objects” that are in a sense separate from or independent of the persons, the “subjects” (albeit in a somewhat different sense than with the Crown) who are meant to consent to them. All this may be said to assume a dualist epistemology that virtually requires that there be a certain degree of distance, even alienation,26 between the rules and those conforming to them, and this means that those rules are almost certainly going to be of the regulative sort. A similar disengagement is also required for the instrumental calculations of the economist, for whom the invisible hand of the Divine Economy is considered to regulate in a way that cannot be accessed from the perspective of a single competing individual. Finally, under a democratic monarch, the demos as a whole is deemed to have an identity that is distinct from the identities of the individuals that make it up, which is why it is sometimes said, given Rousseau’s equation of liberty with the “general will,” that people who oppose that will may be “forced to be free.”27 This points to the second reason why monarchy leads to regulations: when it comes to those who are not willing to go along, the monarchist encourages the use of force as a means of obtaining their consent, and this ensures that, even when it is ultimately granted, the rules consented to cannot be considered expressive of the identities of those conforming to them. The reason why force is relied upon is simple. Since the sovereign from which the decisions emanate is assumed to be just, giving in to those who refuse to comply is understood to mean nothing but giving in to injustice. Think, for example, of Trudeau’s explanation for his initial “go it alone” tactic in

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which he tried to patriate the constitution without the provinces’ consent, or of his choice of officials for his team that would exhibit what he considered to be the necessary ruthlessness. “Let’s just say,” he once put it, “that in this last stage I felt one needed almost a putsch, a coup de force.”28 If you are certain that what you are defending is just for all concerned, then you will give in to your adversaries only if it seems that doing so will ultimately bring less harm to the cause in the end. Monarchists are thus far less willing to enter into negotiations than polyarchists – especially pluralist polyarchists – who, because they reject the very idea of unified justice from the start, feel far less certain that their way is the only way. Decrying such a willingness to compromise, the monarchist will instead invoke the “slippery slope” argument according to which giving in even a little is said merely to encourage one’s adversary to demand more. Just think of the innumerable times this very move has been made by Trudeauites in response to the demands of Québécois nationalists. When monarchists do find themselves with no choice but to negotiate, we can thus see why they tend to be hard-liners, and this only increases the likelihood that those forced to settle with them will end up with accords that they see largely as impositions, as documents containing regulations they must conform to rather than expressive rules they would enthusiastically follow. Polyarchists will also cause us to end up with consent at best, hence with regulations rather than understandings and so expressive rules. To polyarchists, regulations are merely those “small quarantined thoughts”29 that may be erected between the many adversaries that populate the world. With the realpolitik brand of polyarchy, scepticism about the possibility of reconciliation should come as no surprise. But the same is true of the pluralist, because negotiation, especially when carried out in good faith, requires the making of concessions, and this means that whatever is ultimately consented to will only be marred by compromise. The expectation is thus that those involved, as well as whomever they represent, will be unable to feel particularly reconciled to,

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hence at home with, whatever accommodations are ultimately reached. And is that not, after all, precisely what an “accommodation” is, a temporary lodging but not a home? In the Canadian context, this comes out particularly clearly in Jane Jacobs’s pluralist account of the history of negotiated constitution making in the country, where she admits that, “while the mutual accommodations put a reasonably good face on the pain and unhappiness, the accommodations themselves, forced on each partner and begrudged by each partner, tended to become sources of new grievances and to feed resentments.”30 Given that the results of any negotiation undertaken in good faith must always be considered somewhat alien to those involved, it stands to reason that they cannot be embraced as the expressive rules constitutive of a constitutional home. To the pluralist, however, that is simply the nature of politics, constitutional or otherwise. We would be naive to hope for anything better. So the immediate result of following either the monarchist or the polyarchist would be a constitution that served its citizens more as a “house” than a “home”; one built, that is, with bricks of regulations. Yet it would be wrong to assume that either approach necessarily makes for a permanent barrier to such a home. For is it not the case that, given enough time, “conforming to” can evolve into “following”; that regulations can develop into the expressive rules with which one feels reconciled? There have, after all, been significant precedents for this. Think of the us Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling against racially segregated schools in the American South: many certainly needed to be forced or at least pressured to conform then, but that is far less the case today. Or one might raise the biblical example of the covenant established between God and the Israelites in Exodus. By an interpretation that has served as a basis of the rabbinic tradition within Judaism, the Israelites were forced to consent to its terms, God having raised the whole of Mount Sinai above their heads and threatened to crush them with it unless they went along. The Israelites’ response, understandably enough: “All that the Lord has

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said we will do and hear,”31 a clear statement of their willingness to conform in practice to the principles of the Covenant, leaving the “hearing,” or understanding of, hence reconciliation to, those principles to perhaps follow.32 A significant requirement needs to be met, however, if expressive rules are to evolve out of the observance of regulative ones over an extended period: the community in question must already be highly integrated, its members affirming and closely sharing a “form of life” to begin with. If the community does not have this quality, then its members will have little motivation to continue conforming to given regulations, which is to say that those who refuse to do so will constantly have to be kept in line with force, and force, as we have seen, is not the means to expressive rules. More regulations certainly won’t do the trick, as they can be easily thwarted. Think, for example, of the absurdity of American law’s ”Rule 11.” As Deborah Tannen has described it, “Rule 11 requires lawyers to have some basis for their proceedings and motions; the rule can be invoked if one side feels the other is instituting procedures and filing motions as a form of harassment. But Rule 11 itself can be used to harass: Some attorneys file Rule 11 motions on a regular basis, forcing their opponents to respond, costing time and money they may not be able to afford. This has led to yet another layer of protection-from-harassment: filing Rule 11 on the filing of Rule 11!”33 The inherently adversarial nature of the us legal system has ensured that attorneys have never developed a closely integrated community of practice, and it is clear that Rule 11 was established as a means of compensating for their lack of a shared sense of the spirit of the law. But Rule 11, it should be evident, is regulative rather than expressive, which is why it has proven powerless in the face of such discord. Only a genuine understanding could fulfil the required role; without it, no amount of enforced regulation will work. Even when there is a willingness to conform to a regulation, the absence of a closely shared way of life ensures that conforming will be problematic. For to speak of the “letter”

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of a regulation, of what it means “literally,” is not to refer to some fixed and universal meaning because no words can lay claim to that. Rather, “literal” meaning is nothing but the meaning that comes forth most naturally to us, and that “us” must always refer to a particular community at a particular time and place. But if the community in question is more fragmented than integrated, then what naturally shows up will be different for different segments of it. And the more disputes over how to apply and conform to a given regulation that arise because of this, the longer it will take for that regulation to evolve into an expressive rule – if, that is, it is to happen at all. This, then, is a second reason why regulations are parasitic, we might say, upon expressive rules, and so why regulations alone can never evolve into such rules. Without a significantly shared background, that is, without the presence at the outset of a number of profoundly agreed upon expressive rules (or shared prereflective practices that are not even articulated as rules), regulations are not just powerless but impractical.34 Now the ancient Israelites certainly were a close-knit group, as were the numerous Jewish communities of the Diaspora during the Middle Ages (ensconced, as they were, within enclosed ghettos).35 This meant that their leaders even had the luxury of doing away with that most heavy-handed of threats, divine punishment, as a means of maintaining conformity to the laws.36 But we Canadians have never been that close.37 Lacking the powerful integrative effects of a creative transformation such as that associated with Mount Sinai, or with the revolutionary experience of our neighbour to the south, our history has been marked by unrelenting centrifugal forces – from the military and political to the economic, geographic, environmental, and social – that, taken together, have sustained a powerful threat of disintegration. And our constitutional politics, dominated as it has been by both monarchist and polyarchist approaches, has certainly failed to counteract this threat. After all, it is hard to dispute the notion that Trudeau’s national unity strategy has left us

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more divided than ever, or that the adversarial discourse of negotiation encouraged by Canadian pluralists has only further corroded those few bonds that we do have (“Now that house was not a home / Since the poison she has spoken”38). If we Canadians are ever to have a constitution of expressive rules, it should be clear, then we’re going to have to turn to something other than monarchy or polyarchy to get it. There is an alternative, however. It is an approach to politics and constitution making that, like the pluralist polyarchist’s, assumes that political conflict is best met with dialogue than with an appeal to some sovereign authority, and yet which, like the monarchist’s, would have us go beyond simply accommodating our divisions. It is able to do both of these things because it conceives of political society in a fundamentally different way, as neither a unity nor a plurality, neither a melting-pot nor a mosaic, but rather as something that moves in between those two poles. According to this view, a political society is a whole whose parts consist not of a plurality of separable elements but of a diversity of more or less integrated features. This is a holistic but not unified conception, one that accepts that groups or ways of life within a given constitutional regime can legitimately conflict, although when they do they ought not to be conceived of as separate clashing entities and so as adversaries involved in what is necessarily a zero-sum game. Rather, they should be viewed as parts of a whole whose good they share in common, one that may be open to being transformed in a way that is beneficial to all. This is the approach to politics that I call “patriotic,” giving an admittedly different meaning to the term than most. A patriotic politics sees the state and its institutions not as regulating tools separate from citizens but as the locus of the citizenry as a whole, that is, as expressive of its common good. In this, as I pointed out in the introduction, patriotism claims an inheritance from the classical republican tradition of political thought, defended by such thinkers as Aristotle,

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Machiavelli, and, during this past century, Hannah Arendt.39 From them it takes the notion that a citizenry is at its best when it strives for the common good of its members and that one of the best ways of doing this is through politics, the practice of responding to conflict with dialogue. Unlike classical republicans, however, modern patriots accept that dialogue may include negotiation, although in contrast to the pluralist view they understand negotiation as being capable of incorporating judgments about the substantial justness of the accommodations reached, judgments that are to be based on the appropriateness of those accommodations to the political society as a whole. That said, the modern patriot, like the classic republican, also considers it possible that citizens may respond to conflict with an altogether different form of dialogue: conversation. In a conversation the aim is not accommodation but understanding, and this requires the transformation of the terms at stake through the development of new interpretations of their meanings, interpretations that make better sense of them as a whole. The idea here is that this makes it possible for the interlocutors to achieve a genuine reconciliation of their differences, the values or goods in conflict having been, not balanced against each other, not compromised, but further integrated, realized. And this means that it is assumed that a kind of progress is possible in politics, one that we might describe here as taking the form of a movement towards the one, as a many. For while parties to a conflict are called upon to reach agreement in the sense of fulfilling their common good, they are nevertheless charged with doing so in a way that does not detract from difference, the aim being to share in a sense that recognizes that everyone involved will always do so at least somewhat differently from everyone else. It is because the values or goods, and hence the parties affirming them, are not seen as independent or separate to begin with that their conflicts are viewed not through pluralist images of “clashing” or “colliding” (which, as I have said, encourage a zero-sum dynamic) but as taking place

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within, indeed as being a part of, an organic whole, one that, as the fact of conflict ought to make clear, is nevertheless not in a unified state. To the patriot, conflict means that tension or disharmony has surfaced within certain regions of that whole and can only be reconciled through its transformation and so that of its parts.40 In struggling to reconcile rather than accommodate their conflicts, those participating in a conversation are much like dancers striving to move together in harmony with the music.41 When conversing, interlocutors try really to learn from each other, to reach an understanding that allows them to share an interpretation of what they are talking about truly means or requires (even if, again, this sharing will never be done in exactly the same way by each of them). And just as good dancing is not a matter of two separate beings coordinating each other’s independent movements, successful conversation does not arise from the exchange of information between wholly separate interlocutors, for the aim is always to express something meaningful together, which is to say, to be in harmony with, to share in common, something that matters, something that they believe is at least partly constitutive of who they are. To achieve this commonality in dance the partners must be profoundly open to each other and to the music (which, it is to be hoped, they actually wish to dance to), as well as move in such a way that each can grasp the other’s rhythm. Similarly, interlocutors in a conversation must be willing to hear each other out in the profound sense that I’ve referred to as listening (unlike with the more limited kind of hearing required to become clear about the demands aired during negotiations), doing so within the context – the music, however discordant – of their shared history. And they, too, need to speak in tactful ways that help each to understand what the other is saying. The process might also be considered analogous to that of learning a new language. Fluency, as everyone knows, consists in speaking a language naturally, as if it were a part of oneself to the extent that one felt truly at home in it: its ex-

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pressions and curses carrying real power, its words and constructions coming without being sought or reflected upon. When this happens the rules of the language have become truly expressive: the speaker genuinely understands them, since they have become a part of who he or she is. During the learning process, as one struggles to make sense of a particular grammatical construction or to memorize a new piece of vocabulary, the more one is able to associate the new with something that is already understood, that is, with something already familiar or amenable, then the quicker the learning will take place. Where particular words or grammatical forms seem utterly foreign (say, a word with a wholly unfamiliar sound) or even offensive (say, due to the utter incompatibility of gender neutrality with the new language’s grammar), then it will be that much more difficult to learn them, to make them one’s own, to use them comfortably, habitually. Searching awkwardly for a word or struggling to adhere to a particular grammatical construction is thus more like conforming to a regulation than following an expressive rule. In consequence, the fewer such alienating elements there are in the new language, the sooner one will feel at home in it. But if one can change, and if the speakers of the language are not set in their linguistic ways, even the most exotic language can come to serve as a home, one joining the community based around it and so sharing it as a good in common with the others. All this should make clear the advantages of responding to a conflict with conversation. Indeed, these are potentially so great that it would barely be an exaggeration to describe the interlocutors as self-interested. For should their dialogue succeed, its participants, whether weak or powerful, are going to end up with positions that have been transformed – improved rather than compromised; truer expressions of the goods they articulate than they were before the conflict began. To reiterate, the interlocutors in a conversation strive to agree to expressive rather than regulative rules, those that succeed in articulating practices that are so in harmony with all of the

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others being affirmed that they may be carried out virtually prereflectively. Laws that embody such rules are thus going to be more “empowered” than “enforced,” for citizens will follow them naturally and of their own accord, not because they are backed up by the police. And is this not, after all, the true measure of a law’s legitimacy: its moral power to encourage the citizens living under it willingly to uphold it? Patriots are not the only ones who use the term “conversation” as a description of how we should aim to respond to our political conflicts. But others who do so do not always mean the same thing by it, and the differences, as I will show, produce significant divergences in practice. In particular, there are three distinct groups of thinkers here who use the term “conversation” but who differ from the patriot in a fundamental way: they fail to distinguish adequately between it and “negotiation.” Indeed, not only do they tend to use these two terms, along with “dialogue,” “discourse,” and “discussion,” virtually interchangeably but they often do the same with “accommodation,” “compromise,” and “reconciliation.” The differences, however, are crucial. The first group, oddly enough, sometimes asserts a distinction between conversation and negotiation that is just too sharp. Led in Canada by Alain Noël, Mark Kingwell, Simone Chambers, and Matthew Mendelsohn, they advocate what is often called a “deliberative” or “discursive” democracy,42 an approach that gives a central role to what they describe as a fundamentally non-coercive form of dialogue. Sometimes this is called “conversation,” sometimes “negotiation,” but it is always contrasted with “bargaining” (or, confusingly, “negotiation”), which is seen as coercive. Semantics aside, the preference of this group is for conflicting interlocutors to listen to each other, to strive for understanding, and with this the patriot can have no complaint. What makes their approach different, however, is that they think we need to rely upon a neutralist theory of conversation to do this properly; that is, that we ought to conform to a systematic set of proce-

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dures to carry one off. The problem is that, being theoretical, the procedures they recommend are regulative rather than expressive and so are detached from any practical context.43 But a practical context is precisely what is necessary if people are skilfully to judge what is or is not appropriate to an actual conversation, since such a judgement requires not the use of theoretical reason but that degree of sensitivity that, I would suggest, comes with the successful employment of one’s common sense. That is why, if there are to be rules for conversation, they ought to be, not rules of theory, but rules of thumb.44 The second group of Canadian thinkers that tends to conflate conversation and negotiation will sometimes be found making such confusing suggestions as that Canada should become a place where “negotiations are conducted not in a spirit of self-interested bargaining but as a way of pursuing mutual understanding.”45 This is only to be expected, however, for its members advocate an approach that, we might say, strives to assert both the one and the many, that is, both monarchy and polyarchy, together. Samuel V. LaSelva, for example, tries to combine them within a particular conception of federalism; John Ralston Saul and Michael Ignatieff argue for the need to balance them against each other; and Joseph Carens recommends that we alternate between each, endlessly.46 At the heart of all this, as one might suspect, there lies something of an antinomy, of which the approach’s proponents themselves are evidently aware given their embrace of “paradox” (LaSelva), “contradiction” (Saul), “dilemma” (Ignatieff), or “reflective disequilibrium” (Carens). One result is that it becomes virtually impossible to trace any coherent connection between their philosophical assumptions and their practical politics. Indeed, I’m tempted to go further and point out that there is something quintessentially “postmodernist” going on here, though I suspect that most of the members of this group would not be comfortable with the label. But the fact is that we are being asked to affirm a politics that ultimately invokes

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the inherently perplexing notion of a “unity of plurality” or “variety in unity,”47 and this is simply not a politics that encourages that form of dialogue that aims for understanding. The third group is led in Canada by Charles Taylor, Jeremy Webber, James Tully, and Guy Laforest.48 Given that they have no truck with deliberative democracy, or indeed any form of monarchy, I would situate their thinking as somewhere in between pluralist polyarchy on the one hand and patriotism on the other. When it comes to political practice, however, their failure to distinguish adequately between conversation and negotiation ultimately leads to a pluralism tout court. The reason is simple: conversation is an extremely fragile mode of dialogue. Unless all interlocutors remain willing to engage in the speaking and listening that it requires, a conversation will inevitably break down. That is why one must always be alert to the negotiator’s adversarial ways, particularly since an adversarial stance comes readily to those who find themselves disagreeing with others about things they care deeply about, which is to say to all those engaged in politics. Since conversation relies upon a whole, upon a good that is held in common, one whose improvement through transformation is also its goal, then everything possible needs to be done to protect and nurture that whole when conflicts rage over its meaning. Negotiators, however, search only for ways of compromising that whole, and as painful as this always is, it is nevertheless often easier to conduct a negotiation than to engage in the profound searching and challenging of self that conversation requires. At least we can say that conversation’s fragility is inversely proportional to the strength of the understandings that it may produce, for they express agreements that are far more durable than any negotiated accommodation will ever be. The difficulty, however, is to get to them. I read Taylor as the most patriotic among this group, so if I can show that even he fails to help us meet this challenge given his accounts both of how we should be responding to political conflict and of the common good upon which such a

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response relies, then our understanding of what patriotism requires will surely be deepened. To begin with the “how,” the difficulty, again, arises from the blurring of the distinction between conversation and negotiation – indeed, Taylor tends to use the two terms synonymously. What is problematic comes to the fore when we take a closer look at negotiation. Among its different forms is one that, as with the deliberative democrat, can be equated with bargaining. At a market where this is encouraged, both parties are expected to apply whatever guile and pressure they can in order to maximize their own self-interest, which, at least in the short term, is conceived of as largely independent of the other’s, not to mention divergent with it. The pluralist’s conception of negotiation is not far from this, except for the important fact that it is directed to specifically political conflicts, those in which the items at stake are both publicly relevant and incommensurable with each other, thus ensuring that they cannot be accounted for in reductive economic terms. Patriotic negotiation is different again in that the patriotic negotiator is also expected to take account of the overall political community, since it is only in comparison with that community that the accommodations can be judged not just as fair or unfair in form but also as better or worse in content. Patriotic negotiation, then, does not assume the potential independence of the conflicting parties, for it is premised on the notion that, to some degree at least, all share a good in common.49 Yet the accommodations that are arrived at must be considered limited when compared to the far more profound agreements made possible by engaging in patriotic conversation. For negotiation, we have seen, is at best a matter of struggling for compromise rather than for the understandings that come with reconciliation or integration. That is why the patriot believes that negotiations, even those concerned with the whole, should be engaged in only after conversation has been attempted. More than that, when it comes to the fundamental bases of the whole, that is, to the kinds of things that are invoked when one is debating constitutional matters, one

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should be especially reluctant to give up on conversation. This is because, given its adversarial nature, negotiation only confirms the divisions of that whole, while what is required, particularly when it comes to a country’s constitution, is the affirmation of that which is shared in common. Think of a dispute between a married couple. While it is certainly appropriate for them to negotiate in good faith when the disagreement is over, say, who should be responsible for which household duty, when it comes to a divergence over one of the fundamentals upon which their relationship is based, negotiation is at best inappropriate, at worst subversive. For there is simply no place for trade-offs and concessions when it comes to the basic bonds that keep people together. This is what makes Taylor’s ambiguities so problematic. In failing to distinguish between negotiation and conversation, he fails to help us stand on guard against the negotiator’s adversarial tactics and so makes way for a politics that, in practice, will rarely if ever be shaped by conversation. Such a politics is also made more likely by his referring to the positions advanced with regard to constitutional reform as “demands” and to the conflicts based upon them as “collisions.”50 More serious than these semantic missteps, however, are the tactics Taylor recommends as a means of beginning a dialogue about constitutional fundamentals in Canada. In his brief to the Bélanger-Campeau Commission, which followed the failure of the Meech Lake Accord, he clearly rejects the suggestion that Quebec declare itself sovereign and then negotiate with the country that remains, but the alternative he proposes would, I suggest, ultimatly have same divisive effect: that Quebec issue an “ultimatum” to Canada calling for a rerun of the Charlottetown Conference of 1864, which laid the ground for Confederation; should the ultimatum be rejected, it would “signify the end of the country.”51 Taylor is quick to admit, however, that such a move could produce a “shock,” one that “risks damaging the interlocutor, leaving him or her less inclined to talk. It may therefore be useful to couple the ultima-

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tum with an expression of openness, recognizing that Quebec is not alone in wanting to remake the country, that other regions have their own agendas, as we have ours, and declaring ourselves ready to listen to their demands just as we expect them to listen to ours.”52 Despite his evident sensitivity, the “show of openness” Taylor suggests would nevertheless fail to compensate for the damage that would be done by the ultimatum. I do not think we can be more categorical about why: the question at the heart of a genuine conversation is about the nature of the whole – the true meaning of the thing that is shared – not about whether that whole should or should not exist. Taylor’s ultimatum, however, raises precisely the question of Canada’s existence. That is why we need to see ultimatums as but barriers to conversation in constitutional politics, counterproductive at best, self-amputating at worst, and it is also why those Québécois who wish to converse about reforming Canada, about truly “renewing federalism,” must appreciate that there is just no place for (openly) entertaining the prospect of their separation. But as Taylor writes, “for Quebec there is one big question, which is too familiar and too much on the agenda today to need much description. It is the issue of whether to be part of Canada or not; and if so, how.”53 To be clear, I’m not denying that Quebec’s separation from Canada is a possible outcome of the failure to reach an accord. My problem is with Taylor’s willingness to say so openly, because I believe that doing so puts the very existence of the whole he would transform into question. Taylor’s inability to see this is a direct result of his failure to distinguish properly between conversation and negotiation. Let me make this point even more strongly (indeed, perhaps too strongly): if there are Québécois who are concerned that other Canadians have failed to appreciate the seriousness of the constitutional situation and are unwilling to tackle the fundamentals in conversation, then the most threatening thing they should be ready to suggest is that, given the prospect of failure, it may be necessary not for Quebec to leave

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but for the other Canadians to consider doing so. For the Québécois, it should be made clear, will never abandon their canadien heritage. Je me souviens. What about Taylor’s conception of the Canadian political community? What would his call to converse/negotiate do to it? While he seems well aware of the importance of a citizenry sharing a common good, his approach, which consists of the suggestion that different citizens affirm different “formulae” for citizenship, would nevertheless undercut it, at least to a degree. To Taylor, aboriginals and Quebecers ought to see themselves as members of Canada along the lines of the nations of a future Europe, which is to say that they should conceive of the country as a superstate and deal with it through their respective nations rather than as individual citizens. Non-aboriginal anglophones outside of Quebec, however, are referred to the more neutralist modern democratic models that Taylor sees in the us and France, according to which dealings with the state take place on the basis of the rights and duties of individuals.54 Now while there is nothing wrong with citizens relating to their state in different ways – no one who rejects monarchy could object to this – it strikes me that, in calling for such a dualist approach, Taylor fails to be “deeply diverse” enough, as he would put it, for in the end it only contributes to the perpetuation of “solitudes.” That is because, where Quebec is concerned, his recommendation is inappropriate for the non-francophone citizens of the province, indeed even for some of the francophones. As for the rest of the country, to enclose those living there within the supposed unity of a neutralist modern democracy is ultimately to cut them off from the possibility of genuinely sharing a political community with the other Canadians outside of it. My claim, then, is that Taylor should instead be endorsing critiques that would deconstruct that unity55 and so help to tear down the wall that, since 1982, has stood between compatriots. Because “solitudes,” it should be clear, can never be reconciled – only parts of a whole can. Whatever other communities one may or may not be a member of, if

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one is genuinely open to conversing with others in response to conflict then one must be seen to share a whole with them, and thus a membership in what I describe as a “citizenship of we.” Of course, we should never underestimate the difficulties involved in beginning a genuine conversation with our fellow citizens (not to mention those of other countries), or of “getting it right” once one is underway. For conversation is ultimately pointless if it does not, at least on occasion, succeed at reconciliation, at integration, hence at bringing those involved to a better, if imperfect, interpretation of their common good. Perfection may be the patriot’s aim, but he or she knows that it will always be something just beyond reach. And yet that something can, in a sense, be said to constitute a “one,” allowing us to suggest that patriotism is, ironically enough, ultimately more in keeping with monotheism than are the various monarchist approaches. For monarchists wrongly assume that the one has, in some form or other, already descended to Earth, that it must already rule here. But this not only flies in the face of monotheistic eschatology, it is also open to the charge of idolatry, or at least of a certain form of it, given that monarchists expect citizens to obey the sovereign as if it in some sense represented God.56 Moreover, while patriots may strive for the one, they, as we have seen, try to do so without neglecting the many. This, too, seems to me to be fully compatible with monotheism – when, that is, we appreciate that it has never rejected the existence of a multiplicity of gods, only affirmed the pre-eminence of its one God.57 It is not my intention here to advance a religious argument for (or, as many will surely take it, against) patriotism, although I obviously think that it could be done. Rather, my aim has been to emphasize a hopefully far less controversial point: that it would be ideal if we Canadians could come to feel more at home with our constitution. With this both the monarchist and the polyarchist would, of course, agree. But what they fail to see is that their ways of responding to conflict – for the monarchist, pleading before a sovereign authority; for the

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polyarchist, fighting it out with words or weapons – just won’t get us there. Every successful patriotic reconciliation, however, brings us one step closer. Moreover, patriots conceive of this as more than a worthy and viable goal: they consider it essential that we at least approximate it if our constitution is to be considered legitimate. And for this, citizens and their representatives must be willing to converse, to struggle to develop ways to dance, and thus to reconcile with, the music of our country’s politics. I want, now, to say something about how I hear that music, that is, about who I think we Canadians have been, have become, and indeed could be, and so about the expressive rules that I believe we should be following.

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3 Who We Were

So the patriot’s call is for more conversation in politics, more listening, more genuine reconciling. This certainly sounds nice. Obviously, just making the call is not going to be enough. Far more needs to be done to show not only that the approach is more appropriate for our country than the others but also that it is realistic and viable. Meeting the first goal – demonstrating patriotism’s suitability to Canada – is the aim of this and the next chapter, while the question of viability is taken up in the following two. At base, my claim here is that patriotism is truer to who we have been, by which I mean that it allows for a better account of our history than either monarchy or polyarchy. This is not because Canadians have a particularly good record of responding to their political conflicts with conversation; rather, it is because a patriotic conception of Canada – of both the country as a whole and its parts – is still more accurate than those deriving from the other two approaches. At base, the patriotic account of our history that I offer below is intended to establish the following proposition: that the “two founding peoples” conception of our origins, long an unquestioned tenet of Canadian history,1 is, and always has been, false. As we shall see, monarchists have been responsible for the “founding” and polyarchists for the “two.” Both are mistaken.

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A foundation, as we’ve seen, is a kind of solid platform upon which everyday social and political practices are to take place. It is said to be constituted by a sovereign authority, a monarch of one sort or other, which, given its nature as a selfenclosed unity, supports a separation between the undivided foundation based upon it on the one hand and the divisions of everyday politics on the other. But all this, as I have claimed, is myth, and it is myth that, needless to say, is incompatible with a patriotic politics. Let us compare mythologies, ours and that of the United States. The American story begins with the arrival of the pilgrims on the Mayflower, bringing with them a “Great Awakening,” a religious vision of a colony populated by people who had been chosen for a special destiny by God and who thus differed from the Europeans they had left behind. This sense of distinction was bolstered by the revolutionary War of Independence, which lent support to the idea that the country originated with a sharp break from Europe and so with the establishing of something new on the continent. At the base of this new thing was a foundation, the country’s founding documents being understood to contain a set of supreme bedrock principles that are considered to be out of reach of the dialogue of everyday politics. As we have seen, the “We the People” that opens the us constitution is often read as supporting a democratic monarchist conception of this foundation, although we are also informed, in the Declaration of Independence, that this “We” holds certain “Truths to be self-evident,” this alluding to the presence of a theoretical monarch as well. Though the latter has been interpreted differently – whether as embodying the abstract, systematically interlocked rights of a Locke or a Kant, or as some modern form of Machiavelli’s ideal republic2 – it is still, as with the democratic monarch, said to constitute a foundation for the country. To many, then, America is pictured as like some self-enclosed island that has managed to rise above the chaotic waters of everyday history. The constitution, however, did not mark the completion of the island’s foundation. For the thirteen colonies still had to

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make their way from east to west across the continent, a process that is said to have entailed the advancement of a “frontier.” At first, this was seen as consisting of the pioneer’s struggle to conquer wilderness in the name of civilization, but later it gave way to a far less adversarial conception, one that affirmed the kind of Romantic communing with nature we find in the literature of the American Transcendentalists led by Thoreau – before, that is, he took a few trips to the dense woods of northern Maine, which led him to a view of nature that is less benign and so more balanced. The vision of this later Thoreau, which came to dominate the mature conception of the frontier, can be said to include both the taming of wilderness to make it useful for civilized purposes and the Romantic transformation of those doing the taming, a transformation carried out in a way that only the unique North American wilderness could effect. The result only bolstered the “break from Europe” idea, America’s distinctiveness having reached its zenith when the frontier was officially closed upon its arrival at the Pacific, an event associated with the American census of 1890.3 From that point on, many considered the American foundation settled and complete, its meaning fully captured in the founding constitutional texts. The industrialization of American society that followed encouraged the notion that any remaining wilderness ought to be seen as exterior to the now fully established civilization, hence properly subject to its technological control. But all this, again, is myth, and there have been at least two fundamental challenges to it. One relies on factors external to the founding texts: the American frontier, it has been claimed, did not in fact end at the Pacific but has instead acquired non-geographical forms, American civilization having come to encounter new “others” very different from the wilderness which it came into contact with as it moved west. For example, there are the transformations that arose as a result of the Civil War; the rise, due to immigration, of a multiculturalism that some read as a challenge to the constitution’s individualist political principles; the profound and wide-ranging effects of the New Deal and the

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1960s Civil Rights movement; the impact of an increasingly globalized market combined with rapid technological developments; and the post-cold war frontier symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall.4 The other challenge has an internal basis: given that there are, as we’ve seen, at least two possible rival monarchs contained in the constitutional texts – the demos and theory5 – the potential conflicts between them ensure that these texts are always going to be susceptible of new interpretations. As long as the debates over their meaning continue to rage – and there is no reason to assume they will ever stop – the notion that they articulate a solid foundation for the country will be difficult to accept. To the north, one encounters a very different foundation myth. The absence of an anti-European revolution meant that both New France and British North America were, as the names implied, viewed as extensions of Europe in North America, as imported European “gardens” of a sort, these founded on new soil by sovereign European Crowns. Thus did the monarchist British North American political thinkers of the time turn neither to Machiavelli nor to Locke for inspiration but, if anywhere, to Burke.6 For as many have pointed out, historical continuity has long served as a basis of legitimacy for Canadians,7 which is why, as Seymour Martin Lipset puts it, following Russell M. Brown, where the United States is “the innocent Adam who began traditionless,” Canada is more like “Noah, who made a new start but brought with him the weight of a failed history.”8 Of course, as with the Americans, our foundation also had an east-west journey to undergo before it could be declared completed, and this meant that we had our own natural wilderness to confront. Earlier, the colonists of New France assumed two sharply contrasting attitudes, encapsulated in the spiritual division that was asserted between, as they were once called, les moutons of Quebec City and les loups of Montreal.9 The walled city of Quebec was the locus of Samuel de Champlain’s habitation; it containing the civilized Christian garden understood to have been brought in from Europe.

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According to Heinz Weinmann, those walls were built with the intention of “tracing a sharp line between culture and nonculture, being and non-being” in order to “exorcise all inclinations towards Otherness,”10 the most obvious of those inclinations being the “savagery” of the aboriginal. Weinmann suggests that the city walls were also meant to found something new, but it seems to me that, rather than asserting any real beginning, they marked off a sharp border between what was genuinely new, the wilderness that was to be kept on the outside, and the imported old contained within. Even Weinmann notes that the colonists tended to emphasize their connection with the motherland, to which we can add SophieLaurence Lamontagne’s observation that they often, sometimes desperately, tried to retain their European ways, to the point of wearing wholly inappropriate European dress deep into the winter months.11 But while the “sheep” of Quebec City strove for nothing more than to remain ensconced as comfortably as possible within their city’s walls, the “wolves” of Montreal had a different ambition. As Weinmann explains, the Montrealers of the era tended “to allow their city to be completely penetrated by the savage country,”12 with aboriginals, hunters, and explorers all making their way continually in and out of town. Montreal thus considered itself as more of an outpost than a stationary defensive base, as a truly adventurous ville ouverte that strove to collapse Quebec City’s distinction between habitant and autre, civilized and savage, sedentary colonist and nomad.13 And it was indeed from Montreal that most of the coureurs de bois of the day set out, those courageous entrepreneurs and explorers who, as Stan Rogers reminded us, are at their best when “tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage.”14 Those very lines, as Harold Innis has shown, formed the skeleton upon which the flesh of a future Canada would grow.15 Ultimately, this was accomplished by a project that, as I interpret it, saw the sheep and the wolf somehow dwell together: the steady westward advance of what Northrop

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Frye famously called the Canadian “garrison.”16 For as with les moutons, the garrison can be said to contain a European garden of sorts, and as with les loups, it is something on the move. Note that, as this militaristic metaphor implies, the relationship between civilization and wilderness here is assumed to be fundamentally adversarial, which is to say that, unlike with the American frontier (in which, again, society does not just shape but is also shaped by the wilderness it encounters), the garrison project represents a struggle to extend a “border” across the continent, a solid boundary line that is meant to maintain a clear separation between civilization and wilderness as it advances across the landscape. One of the reasons for this, of course, was that the Canadian wilderness is much wilder, much harsher and more inhospitable than the wilderness to the south, and so it is not the kind of thing that one could contemplate communing with Romantically. It’s just too cold up here. Thus Margaret Atwood’s apt contribution of the “survival” theme to Frye’s garrison. Initially, however, as her well-known study of (mostly English) Canadian literature has shown, many of the early colonists attempted to deny this harsh reality, convincing themselves that the environment they encountered constituted some kind of Wordsworthian Divine Mother and so was already a European garden of sorts. As Susanna Moodie wrote, for example: The previous day had been dark and stormy, and a heavy fog had concealed the mountain chain, which forms the stupendous background to this sublime view, entirely from our sight. As the clouds rolled away from their grey bald brows, and cast into denser shadows the vast forest belts that girdled them round, they loomed out like mighty giants – Titans of the earth, in all their rugged and awful beauty – a thrill of wonder and delight pervaded my mind. The spectacle floated dimly on my sight – my eyes were blinded with tears – blinded by the excess of beauty. I turned to the right and to the left, I looked up and down the glorious river; never had I beheld so many striking objects blended into one mighty whole! Nature had lavished all her noblest features in producing that enchanting scene.17

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Such images, however, even in Moodie, ultimately gave way to the harsh realities of the Great White North. Nature came to be seen, in Atwood’s phrase, as a “monster.” This was certainly no world within which to advance a frontier; instead, one could only hope to defend a rather fragile border against encroachment, a thin and yet solid line drawn to distinguish the founded Canada from both nature and the republic to the south. As Ian Angus puts it, for Canadians the “civilizing moment” came “with the drawing of a line, a border that separates here from there, that lets there appear Other.”18 Canada was thus seen as shakily contained within a garrison, one unceasingly threatened by the savagery and lèsemajesté assumed to be present in the realms, natural and American, without. Gardening upon such a foundation was obviously not going to be easy; it often seemed as if what was required, if there was to be an “order and discipline of heaven upon earth,” was nothing less than the subjugation of “Satanic monsters.”19 All those “others” encountered on the wrong side of the border were thus considered fit only to be crushed, as indeed they were, for the most part, whenever they came up against the steamrolling sovereign authority that was (and often still is) the Canadian garrison. There was another important difference between our foundational process and that of the Americans. When our garrison’s border reached the Pacific, no Canadian ever dreamed of declaring that our battle with nature was over, and so that the project associated with it could be declared finished. This, of course, is thanks to the unavoidable fact that one never fully gets control over nature up here, as anyone who has known the North will surely attest (though an encounter with a Montreal ice storm should also suffice).20 Moreover, none of those “others” who have spoken in her name were ever completely defeated by our “civilizing” process. Of the three that I identify below, each in its own way has called on us to utterly reject the garrison imposed border between wilderness and civilization. The first of these is the conception of nature rooted in aboriginal traditions and taken up by environmentalist

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movements such as the Canadian-founded Greenpeace.21 We might interpret it as calling for a reassertion of some of the features of “Kanada,” that Iroquois country on whose shores Jacques Cartier landed, the one to which Leonard Cohen alludes when he declares, in his native-inspired novel Beautiful Losers (1966), that “Canada became a royal colony of France in 1663.”22 This is a notion of civilization that adheres to an animist cosmology, one that conceives of man as fully at one with nature. Whether or not one finds it fully compelling, there is, as I’ll argue below, surely reason to be thankful that it has maintained a significant presence throughout Canadian history, our aboriginals having never been devastated to the extent that they were south of the border. The second “other” consists in our own form of frontierism, the fusing of an originally European civilization with the nature of North America. Centred in the prairie West, this alternative to the garrison can be said to have originated with the Métis as well as with the other immigrants to the region such as the Red River settlers, established on their land by Lord Selkirk in 1812, as well as those who came in from the States. All saw themselves as aiming to reconcile with a land of open plains, one that never seemed as threatening as the dense forests of central Canada. The result, as Barry Cooper puts it, was “a settlement experience that was in many respects a frontier experience,” there being in the West “scant evidence of a garrison mentality; survival is not the dominant theme save under extreme and adverse conditions, which soon give way to the spirit of new beginnings.”23 Technology was, in consequence, able to be deployed in an adaptive rather than controlling manner, and this in an economy that was based upon resource extraction rather than industry.24 “Not just a platform for my dance”25 was how the Westerner conceived of the natural world within which he or she was set, a vision that was diametrically opposed to that of the garrisoned foundation of the Central Canadian. No surprise, then, that the latter felt called upon to invade the former, first taking over the Red River Settlement and then defeating the

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rebellion led by Louis Riel.26 This was followed by the establishment of the North West and then the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to deal with civil unrest, whether in the West or elsewhere. Indeed, to this day such forces, when misused, can be seen to personify the controlling power of the garrison, for they are the first called upon whenever it is considered under threat.27 I’ve said that the so-called civilizing process of advancing our border did not end with the reaching of the Pacific. The Canadian garrison had nevertheless consolidated itself to a significant degree around this time, become stronger, bolstered in particular by the technological advances of the day. The industrialization that arose during the nineteenth century brought with it significant benefits but also a number of disturbing effects, which encouraged the development of a less-threatening vision of nature, one that began to share a great deal with the Americans’ post-frontier conception of it. Nature came to be seen as providing a healthy alternative to life in the city, although now it was a nature threatened by, rather than threatening to, a civilization whose technology was beginning to overwhelm its environment.28 The oncethin line that was the garrison’s border had, thanks to the growing powers of instrumentalization, become thicker, stronger, hence increasingly able to overrun whatever wilderness got in its way. In the twentieth century, many people attributed to this the alienation they felt not just from the external nature that was the wilderness but also within, from their own bodies. Disturbing socioeconomic ramifications were also noted,29 as were political ones that touched at the very heart of the garrison. For the way had been paved for the functionalist neutralist liberalism of a Trudeau, which meant that a new theoretical monarch would attempt to become sovereign here and so seat itself upon the throne at the head of the table that is Canada’s foundation. Sharing concerns about all of this with both aboriginals and westerners, the philosopher George Grant developed a critique of technology that was also a critique of neutralist

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liberalism. Grant expressed it as a lament for the demise of a kind of nationalist red toryism, one that he conceived of as invoking a Platonic tradition that has no place for any form of division between a just politics and the cosmos, between man and nature.30 Grant would thus have us reject the modern notion that man ought to have control over nature and use technology, as Francis Bacon, the sixteenth-century scientist and man of letters, purportedly urged, to “put nature on a rack and squeeze the good out of her.”31 Grant also seems to have been inspired by that minority Christian view, powerfully expounded by St Francis of Assisi for one, that the godly person ought to see his life on Earth as taking place amidst – rather than separately from – wilderness and that we humans are mistaken if we think we have a right to dominion over it. And so, though Grant’s views certainly differ in a number of respects from those of the animist aboriginal and the frontierist westerner, his uncompromising critique of technology as a conqueror’s tool allows us to speak of an ideal that they all hold in common: the complete erasure of that garrison-drawn line between wilderness and civilization. But this, I suggest, would be to commit an error of the opposite extreme. Because it would serve only to transfer the ostensible unity associated with the monarch’s foundational civilization onto the whole cosmos, a cosmos now characterized by a ubiquitous pantheistic monism that is even less true to our experience, it seems to me, than the monarchist’s belief that we can sharply distinguish a unified foundation from the chaotic plurality said to be characteristic of untamed wilderness. This is not the place to argue the point, however, so I shall merely suggest that a minimal degree of alienation between humans and nature is inescapable, if only because the distinctiveness of our species depends on our ability to exercise a moral capacity. For the very idea of human morality assumes that we have at least some degree of free will, a form of liberty that, by definition, does not comply with nature’s physical laws (according to which every action or event has a cause). The reason is that morality requires that people be re-

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sponsible, to a degree, for their actions, and this means that it cannot be the case that everything behind those actions is identifiable with a physical cause.32 Not that making such a claim about human beings requires us to assume that we are so utterly distinct from nature that it makes sense to draw a solid line between us and it and thus assert an impermeable border around our civilizations. Rather, I think we should conceive of those lines and borders differently, and in a way that reconciles those truths present in both the garrison vision and its challengers – a conception, that is, of the kind that might result from a successful conversation between them. Such a line would not only have to be flexible rather than rigid, the making of indentations in it representing the compromises of negotiation, but also dotted rather than solid, since it is through its spaces that conversation, and thus reconciliation, becomes possible. That is the kind of border that we need to assert around our country, and it is just one of this sort that the patriot will be found defending. Far too many Canadians, however, have yet to do so. One way this shortcoming reveals itself, I suggest, is in the persistance of confusion about our identity, situated as it is between the contrasting monarchist foundational visions originating in both Europe and the us. Think of our mixed use of metric and imperial weights and measures, or of the seemingly banal fact that in Canada today, or at least in Quebec, one may occasionally find oneself in a building whose first floor is located one flight up from the ground floor, or rez de chaussée, while, just next door, first floor and ground floor are one and the same. Not so in Europe, where the first floor is invariably one flight up, nor in the us, where it is consistently the floor that one enters upon. Clearly, there is an unanswered question contained in our architecture: do our buildings stand upon a foundation that we have inherited from Europe, or one that we, like the Americans, have constructed here in a new world that we have come to dominate?33 I think there is something healthy in our inability – or refusal – to settle on either possibility, for each is, after all, monarchist in spirit.

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Thus where, to Canadian journalist Robert Fulford, “the feeling of being always on unsound political and constitutional foundations is the direct result of our beginnings. We have no ‘foundation myth’, as the anthropologists say,”34 I would suggest that, on the contrary, our challenge derives from our having had too many. To make the point again, no single would-be monarch has ever managed to come close to achieving full sovereignty over this country, which is why we cannot say that we have constructed a foundation for it. Certainly all monarchist positions were represented during what have wrongly been called our “founding” debates,35 but none, thankfully, has ever managed to carry the day. The myth that our politics does take place upon a foundation has thus always been weaker here than in the United States, which is why, although we accepted the British suggestion that we declare our country a “dominion” (the Brits worried that “kingdom” would antagonize the Americans), something about the moniker just never sounded quite right. One of the beneficial effects of all this is that, comparatively speaking, we are more tolerant of diversity, since the voices of the “others” outside the garrison have never been fully silenced. Yet toleration is but the hallmark of the willingness to negotiate, to make concessions when confronted with the demands of someone who differs from oneself. The tolerator endures the other, but only that; there is no assumption that they might have something to say that is worth listening to, something one could learn from. This, as we’ve seen, marks the limit of how far the pluralist polyarchist is willing and able to go, and it is just not far enough. What I’m suggesting is that, from the beginning, our politics should have been more ambitious. It is simply not enough to recognize that the existence of competing monarchs is incompatible with the assertion of a foundation, even though this at least rules out the constrained, superficial politics that is ostensibly practised upon a stable constitutional

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platform. For the intimation that a constitution is always a political document, one that is intimately connected to the flux of citizens’ always-evolving political practices, should also have made way for seeing it as, potentially at least, expressive of the goods or values shared by the citizenry as a whole. Only this could make possible the reconciliation of our differences, the progressive transformation, rather than compromising, of the things we care about. But we have all too rarely striven for such reconciliations, all too rarely gone beyond the simple recognition that establishing our borders a mari usque ad mare has not meant that all of our “others” have been vanquished. Our political leaders’ longstanding inability or unwillingness to converse with those who do not conform to the garrison can thus be said to have constituted a one-sided affirmation of the mouton spirit of our heritage, just as today our all-encompassing concern with economic efficiency and the maintenance of order and stability may be seen as failing to live up to the standards of the loup. Pandering to our sometimes pusillanimous concerns for comfort, trumpeting ad nauseum our country’s high place on the un Human Development Index, it seems that many of us have taken as our mantra the words of none other than Don Quixote’s sidekick, that proto-economic monarchist Sancho Panza, who declared that “on a good foundation you can build a good house, and the best foundation in the world is money.”36 What, I ask, has happened to our sense of political adventure? Are we afraid that being true to the loup in us will put the mouton, our comforts and security, at risk? This is an ancient worry, and not without basis.37 But in our case it has too often translated into a self-defeating reluctance to celebrate the most original and successful among us, and this in its own way puts the mouton at risk. We need to see that, ultimately, mouton by itself provides only a false security; it lulls us into the false belief that we stand here upon a solid foundation when the reality is that the meaning of our most fundamental political principles is, and forever will be, unsettled. The fact is that those principles must remain

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instead open to question and so intimately connected to the flux of that river that is our history. By neglecting to swim along with them, we will surely drown. If we do swim, however, and try to do so not off in all directions, but together, struggling to move in harmony with the current, indeed in laminar flow, then the importance of being true to the whole of our history, to all of the (evolving) traditions that have been passed down to us, will become clear. This, we ought to appreciate, means striving to be authentic to all that we have been and are, together: to our sheep and wolf spirits, to General Brock and Chief Tecumseh, to the Canadian Pacific Railway and Sir John Franklin, to Sam Steele and Viola Desmond, to peace, order, and good government. The other problem with the “two founding peoples” myth, I have said, is with the “two.” For Canada, it will claim, has from the beginning been a multicultural country, one containing many more than just two communities. When I speak of “multiculturalism,” I should note, I mean to invoke a specifically patriotic conception of it. It differs from the individualist multiculturalism of a Trudeau in that it doesn’t reduce diverse communities to the individuals who make them up.38 Nor does it resemble the multiculturalism of the pluralist, which assumes that those communities have so little in common that zero-sum relations are the best that one can expect when they conflict. So what, exactly, do I mean by a “patriotic multiculturalism”? Rejecting the dualism of the two-founding-peoples myth is one way of providing an answer. This involves recognizing that the original colonists here were for some time just that, colonists from their respective countries whose primary allegiances, if they had any,39 remained with the motherland. It is only when they come to consider themselves as ex-patriots that we can begin to speak of French and English Canadians. But what about the adjectives “French” and “English”? What should we take them to mean? My claim is that, at the outset of our country, the French but not the English Canadians could be considered a genuine community, a group of people

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who held a good in common and not just a linguistic group. As the 1953 Tremblay Commission put it, French Canada embodied “three great traditions – family, autonomous work and the parish,”40 these having served as the basis of a community that truly came into its own only with the rupture of the colony’s ties with France.41 The English Canadians of the time were a far more disparate lot. While they shared a language, it was not a focal point of a genuine community, one more or less on par with the French Canadian. Rather, the anglophones of the day constituted a number of communities, ethnic, religious, and regional. There were, of course, the Anglo-Saxons, who came directly from England. But they were, from the start, in the minority when counted against the immigrants from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and the United States (though about half of the United Empire Loyalists were born in England).42 Indeed, many of the Scots and all of the Welsh and Irish initially had more in common with that admittedly small percentage of Breton francophones (of whom Jacques Cartier was the most famous) who claimed a Celtic, rather than Germanic, heritage (the latter being shared by the Anglo-Saxons and all of the other francophone colonists, in particular those with Frank, Norman, and Poitu-Charentes origins). And religion cut across all of these groups in yet another way, distinguishing the Irish and francophone Catholics from the Protestants,43 just as class differences meant that it made sense to lump many of the Irish and Scots who were unskilled labourers in with the many francophones who experienced similar working conditions rather than with the more skilled English labourers. Finally, there were significant regional differences amongst the anglophones, which distinguished the British Columbians and Red River settlers out west from the garrison-manning Upper and Lower Canadians in the centre and the others to the east. And so on. All this should help us appreciate the extent to which the diversity of the first Canadians has been obscured by the two-founding-peoples myth.44 Moreover, not only does the

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myth reduce a number of substantially different communities to just two groups of people who happen to speak the same language but it altogether ignores another community, or rather collection of communities, that played a pivotal role right from the start of Canadian history. I’m thinking, of course, of the aboriginals. How is this possible? For the answer, we must look to the polyarchist. Polyarchy, as we have seen, assumes that distinctions must be based on things – values or the groups of people affirming them – that are conceptually independent of each other, entities between which it is said to be possible to draw solid lines. And to the polyarchist, it is in response to conflict that we need to draw those lines most clearly; for that is when it becomes necessary for us either to strike a balance, as when negotiating, or to distinguish friend from foe, as realpolitik demands. Indeed, one might say that, in polyarchy, conflict is all: it is conflict that reveals who is the stronger and so who will ultimately rule according to the adherents of realpolitik, just as it is conflict that serves as the basis of all justice to the pluralist.45 All this leads polyarchists to emphasize the distinctions that underlie conflicts, especially those they consider to be the more significant conflicts, and to downplay all the others. When the polyarchist looks at Canadian history, in consequence, one thing tends to stand out: the struggle between the francophones and the anglophones. Now it must be said that these two groups have indeed been involved in the most significant of our conflicts, this one having threatened the country’s very existence from the start. But the polyarchist goes too far, making the francophone-anglophone sociological divide virtually the only one that has ever really mattered. And this, given the many other relevant groupings of francophones with anglophones mentioned above, is a distortion. The aboriginals get read out of our story in the same way. Because with both types of polyarchy, aboriginal weakness ultimately translates into aboriginal invisibility. In the context of realpolitik this arises from the assumption that, when

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there’s no one to do battle with, then politically speaking, there no one really there. We get the same result with the pluralist but in a different way. As everyone knows, when it comes to negotiation different groups bring different degrees of power to the table, and this means that, even when all sides are negotiating in good faith, those that begin with very little tend to end up losing a lot. In the literature, this reality has served as the basis of the well-known “élitist” critique of pluralism, which I won’t rehearse here.46 But there are further implications of this imbalance, since power affects not only the degree to which one finds it necessary to accommodate others but also decisions about whom one is willing to negotiate with in the first place. Thus, in Canada, while pluralism certainly “has at least the potential to embrace aboriginal peoples,”47 as Kenneth McRoberts, one of its leading proponents, has put it, it will only happen if the aboriginals have the strength to make a real fight of it. Since they have only recently begun to acquire that strength, it should come as no surprise that it is also only quite recently that pluralists have begun to recognize the fundamental place of aboriginals in this country. Indeed, even McRoberts implies that his own longstanding advocacy of Canadian dualism was a result of nothing but aboriginal political weakness. As he writes, “To be sure, the involvement of native peoples with Canada has also stemmed from their membership in a prior collectivity, but until quite recently native peoples were not in a position to force their claims upon the Canadian political scene. If only because of their much larger numbers, francophones (at least in Quebec) have always been able to do so.”48 What an odd way to advance a position one considers just. But we can see why, with no sense of what could be true to the citizenry as a whole, the pluralist has little to say on behalf of those groups that lack the strength to make it to the bargaining table in the first place. When it comes to recounting history, the result is a blindness to the necessary centrality of truth, which is nothing other than truth that at least occasionally calls upon the historian to highlight the importance

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of groups that had nevertheless been politically marginalized. Where the pluralist fails, then, is in the appreciation that historians need to be even more reluctant than politicians to engage in negotiation, to allow compromise to taint their interpretations. Otherwise they will be led to do just one thing, and that’s misconceiving Canada.

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4 Who We Are

Our practices are, in a sense, interpretations of the values or goods underlying them. When we play hockey, for example, and do so in a particular way, that way can be said to constitute our interpretation of hockey, expressing such goods as athleticism, sportsmanship, teamwork, and so on. To play the game, then, is to offer an interpretation of how those goods should be understood; we might even go so far as to say that one is advancing a particular “argument” for this. So what hockey commentator Don Cherry does orally before a television camera – articulate an account of what good hockey is supposed to be about (among other things!) – Wayne Gretzky has done on the ice without opening his mouth. Both offer interpretations of the practice, accounts of the goods underlying it. In this chapter, I advance some of my own interpretations of certain politically relevant goods, hence practices, present in contemporary Canadian society. Since we participate in these practices and not others and carry them out in this way and not that, we can say that the goods they express matter to us in a particular way. Any account of them, in consequence, is also going to be an account of the people who follow them. Before I begin, however, I want to say something about what “goods” are in general and how they differ in type depending on how they are valued. A good, as I conceive of it, just is

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something that is valued, something that we “care”1 about. When the good pertains to one person alone then it is just that, a “personal good,” one that may be valued either instrumentally, as a good for some other purpose, or intrinsically, as a good in itself. Money is, to most, a clear example of the former, while one’s dignity or liberty serve as examples of the latter. Of course goods, whether instrumental or intrinsic, can also be valued by more than one person at a time. Those valued instrumentally by a number of people have been referred to, by welfare economists and others, as “public goods”: think of a dam that provides a town with water and security from floods. When two or more people hold an intrinsic good in common, however, as in the case of a friendship, then this is best called a “common good.” For friendship is unlike the dam in that it cannot be valued by the friends instrumentally – if it could then we would have to think of it more in terms of a business relationship. In friendship there is no need to repay our partners in kind every time they do us a favour since that favour is considered less an exchange between two independent parties and more a contribution to something greater than the sum of its parts, namely, the friendship. That is also why, when we find that we are no longer enjoying a friendship, we still feel an obligation – though not necessarily an overriding one – to continue the relationship. Aristotle was the first philosopher to describe friendship in something like these terms, and I think that he was, for the most part, right in conceiving of it as the model for what I’m calling a common good.2 Friendship, however, tends to go without something that we find with many other common goods. One of the ways that kinship, for example, differs from friendship is that it may continue on long after those who originally established the relationship have gone; indeed, family members often wish for some sort of lineage. In this, kinship shares with many other common goods something that is absent in the case of friendship: an aspiration, to put it grandiosely, to immortality.

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This is particularly the case with many of the common goods that we might describe as “public,” those that tend to involve many more people than the two more “private” ones just mentioned (indeed, the move from public to private can be seen as simply a function of the number of people involved). It is those common goods that involve enough people to be identified as public that serve as the basis of what we call communities, and it is the combined presence of different kinds of communities that is responsible for much of the diversity of modern societies. I say “much” but not “all,” because modern diversity is also, of course, a matter of bringing together a large variety of individuals, which is to say that individuals also uphold differing, hence differing combinations of, personal and not just common goods. That said, I’m going to restrict the discussion below to the different forms of community that tend to be present because distinguishing between these properly, has, it seems to me, tended to be far more controversial than giving individuals their due. I distinguish between six kinds of public common good, and so between six kinds of community: civil associations, ethnicities, religions, regions, nations, and citizenries. Of these the last two, nation and citizenry, tend to be conflated, and the result has been much confusion. That is why I think we need to conceive of them in ways that are somewhat different from those that have been on offer so far. To many, the concept of “nation” (thanks, among other things, to institutions such as the United Nations) is often assumed to be identical with that of “state.” My argument, however, is that the laws and institutions that constitute a state – indeed, any political body – should be viewed as expressing, first and foremost, a citizenry, or “civic” community, instead. A nation may have a special relationship with a state (as we shall see, it must have one if it is to be considered truly free), but nationalists tend to be more concerned with those of their community’s practices that are situated within civil society than with those carried out in and around the state. Of course, civil society is also the

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home of many other kinds of communities, and I am going to go into some detail about all of them below. But before I do so, I want to make a seemingly obvious point: most Canadians tend to be members of more than one community. Although this is no more odd than the fact that individuals tend to have more than one friend, it does ensure that conflicts between these communities, like those between communities and the personal goods of individuals, are always possible. Hence the need for politics. Something else needs to be said about membership in a community, in particular about admission. It is important to appreciate that, other than that necessary but not always sufficient condition that we might refer to as “positive self-identification,” whereby all members of a community must personally affirm their membership for it to be in good standing, there is anything but uniformity across communities here. Each and every community, of whatever type, tends, because of its unique history, to have its own specific admission requirements. It might be helpful to situate the differences here on a spectrum, with one pole echoing the terms of admission for kinship, in which birth is a prime route to membership, and the other those for friendship, to which entrance is invariably voluntary. Different communities are going to be situated at different points along this spectrum and may also move along it in one direction or another as they evolve. Thus, while most people tend to be born into an ethnicity, membership in a civil association such as a sporting club is invariably going to be voluntary. Controversy arises, however, when it comes to nations, because while some nations, such as the Québécois, have moved increasingly away from race as a factor with regard to admission, others, the aboriginal nations among them, have not (though adoption has long been an accepted way of becoming an aboriginal). This becomes controversial because nations, unlike ethnicities, need special recognition by the state, and a nation’s allowance of race as a factor in admis-

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sion may conflict with the notion of respect for individuals. Not that acknowledging the controversy here should be interpreted as saying anything against this admission practice. For a community must be what it is: just as it would be absurd to pretend that someone without any sort of Chinese ancestry could become a full member of the Chinese Canadian ethnic community, the same must be said of the aboriginal national communities among us. If there are difficult implications in the case of aboriginals, it just means that we need to be especially careful about responding to them appropriately in our politics. But simply demanding that aboriginals – who, like everyone else, feel a moral obligation to uphold the common goods at the heart of their communities – pretend that they are members of ethnicities rather than nations is no solution. I’ll have more to say about this below. I believe that the failure to properly grasp the various types of communities actually present in our country today has had significant political ramifications. That said, it strikes me that I’m getting somewhat ahead of myself in referring to specific Canadian examples at this point, which is why, in order not to prejudice the discussion of Canada too much (or, to be honest, to do the opposite in a way most useful for my purposes), I will limit the immediate focus to the case of present-day Britain.3 Civil associations are those thoroughly voluntary communities found in civil society, from football fan and book clubs to universities, unions, business enterprises, interest groups, and so on. Ethnicities also find their home in civil society, though, as I have said, people tend to become members of them more as a result of birth or upbringing than, as with the civil association, choice. Usually, ethnic communities consist of immigrants and their descendants, the culture they share having been imported from their place of origin, as with, say, Britain’s East Indians. As for the religious community, by this I mean to refer to those religions whose followers tend to worship in an institutionalized setting, say by regular attendance

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at a church, mosque, or synagogue that serves as the locus of their community. And depending on the religious community in question, some – again unlike ethnicities – will require some form or other of recognition by the state. Thus, while Britain’s Indians and Bahai see their communities as fully and comfortably situated within the bounds of civil society, British Protestants, with their established churches in England and Scotland, as well as Catholics, Jews, and Muslims – who now all receive, along with the Protestants, state support for their public schools – do not. Every single citizenry and nation, however, requires that unique level of integration with the state that comes with recognition. The observation is superfluous when it comes to a citizenry because the state, as I have said, ought to be seen above all as an expression of its citizens – at least when its laws and institutions are the products of dialogue between those citizens or their representatives. Such dialogue, once again, should include both conversation and negotiation, since the struggle here is the political one that attempts to be true – and not just to do the least possible damage – to the good that all citizens hold in common. This is very different from the common good that constitutes the national community, and to show how, I shall point to three qualities of the nationalist, none of which is especially concerned with the ongoing response to conflict and so politics. First, there is the nationalist’s concern for his or her nation’s cultural heritage, that is, those of its practices, including the making and disseminating of art and cultural ideas, the reading and writing of newspapers, discussions in cafés, and so on, that tend to be situated in civil society. All of these, we should note, are connected in some way or other, above all through a shared language. Second, the nationalist affirms a special attachment to a particular piece of land with specific boundaries, an attribute that is notably absent from the domestic concerns of the ethnic community (the Arab British, for example, feel no special tie to any particular area in Britain, unlike the English,

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Scots, Welsh, or Northern Irish). And third, nationalists lay claim to a sense that their nation cannot be considered free unless it receives a particular form of recognition from the state(s) under whose jurisdiction it lives. This latter is yet another distinguishing point between the nation and the ethnic community. West Indian Brits, for example, will never be found calling for their own representative stripe on the Union Jack, putting their ethnicity on par with the nations symbolized there. It is because of this third quality that nations cannot be said to limit their practices to the bounds of civil society. That said, it would be going much too far to assert that state politics is a central concern of nationalists. As long as the required recognition has been achieved, nationalists will tend to focus on those cultural practices expressed in civil society. Even when that recognition is not forthcoming, the consequent limit to national (as distinct from political) liberty will still be considered less important than will the need to remain vigilant about the nation’s cultural heritage. The modern Greeks certainly demonstrated this, as the following story makes powerfully clear: “Athens – 1821. Greeks are fighting for their independence. In Athens, they besiege the Acropolis, a stronghold of the Turkish occupiers. As the siege grinds on, the Turks’ ammunition runs short. They begin to dismantle sections of the Parthenon, prying out the 2,300year-old lead clamps and melting them down for bullets. The Greek fighters, horrified at this defacement of their patrimony, send the Turks a supply of bullets. Better to arm their foes, they decide, than to let the ancient temple come to harm.”4 How different this is from what we might have expected of the ancient Greeks, who saw themselves as members of a variety of citizenries rather than of a single nation. “Liberty,” for them, referred above all to that which comes from participating in politics; the idea of a national community and of that form of freedom associated with it had yet to be imagined. Indeed, the ancients would not have been able

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to comprehend struggles such as those waged by many Third World national liberation movements during this past century, in which the central goal was that of obtaining national recognition by ensuring that the leaders of their nations’ states would be, if not necessarily democratic, then at least native sons rather than foreigners. That said, talk of the nationalist’s concern with state recognition only makes sense vis-à-vis those nations that have come into existence in the modern age. To see why, I believe we need to sidestep that ultimately fruitless semantic debate currently developing between “modernist” and “revisionist” scholars of nationalism. To the modernist, nationalist ideology and the nations it is meant to affirm came into being only in the eighteenth century. It defines communities that are basically secular; that exhibit relatively egalitarian social relations of a sort absent, say, within the hierarchical political structures of medieval kingdoms; and that turn for their political expression to the state, with its sharp “sovereign” borders.5 To the revisionist, alternatively, nations existed long before modernity, and, rather than being primarily secular, they turned for their political and institutional expression to the Church, which asserted everexpanding and more diffuse borders.6 I think we can uphold the truths contained in both positions by recognizing that there have been basically two kinds of nations in history, the premodern and the modern, and that those communities that today exhibit the characteristics of the premodern are, from our modern vantage point, best referred to as religious communities rather than as nations.7 England may have begun as a premodern nation, that is, as a Christian religious community, but today it must be counted among the moderns. The same may be said of the Catholic Irish of Northern Ireland, many of whom look to the republic to the south as their (modern) nation’s home and so would have its sovereignty extended to include the North. Northern Ireland contains another community, of course, the majority Ulster

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Protestants, but where their Catholic compatriots are more nation than religious community, they are more religious than nationalist.8 Given that all modern nations and some religious communities need a form of state recognition if they are to consider themselves free, the recent establishment of assemblies in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland can be interpreted as attempts to meet this requirement (in Northern Ireland this has involved sharing some of its sovereignty with the republic to the south and thus, to a degree, responding to the demands of the Catholic nationalists). That leaves the English, and I am not the first to note that they lack an assembly largely because they have for so long, and so wrongly, been equated with the British, their de facto dominance in the now-federal British state based in London obviating their need for state recognition. The ubiquity of the English language has also, it must be said, contributed to the obscurity and relative placidity of contemporary English nationalism (football hooligans excepted, of course), the English having never felt their language to be under any sort of threat. For history has shown that suffering one or another form of oppression at the hands of another people seems to be a veritable precondition for the development of (sometimes too) strong national sentiments.9 That said, perhaps the recent assertiveness of the other British nations will have the effect of awakening English nationalism to the point where the English will soon begin calling for an assembly – or two, or three – of their own.10 If so, then we would be able to speak of that other type of community getting state recognition in Britain, the one that emerges when people take as significant the fact that they live in a particular region. It should be clear that the federal British state cannot be considered exclusive to any one community. Yet it is expressive of a single citizenry, the civic community of British citizens (the new assemblies can also be said to be the locus of their respective citizenries). Indeed, my claim is that, in the

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modern West at least, we need to see the citizenry, and nothing else, as the essence of what makes a country whole, and so that countries are civic communities that are charged with embracing all of the other communities, not to mention the individuals, living in their jurisdictions. Too many political thinkers, monarchist and polyarchist alike, have failed to appreciate this. The idea of a community of citizens, as I have said, comes down to us from the classical republican tradition. To classical republicans, citizens ought to be seen as “patriotic” only when they demonstrate a willingness to respond to conflict with conversation, to reconcile their differences with the aim of fulfilling the common good. Making laws in this way is all about striving for justice, taking justice to mean that truth at which every political conversation aims. And since truth, as the saying goes, shall set us free, we may equate the decision to participate in a politics that gives conversation a central role with the affirmation of that form of liberty that is specifically political, as distinct from national or individual. Political liberty differs from these other two in that it arises only when a citizenry manages to make and live under laws that to some degree reconcile the goods they hold dear. The modern patriot accepts, however, that the struggle for political liberty will often fail, that conversation in politics will in many cases break down, and that at such times it is legitimate for those involved to turn to negotiation. To the classical republican, such a move is taken as a sign of corruption, of the emergence of factions in the body politic that require sometimes drastic measures – Machiavelli’s being the most famous – to excise. It is thus, we can say, the modern’s greater sensitivity to difference that has made way for a patriotism that accepts, given that unity is not of this world, that those involved in a conflict can sometimes do no better than to search for those compromises least damaging to each other and to the good they still hold in common. This, as I see it, is to embrace not factionalism but realism, and nothing could be more patriotic.

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How citizens tend to do all this, to converse and negotiate their politics, constitutes their shared political culture, political cultures being distinct from those situated more in civil society, the cultures of the national, ethnic, religious, and regional communities. That the various parliaments in Britain today lay claim to differing degrees and types of power should be seen as an indication of how political cultures may vary not just as a result of divergences in political ideology but also because of the differing ways in which they have been combined, integrated, with these other communities. The marked asymmetries of contemporary British federalism should thus only be expected. These, it seems to me, relatively uncontroversial British examples should help in making the necessary distinctions when we turn to Canada. Essentially, I would like to show that the various Canadian communities are distinct enough from each other to ensure that, while Canada does constitute a whole, that whole is nevertheless not in a unified state. Yet those communities do share enough to ensure that the whole can be characterized as more or less integrated, so any lines we may wish to draw between its parts ought to be dotted rather than solid. Let me begin by declaring that Canada is not, and never has been, a nation. A single country, certainly, one with a federal state system that, for a long time now, has had the potential to express a number of provincial citizenries as well as an overarching federal one, without question. But the state centred in Ottawa, just like the British one based in London, simply must not be interpreted as exclusive to any single nation. Nations have lived under it, of course, the first of these, as we have seen, being the French Canadian, a premodern national community that in retrospect is perhaps better identified as a religious community. Regardless of the nomenclature, we need to recognize that that French Canada is just no longer with us, that “French Canadian” now refers at most to a linguistic group but no longer to a full-fledged community.

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Where once the diocese in Ottawa was part of the ecclesiastical province of Quebec,11 secularization has given rise to an important distinction between the francophone communities outside of Quebec – the Franco-Ontarians, Franco-Manitobans, Acadians, and so on – and that one within it. For these French Canadians no longer look to Quebec as the centre of a larger community of which they are all a part; instead they constitute a number of distinct regional-ethnic communities in their own right.12 Within Quebec, the social transformations associated with the modernizing Quiet Revolution of the 1960s have meant that the French Canadians in the province have come to form a new community, la nation québécoise, one whose members have largely shifted their institutional allegiance from the Church to the state centred in Quebec City. And given that states have much sharper borders than any church,13 we have yet another reason for emphasizing the distinction between the Québécois within Quebec and the other French Canadians without. That said, it would be a mistake to forget that contemporary French Canadians are all integrated to a degree, given their common origins in the old French Canada, and so ought not to be seen as separate or conceptually independent of each other: no solid line should be drawn between them. As with the Québécois, “somewhat over thirty” is also the age of another national community new to the Canadian scene: English Canada. It can be said to have undergone an opposite transformation to that of French Canada in that it evolved from linguistic group to national community. That said, the English Canada of today is, as Ian Angus has rightly pointed out, “a nation whose unawareness of itself is legendary.”14 This, I want to claim, is a direct result of its origins. For where the Québécois nation came into being along the lines of the “German model,” according to which a state with a nationalist role is formed only after certain social transformations have taken place, the English Canadian nation conformed more closely to the “French model,” ironically

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enough, whereby a pre-existing state, in this case the one based in Ottawa, set the stage for the creation of the nation.15 But because of that state’s fundamental role in this process, many have come to confuse it (which, to reiterate, must be seen first and foremost as the expression of the civic community that is Canada) with the English Canadian nation, and this has resulted in misguided talk of a “Canadian,” “panCanadian,” “Anglo,” and “English Canadian” nationalism as if all these terms were but different ways of referring to the same thing.16 Overcoming the confusion requires that we be clear on precisely how the English Canadian nation came into being. And for this we do need to look to the Canadian state. More than anything, it was developments in the wake of the Second World War that led to its strengthening, to its becoming more independent, hence capable of engendering a nation. For the war generated pride in Canada’s exploits as well as a decline in British influence on the country. Moreover, federal officials, citing the requirements of Keynesian economics and the call for more robust social programs, were loath to relinquish the powers they had acquired vis-à-vis the provinces as part of the war effort. One of the first significant moves of this newly empowered state was to adopt the recommendations of the 1949 Royal Commission on Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, the result being more active government support of cultural productions through the formation of the Canada Council as well as a program of federal grants to universities.17 This, more than anything else, led to a transformation of anglophone civil society and made way for the creation of the English Canadian nation, an event that I would identify as having taken place during the late 1960s. No thinker has been more sensitive to the reality of English Canada than Philip Resnick.18 He tells its story somewhat differently than I do, however, and for a reason that I suspect has to do with his not seeing how a citizenry can constitute a distinct community in its own right. For while Resnick seems

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to distinguish between state – its laws, structures, and institutions – and nation, he does not view the former as the expression of a community of which all Canadians must be considered a part. Rather, in his account, the development of the increasingly independent Canadian state from 1867 on ought to be seen as concomitant with the rise of the English Canadian nation. He thus does not, for the most part, seem to situate the latter within civil society, which is why he thinks it makes sense to speak of a distinctively English Canadian political culture and to distinguish it from the political cultures of other Canadians.19 I have been suggesting, however, that we recognize that nationalists are not particularly interested in politics and attend to it only when they think that their nation hasn’t received due recognition from its state(s). Resnick ends by pointing to the powerlessness of the state based in Ottawa today, which in his view has merely switched its political and economic dependence from Britain to the United States, and makes the state responsible for the weakness of contemporary English Canadian national identity.20 My claim, however, is that English Canada the nation came into being only in the 1960s, and that it is not so much weak as hidden. Who hid it? More than anyone else, Pierre Trudeau and his followers must take the blame; for it was Trudeau who ensured that the very same state that was responsible for English Canada’s genesis came to defend a neutralist theory of justice that leaves no room for the recognition of nationhood. That is why those nations that actually exist under its rule have been, at best, ignored and obscured. It is also why Trudeau rejected everything the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism had to say about biculturalism, claiming, against all the evidence to the contrary, that the country is the home of a single “national community.” But neither really “national” nor even really a “community.” For the “civic nationalist” doctrine that Trudeau is sometimes said to have espoused is not, in fact, compatible with the affirmation of a genuine form of community, be-

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cause rather than being concerned with a specific common good shared by a specific group of people in a specific historical context, its main aim is to defend an ostensibly systematic set of regulations for which it claims universal validity, regulations that, as we have seen, are essentially designed to affirm the respect of individuals in a way that is supposed to unify them. There’s no sign of the common good of a citizenry here because there’s no place for the notion that an actual historical community can be based on the willingness of citizens to converse with each other. Nor is there any sign of a nation: the focus is all on the state and its constitution rather than on the heritage of a societal, as distinct from political, culture. Indeed, when faced with nationalist calls for state recognition, the civic nationalist will stand in unwavering opposition, his or her assumption being that any such recognition is irreconcilable with the respect for the individual that alone is deemed worthy of an absolute, uncompromisable status. This itself follows from another mistaken assumption, namely, that membership in a nation is invariably a matter of biology, and so that nations are for the most part ethnicities whose defenders rely upon an illegitimate doctrine of “ethnic nationalism.” But this form of membership, as we’ve seen, is true of only some nations; in any case, who is to say that giving them state recognition is always going to be unjust, that it is something never worth discussing? To civic nationalists, the presence of communities that cannot be wholly reduced to the individuals that make them up is considered threatening to a country’s integrity. But real integration, I have been arguing, arises not from the imposition of doctrinal regulations, however unified in theory, but from the willingness of citizens and their representatives to converse in an effort to realize the good that they hold in common. The community associated with this is not only not threatened by genuine diversity but positively embraces it. The “unified” vision of a country underlying civic nationalism, however, does just the opposite, with the result that nations such as English Canada get hidden from our view.

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Sensitivity to the distinction between citizenries and nations should also provide us with a different take on Resnick’s worries about the independence of the Canadian state. For it means that we should distinguish between “political independence,” which is of chief concern to a citizenry, “socio-cultural integrity,” which is a matter for those communities, including the national, that are found in civil society, and “economic control,” which ought to be seen as something that is largely instrumental to the other two. It is the failure to make such distinctions that, I suggest, is behind all the misconstrued talk about the rise and fall of “Canadian nationalism.” For the modern national community is practiced, for the most part, not just in civil society but more specifically within that part of it identifiable as the “public sphere” – as distinct from the “market economy” – that subdomain within which non-economic practices are situated. So while the failure of a nation to achieve sufficient control over either the state(s) or the economy associated with it may say something about its liberty, it does not necessarily mean that we ought to question its very existence. After all, a group of friends may rent rather than own the residence they share yet it can still serve them as a genuine home. Indeed, even if they were imprisoned their friendship could conceivably survive and perhaps even grow stronger from the experience. Worries about independence are nevertheless understandable when we see them as concerns about the impact of an absence of sovereignty on culture, whether of the political, societal, or economic sort. But how should we understand this notoriously ambiguous term? I think we would do well to begin answering the question by taking into account the three meanings of culture outlined by Northrop Frye. As he explains, there is culture as lifestyle, exhibited in the way people dress, eat, drink, and carry on other normal social rituals (the British pub and the French bistro represent cultural differences in lifestyle, for example); culture as a shared heritage of historical memories and customs, carried out mainly

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through a common language; and culture as the production in a society of literature, music, architecture, science, scholarship, and applied arts.21 With respect to the first category, Canada has never had much of a distinctive cultural lifestyle, according to Frye, but rather one that is largely identical to that of the northern United States. The similarities, he adds, are spreading rapidly to the rest of the world thanks to an increasingly global civil society with its tendency, if only for technological reasons, towards standardization.22 That said, I think Frye significantly exaggerates the commonality he refers to, not just between countries but also within them. For when it comes to lifestyle, profound differences remain between communities within a single country, say, between urban and rural, and even between groups of people living within a single community. A young urban professional based in New York, for example, can be expected to share a great deal with someone in similar socioeconomic circumstances in Paris, but neither of them will share much in this respect with the residents of their cities’ poor neighbourhoods. Lifestyle, we should thus appreciate, has never been shared to a significant degree across the whole of a country, nor indeed across any of the communities within it, and certainly not to the extent that it could be used to distinguish one from another: lifestyle is simply not a basis of community. Regarding culture as a shared heritage, Canada’s anglophones can be said to affirm such a thing, although it is not a culture that distinguishes them from other Canadians and it cannot therefore be considered something uniquely English Canadian. I’m thinking of the political, rather than societal, culture that all Canadians share through their longstanding membership in the Canadian citizenry centred in Ottawa. With regard to societal culture, English Canada cannot lay claim to a shared heritage all its own for the simple reason that it is just too young to have developed such a thing.23 Not so, however, when it comes to identifying a distinctively English Canadian version of the third category, cultural

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production. It was during the 1960s that the culture of English Canada began to come into its own, giving rise, for example, to an identifiable literature of significant scope and integrity,24 as well as to rich and compelling folk and pop music, from Stan Rogers, Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen to the Dream Warriors, Scott Merritt, and the Tragically Hip.25 It is thanks to that cultural flowering that the various English-speaking communities in the country can be said to have integrated in certain social respects and so formed a single English Canadian nation. Given its societal culture, the English Canadian nation in Canada today can be described as a vibrant and increasingly self-assertive community, though it is in a similar situation to the English nation in contemporary Britain in terms of its relations with the country’s other nations and its level of selfawareness. Then too, one may question the justifiability of speaking of a nation when so many of its members fail to identify themselves as such. After all, I have said that positive self-identification is a necessary condition of membership in a community, whatever its type. The problem, again, is with the influence that certain monarchist doctrines – in particular, Trudeau’s theoretical one – have had on many English Canadians. Yet I would claim that it was nothing other than the English Canadian nation that was being invoked by those anglophones who identified themselves as “Canadian” in an important 1991 survey of ethnicity and citizenship attitudes. For it is clear that, in the survey, “Canadian” does not refer to citizenship: not only were all possible answers to the question societal as distinct from political but the question immediately preceding the one of most interest to us here implied that “Canadian” referred to a kind of “ethnic or cultural group,” again something that is more societal than political.26 This suggests, then, that there are many more English Canadian nationalists out there than they themselves are aware. Not that recognizing the rise of the English Canadian nation in any way implies that it has replaced, or even that it

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could exist independently of, the various ethnic, religious, and regional communities that predated it. The whole point of making our distinctions with dotted rather than solid lines is that it allows us to reject the notion that communal allegiances constitute such a zero-sum game. After all, are not the novels of Mordechai Richler, a Jewish Canadian, also considered as among the most important works of English Canadian literature, just as those of Gabrielle Roy, a FrancoManitoban, claim a similar status for the Québécois? One could easily multiply the examples. But confusion nevertheless persists, an effect of the English Canadian nation having, as we’ve seen, come into being more as a result of a Silent Evolution, as we might put it, than a Quiet Revolution. Clarity will reign only when a significant number of us become sensitive to the distinction between Canada the citizenry and English Canada the nation. What of the aboriginals? In the main, they are best conceived of as a collection of nations, with a level of diversity roughly equivalent to that found in Europe. We need to be aware, however, of the large numbers who have moved off reserve and into urban centres. In doing so many of them have minimized their identities as members of specific aboriginal nations. Not that they ought no longer to be considered aboriginals, of course; only that now they merit the designation more along ethnic than national lines. As for those still living on reserve, having the state recognize their nationalities makes more sense now than ever. For one thing, premodern nationality was never applicable since aboriginals did not practise the kind of institutionalized religion that is essential to this sort of community. As for modern nationhood, with its relatively horizontal, i.e., egalitarian, social structure, to the extent that it can be ascribed to aboriginal communities it was largely adopted as a result of Western inspiration.27 Indeed, aboriginals have only recently come to refer to themselves as constituting the country’s “First Nations,” and as we’ve seen self-identification is a necessary but not sufficient condition for nationhood. That said, it seems to

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me that the original European colonists were more right than wrong to have dealt with the aboriginals as members of sovereign states and to have made treaties with them on that basis – a practice that, despite the objections of those such as John Locke himself,28 was largely in keeping with the leading constitutionalisms of the time. Doing so was in any event far more justifiable than the later decision to base relations with the aboriginals on the colonialist Indian Act, first passed by Parliament in 1876, the devastating effects of which all of us are (some more than others, of course) still contending with today.29 What of the other kinds of communities in contemporary Canada? There are many ethnic communities, too well known and numerous to identify here. Canada also contains roughly four regional communities – Central Canada (Ontario and Quebec), the West (the western provinces, sometimes, curiously enough, excluding British Columbia), the East (the provinces of the Atlantic coast), and the North.30 Given our country’s immense size, this is a surprisingly small number. Less surprising, however, is our inadequate awareness, not to mention understanding, of the country’s various citizenries or civic communities. As I have suggested, the notion that every political association ought to be interpreted as expressing a community of citizens is quintessentially patriotic. Some such civic communities will be found, in a limited form, in the self-governing associations of civil society, but the more robust ones are those that are expressed by our states, be they municipal, provincial, or federal. Thus should the federal Official Languages Act (1969) be viewed as an expression of that state’s unique political culture, which is to say that the act is concerned with the languages in which the state operates and relates to the Canadian citizenry. Hence the error of thinking that it was designed to bring about a fully bilingual Canadian society, to encourage all Canadians, not just those who take an above-average interest in federal politics, to become bilingual. That said, those who

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make this mistake can, nevertheless, claim some support from the act itself, as when it reaches into the depths of civil society and demands that consumer products – even those destined for the most monolingual regions of, say, Quebec or Alberta – have bilingual packaging. It is because they express cultures in the second of Frye’s three senses of the term, those based upon a shared heritage of historical customs and memories, that it makes sense for us to ask about the ideological identities of the various Canadian citizenries, ideology being the chief characteristic of a political culture. Restricting ourselves to that countrywide citizenry centred in Ottawa, I think we can say that it has been, for the most part, expressive of (an evolving) liberalism, at least since the close of World War ii. Whether this has taken the form of the pluralist liberalism of Mackenzie King or Jean Chrétien (when, that is, the latter is not playing realpolitik), the neutralist liberalism of Trudeau, or the patriotic liberalism that, alas, has yet to receive much of its due in Canadian political practice, liberalism has, more than any other ideology, served as the “home” of our political culture, the centre of our political spectrum, and so the main orienting creed of whatever political party has been serious about getting elected to form a government.31 Of course, the more democratic socialist wing of the New Democratic Party or the conservatives who are present within the conservative-liberal mix that is the Progressive Conservative party or dominant within the Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance would certainly like that home ideology to change. But, so far, they have been unable to convince the majority of Canadians to go along with them. Ideology permeates all of a citizenry’s practices, including the development of public policy, the provision of services, the management of the economy, and the recognition of nations and regions. Regarding the latter, the very existence of provincial, territorial, and municipal governments signals the recognition of regions (as well as, of course, expressing civic

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communities). Indeed regional differentiation, in particular, has been responsible for a de facto asymmetrical federalism that, given the variety of political experience that one might expect from a country as large as ours, surely makes a great deal of sense. All these practices, however, are best fulfilled only when we remember that the various states carrying them out are, before anything else, the homes of genuine communities in their own right, and that these communities are civic rather than national in nature, their members charged with the responsibility of reconciling their conflicts and so of struggling to be true to the goods that all of them affirm. That being the case, we have reason to question decisions such as that to designate the legislature in Quebec City a “national assembly.” Given that the nation being referred to in this case is that of the Québécois, calling the legislature a “national” assembly contradicts the principle that, while the provincial government certainly has a special responsibility towards this nation, the province must also serve those of its citizens who are not a part of it. For example, the vast majority of the aboriginal or English Canadian citizens of Quebec, especially those who cannot speak French or at least do not live a significant portion of their lives in the language (much less identify with Québécois culture), cannot be considered Québécois. The problem with the term national assembly, then, is that it ignores the fact that there are Quebecers who are not Québécois. Similarly, while the provincial state’s recognition of the Québécois nation (for example, through acts such as Bill 101, designed to protect and promote the French language in the province) is perfectly appropriate, the fact that the province contains other nations as well means that ways must be found to ensure that they, too, are given their recognitional due as “distinct societies.” Returning to Canada as a whole, my argument is that only a politics that takes place in the context of a shared citizenry is going to have the potential to embrace the country’s diversity.

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To achieve such a politics, the members of every Canadian community need to see themselves as connected, to some degree, with every other, which is to say that each must be sensitive to the single public common good that they all share, the one that serves as the basis of their Canadian citizenship. I have so far tended to highlight only those connections that exist within three groups of communities in the country: francophone, anglophone, and aboriginal. But what about between them? One of the obstacles to this line of inquiry is that each of the three groups contains within it a nation, or a group of nations, and for some reason nationalists tend to be unenthusiastic about the idea that their nation is, even to a degree, integrated with other communities, especially when some of those other communities are nations themselves. Note, for example, this statement by Ian Angus concerning English Canada: “The context of the contemporary assertion of other national identities within Canada is thus one main reason for confining one’s definition of identity to English Canada. If we are to negotiate with these groups over the future of the country, we must inquire into who we are as a part of this negotiation and leave the question of what we share and might become a common identity pending until the negotiation itself.”32 The problem here is that while the question of what we as Canadians all share certainly invokes a central patriotic concern, Angus’s approach will do anything but help us answer it. This is not only because he seems to conceive of political dialogue as limited to negotiation but, in keeping with this, he clearly wishes the parties to develop their positions on their place in the country in isolation from each other, before they come together to talk. But if one wishes, as Angus clearly does, to defend a multicultural Canada in which some of those cultures are national ones, then the nationalists upholding them need to be shown that national identity, just like personal identity, is something best grasped in conversation with others.33 Thus developing a proper conception of English Canada, indeed of all the nations in the country, is best

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approached by conceiving of them not as separate from each other and from all the other kinds of communities around which they have come into being but as at least partly constituted by an ongoing dialogue between them all. For a dialogue without a partner is but a monologue, and monologues almost never get it right.

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5 Who We Could Be

I turn now to the question of how the patriotic approach differs from other approaches to various issues. Just as our laws need to be authentic to the diverse personal relationships we participate in, so must they give the more public relationships, in particular the communities, their due. Sometimes, as in the case of friendship or public worship, there is no need for a law to govern the relationship. In other cases, for example when it is necessary to ensure that children are protected within the family, or that a nation is properly recognized, then laws are indeed appropriate. The key here is to ensure that, at all times, the state manages to be true to the diversity of goods throughout society. Indeed, we may declare this to be the first premise of the patriot: that there are goods out there, all of which need to be respected. Some may be old, some new, but each is as “real” as any other, which is why our laws must strive to express all of their meanings as coherently as possible. How this is to be done in specific cases is, of course, often a matter of disagreement. All too frequently, however, we Canadians fail to live up to the challenges that such disagreements pose. This, I have claimed, is in no small part due to our mouton-inspired complacency, which makes a concern for peace and order the all-embracing imperative. It should be evident that I believe that our mouton and loup spirits need realigning, which is why this chapter is all about some of the ways we might do this.1

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What the reader will find below, then, is a series of suggestions about how certain of our existing disagreements might best be resolved. I also deal with a few questions – such as how some of our institutions might be reformed so as to facilitate conversation – that I can only hope will one day become controversial. Many issues are left out of the discussion, however, not because I consider them unimportant but because they are more appropriate to the debates of everyday politics and so are less relevant to the constitution, which is my chief concern here. That said, the sketchiness of the accounts of the issues that I do address will quickly become evident. There is an important reason for this. As I have said, the conflicts of politics are essentially conflicts of interpretation, that is, conflicts that arise because people have different understandings of how certain goods ought to be expressed in practice. To advise those involved to respond to these differences with conversation is to make a significant assumption: that their interpretations are not perfect, indeed, that no one ever has a fully transparent grasp of what the goods they affirm require. It makes sense to engage in a conversation with disagreeing others, then, not only because this is a good way of persuading them to adopt one’s point of view but also because there’s always the possibility that one may learn something from the encounter oneself and so that one may find a way to transform one’s own interpretation of what ought to be done, making it better, more authentic to the good(s) it is meant to express. And for this, as I’ve said, one needs to be willing really to listen to what the other has to say. It is part and parcel of all this that no one can ever anticipate where a conversation will lead. Conversation, as I conceive of it, is not a method for resolving conflict, not a technique or set of procedures to be applied, for this assumes that how a conversation ought to be carried out is something separate from the context within which it must take place. I believe, rather, that conversation requires a sensitivity to that context, a genuine engagement with all of its particularities

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and an embrace of all of the contingency that that implies. It makes no sense, therefore, to set forth full-blown theorydriven accounts of how given conversations about certain issues ought to play out, or of the specific reconciliations that should be reached. To do so is to make the mistake of putting theory rather than practice first, “Descartes before de horse,” and the result can only be the distortion of whatever it is we are trying to make sense of. That is why I do no more than gesture towards how I think such conversations might successfully be concluded, for my intention is not to develop solutions all on my own but rather to encourage, perhaps even inspire, others to participate in real conversations that they might develop solutions themselves. Similarly, while it makes sense for me to identify some of the existing obstacles to such an approach, I do not feel that it is my place to propose comprehensive institutional reforms. Far more important at this stage is getting others to recognize the obstacles in question, as well as showing how conversing about them could really make a difference. Had I thought that conversations about these issues had already begun, then it would indeed make sense for me to write as if in contribution to them. But I do not think this; hence the more limited aims of this chapter.

th e m e a n s o f c o n s t i t u t i o na l r e f o r m The past few years have witnessed a growing recognition of the “constitutional fatigue” that is said to have afflicted many Canadians. It seems that we have become exhausted with our apparently interminable constitutional struggles.2 There is something ironic about this, however. For we did, after all, “ask for it,” or at least ask to have more to do with it. It is clear that one of the main sources of dissatisfaction with the Meech Lake Accord, for example, was the élitist means by which it was put together, the first ministers having negotiated behind closed doors with little direct input from citizens. Indeed, there were already intimations of concern

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about this back in 1982 with the making of the Constitution Act. As Alan Cairns comments about that time, “In the final days of frantic bargaining it was either deeply offensive or bitterly amusing to observe that the rights to be entrenched as a protection against the considered judgment of future legislatures could be altered by exhausted first ministers between breakfast and lunch.”3 Yet this was but another case of “executive federalism,” which had long been the tradition for dealing with matters of relevance to both the provinces and the federal government, the constitution being no exception. Traditions change, however. The cry of élitism grew so loud after Meech that the (ultimately doomed) Charlottetown Accord that followed and any subsequent proposals for constitutional change have become virtually unthinkable without public assemblies and other forms of widespread consultation, not to mention a referendum designed to provide at least a de facto democratic endorsement of any package of amendments. Clearly one of the reasons for all the weariness is that, while citizens have no wish to shirk their political responsibilities (as the demand for inclusion in the constitutional reform process itself shows), there is a limit to our willingness to focus continually on constitutional issues, as opposed to other political as well as non-political matters. Nevertheless, I want to suggest another reason for our constitutional fatigue, one that is associated with an aspect of the constitutional reform process that has remained unchanged throughout the move to greater participation: our reliance, for the most part, on negotiation as the chief form of dialogue. Negotiation, as we’ve seen, is the hallmark of pluralist polyarchy, though even realpolitik polyarchists as well as monarchists find themselves reluctantly engaging in it when all means of imposing their views have been exhausted. At its heart is compromise, and compromise, as Joseph Schumpeter once aptly put it, cannot but “maim and degrade”4 the goods or values in question. It is just because the people involved really care about these things that we should be able to un-

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derstand why, to put it bluntly, negotiation hurts. In consequence, one of the inevitable results of moving to a more participatory constitutional amending process dominated by negotiation is that many people other than professional politicians are going to end up with the “dirty hands” that, as pluralists so often emphasize, come with the territory.5 Hence Michael Walzer’s claim that politics, especially in multicultural societies, brings with it “only compromises that are sure to make both democratic citizens and community members unhappy.”6 For as Peter Russell reminds us, negotiation only works when people’s backs are up against the wall,7 and no one likes having his back up against the wall. The rather pessimistic spirit of the pluralist is thus only to be expected. Patriotism makes way for a different tack, however. Because if those involved in a conflict try to engage in a conversation that attempts to reconcile, rather than compromise, the goods or values in question, then it becomes at least possible that they will develop ways of transforming these goods, rearticulating and thus improving them. When successful, this means that they would become not only truer, more in harmony with all the other goods one may happen to uphold, but also more powerful, better able to act as sources of motivation for those who affirm them. After all, the better the music gets, the more one wants to dance to it. Thus, when James Joyce asserts, in a declaration that directly contradicts Walzer’s claim above, that “the hearsomeness of the burger [a pun on the modern citizen] felicitates the whole of the polis,”8 it should be clear that the kind of hearing he is referring to is the demanding sort that I’ve identified as true listening, the type of hearing that is essential to conversation, not negotiation; because if there’s to be any “felicitating,” politics will have to include at least some success at reconciliation. A politics limited to negotiation, however, with its inherent “maiming and degrading” of goods, has no place for the real pleasure that reconciliation brings. Think of the feeling that comes when, after struggling to express something correctly, one hits upon just the right words that are

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immediately understood by others. Or take the case of two friends with widely divergent tastes in music who come upon a piece they both enjoy dancing to. How different this is from the discomfort associated with having to compromise, or use an unsatisfactory term, or dance to a tune that one simply doesn’t like. All of this should make clear the distinct advantages of giving conversation a significant place in constitutional reform: a conversational politics makes it at least possible that the citizenry will end up feeling more rather than less reconciled to, hence at home with, the results. And when that happens, we can be sure, there will be little talk of “constitutional fatigue.”

ag ai ns t th e c h a rt er Pierre Trudeau considered that one of his main objectives while in government was combating “the centrifugal forces that were threatening to break the federation apart … by implementing policies whose goal was to create a Just Society.”9 Of these policies the most significant was, of course, the Constitution Act of 1982, with its Charter of Rights and Freedoms.10 There is a sad irony here, however. For though Trudeau and his followers have been unaware of it, the charter is itself fundamentally centrifugal. One of the reasons for this is that the charter fails to exhibit unity, the centripetal quality that its framers intended for it. The neutralist theorist’s idea, again, is that the basic governing principles of a country are supposed to constitute a systematically unified whole, one whose parts are interlocked in a non-contradictory, fully compatible way. A constitution that reflects this will assert rules that, through their application, act as a unifying foundation for the country: should all citizens consent to it, or at least go along with it in practice, then all would, in that sense, be one. The reality of politics, however, is that it must take place in an inescapably messy and – as the pluralist never stops reminding us – dirty world.

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Perhaps there was unity in Eden, but not in the moral cosmos within which we humans are currently set. Only the utopian would believe otherwise. That is why it should come as no surprise when interpreters find that the charter fails to provide neutral, systematic guidance in the face of conflicting goods. For as with any but the simplest of texts, it is full of tension and conflict, and pretending otherwise only leads to the distortion of the very goods being affirmed. On top of this, the charter’s divisions are exacerbated by a judiciary that functions, like its equivalents throughout the Anglo-American world, in the context of an adversarial system, virtually guaranteeing that its rulings will, at best, take the form of regulations rather than integrating expressive rules.11 Moreover, the very language the charter uses to express its goods ensures only minimal integration of its parts, so that it remains a fundamentally fragmented and fragmenting document. And that is why I claim that the charter is best understood as – not neutralist – but pluralist. It is because the charter articulates its goods in the language of rights that it has this fragmenting quality. For rights encourage negotiation, that adversarial form of dialogue that is all about balancing the terms of a conflict against each other rather than integrating or reconciling them. They do this in the following way. Referring to a value or good as a right means conceiving of it as an isolable, discrete entity (the right to free speech, the right to security of the person, and so on), which is why rights are often set forth in schedules or lists. And as with the pluralist’s values, when such separate things conflict we are encouraged to see them as “clashing” or “colliding,” ensuring that the conflict will be adversarial, capable, at best, of being accommodated. Hence Jeremy Waldron’s observation: “To stand on one’s right is to distance oneself from those to whom the claim is made; it is to announce, so to speak, an opening of hostilities; and it is to acknowledge that other warmer bonds of kinship, affection, and intimacy can no longer hold.”12 After all, as the song says, rights are there to be fought for.

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To assert rights, then, is to take an adversarial stance, and there is no conversing with an adversary. Indeed, if just one party to a conflict refuses to listen, then conversation becomes impossible. And if there is no place for conversation, then there is no room to affirm the public common good that, unlike some abstract theory of justice, constitutes the true integrity of a citizenry. Unifying a political community may be unrealistic, but we should not therefore abandon all attempts to reconcile and integrate its parts – unless, that is, we restrict ourselves to rights talk. But that is exactly what the charter would have us do, which is why we need to appreciate that it asserts its rights not only, as Cairns claims, against governments, federal and provincial,13 but also against other Canadians. For as Cairns himself points out, the language of rights “has escaped the confines of the legal process and is insinuating itself into everyday political activity.”14 The charter can be said to fragment and divide us in two ways. One is pluralist multicultural: in affirming the rights of women and minorities such as the aboriginals, the disabled, and ethnic groups, it encourages division, rather than integration, between these communities. To reiterate, it is not constitutional recognition of these groups per se that is divisive but recognition in terms of rights. As for the other source of division, it is more individualistic: the rights of the individual cherished by Trudeau ultimately make for an even finer fragmentation since they end up separating individuals by working directly against the affirmation of common goods, thereby encouraging the dissolution of communities. Not that the charter’s influence has been all bad. We must not forget that Canadians, with our mouton-inspired concern for order in the garrison, have long tended to display too much deference towards government.15 In helping to curb this tendency, the charter can be said to have helped to remove a significant barrier to conversation, hence reconciliation, in our politics. Yet any constitutional affirmation of respect for the individual could have accomplished this, which is to say that it was not necessary to rely on the adversarial, divisive terms of rights.

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There is another aspect of the charter, a feature that its framers did succeed in imparting to it, that tends to undercut the civic community that is the basis of our country’s integrity, and that is its abstractness, or “thinness.” For the meanings of the rights it affirms are not considered to be dependent on particular contexts, and this has led to the widespread belief that they are worth defending either within all modern constitutional democracies16 or, for those who take a more universalistic view, with regard to the whole of humanity.17 Indeed, as Cairns has shown, it was nothing other than the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights that was the main inspiration behind the injection of rights talk into the constitutions of most modern democracies.18 But then upon what basis can we legitimately uphold the distinctions, the borders, between these countries? For the charter implies not so much that “both orders of government [federal and provincial] now encounter rights-bearing Canadians”19 as that they encounter rights-bearing human beings. This is because the charter does more than just “take people psychologically out of their provincial communities”;20 it takes them out of the federal one – that is, out of the Canadian citizenry – as well. As Cairns himself points out, the rights and freedoms of the charter “are not restricted to citizens only but, depending on the right or freedom in question, are guaranteed to ‘Everyone,’ ‘Any Person,’ ‘Anyone,’ ‘Every Individual,’ and ‘Any member of the public.›21 Thus he misinterprets it when he claims, along with so many others, that “the Charter portrays Canadians as a single … community,”22 a point underlined by its granting of various communities rights-bearing status as well.23 Given that they are all being recognized as bearers of what are ultimately universal principles, articulating those principles in terms of rights can be said to exhibit a “centralizing” tendency only if the centre is located, not in Ottawa, but at the un headquarters in New York. It should thus come as no surprise that those neutralist theorists who have supported constitutional documents such as the charter tend to offer only the weakest accounts of why we

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should recognize borders between states – if, that is, they don’t go all the way and advocate a full-blown cosmopolitanism. Not very long before Trudeau became prime minister, for example, he and others published a surprising political manifesto that made it clear that they had nothing in principle against the notion of joining Canada to the us: “To try to integrate [Canada] with another geographic entity also strikes us as futile at present, even though, in principle, it might seem more in keeping with the way the world is evolving.”24 No less astounding are claims such as those of the Québécois political scientist Louis Balthasar, a sovereignist as well as a civic nationalist, who has called for an independent Quebec based around, as he himself paradoxically refers to it, a “cosmopolitan nationalism,” one that seems so Trudeauesque in its fundamentals that we cannot but wonder why anyone would bother working for “the rise of an original Quebec citizenship that is not perceived as incompatible with Canadian allegiance.”25 Michel Seymour has posed the relevant question here: “Why would a civic national Quebec be better than a civic national Canada?”26 All this supports my claim that truly integrative countrywide standards must be articulated with rules of the expressive sort, not with abstract or adversarial regulations, and this means forgoing the language of rights. Any concern that we might be coming apart can be counteracted only by attending to the needs of the community of citizens that is the basis of our integrity, not by undermining it through the affirmation of the rights of individuals or communities living within it. Rights do have their place in politics, I admit, but they should be appealed to only by invoking a document that is global, rather than domestic, in scope, such as the un Declaration of Human Rights. That Canada is one of its signatories is thus appropriate, but the rights it affirms should be turned to in given cases only after we have been unable to find a way of reconciling the conflicting ideals we share, that is, when negotiation, rather than conversation, has become the best available option. By putting rights talk directly into

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our constitution, a document that is supposed to express the bases of our pan-Canadian political community, we only undercut it. This is also why I believe we should support calls for the insertion of an inspiring “Canada clause” into the constitution. After all, “peace, order, and good government” has always lacked a certain something. We need instead a rendition – if possible sublime, even epiphanic – of what we Canadians really stand for, one that will guide and empower those who would join the struggles of our politics by bringing with them a genuine concern for the common good. Only poetry, and certainly no schedule of rights, can do this.

r e c o g n i z i n g i n d i v i d ua l c a na d i a n s What would it mean to recognize individual Canadian citizens without resorting to a charter that merely arms them with rights? There is much that could be said about this, but I shall focus on what it should mean for relations between Canadians and their governments, in particular between citizens and their state bureaucracies. I’m going to limit myself to a single suggestion that will indicate the overall direction I think reforms in this area should take, a direction that has much in common with what scholars of public administration call “citizen engagement.” According to this approach, we need to encourage and facilitate an ongoing role for citizens (that is, not just during elections) in exercising informed oversight over, and providing guidance to, government. Citizenship should be understood to mean much more than just the reception of services from the state; it should also invoke “an identity as an expression of membership in a political community.”27 As Katherine Graham and Susan Phillips have pointed out, however, this has been somewhat occluded by what’s been called the “customer-service revolution” in Canadian public administration, according to which government bureaucracies are enjoined to see citizens as customers deserving of services that meet certain standards of efficiency

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and effectiveness. The problem is that, while service has improved in a number of cases, “the essence of political life becomes redefined in limited terms as the efficient delivery of services, rather than as a contest over the values and tradeoffs involved in deciding which services are to be provided in the first place.”28 Obviously, this talk of a “contest” and the “trade-off” of values is indicative of Graham and Phillips’s pluralist orientation, but they are nevertheless right to be concerned with the depoliticization of public administration along the lines of what is ultimately an economic form of monarchy. Moreover, some of the principles and guidelines they suggest – for example, that the processes of citizenstate relations ought to be transparent, flexible, and sensitive to differences both in the abilities of citizens to access government and in their preferred means of engagement29 – strike me as eminently compatible with a patriotic politics. Yet the patriot would go further and strive to do away altogether with the notion that the citizen-state relationship is strictly “instrumental,” this implying that one could draw a solid conceptual line between the two. Citizens must be understood to do much more than simply use the state to further their ends, taken as wholly independent of that state, since, as we have seen, the state must also at least partly express who they are, their very identities. Reciprocally, the state should also be denied any pretext for treating its citizens as instruments to be manipulated. And the most effective means for countering such an instrumental, I/it relationship? Conversation, of course. Which is to say that there must be a place for conversation at all levels of citizen-state interaction, not just during formal public consultations about given policy questions. After all, since no rules are perfect (especially, it goes without saying, those that take the form of bureaucratic regulations), conflict and complications will inevitably arise when they are applied in specific cases, which is why everything possible should be done to facilitate reconciliation when they do. If I had to identify a single factor responsible for – or at least

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symbolic of – the failure to appreciate this, it is the state’s decision to assign its citizens numbers as a means of identifying and keeping track of them. For numbers deny individual uniqueness, specificity, exactly the kinds of things bureaucrats need to be sensitive to if they are genuinely to engage with whomever they are serving. That, after all, is why we have names. As Charles Taylor has written: The close connection between identity and interlocution also emerges in the place of names in human life. My name is what I am “called.” A human being has to have a name, because he or she has to be called, i.e., addressed. Being called into conversation is a precondition of developing a human identity, and so my name is (usually) given me by my earliest interlocutors. Nightmare scenarios in science fiction where, e.g., the inmates of camps no longer have names but just numbers, draw their force from this fact. Numbers tag people for easy reference, but what you use to address a person is his name. Beings who are just referents and so not also addressees are ipso facto classed as non-human, without identity. It is not surprising that in many cultures the name is thought in some way to capture, even to constitute, the essence or power of the person.30

Of course Taylor has no need to invoke science fiction, given the Nazis’ technique during wwii of tattooing numbers on the skins of concentration camp internees. Now it goes without saying that our governments have no such wish to dehumanize, but they nevertheless do their share of assigning numbers: passport, birth certificate, driver’s licence, health card, and, most significantly, social insurance – all these documents are headed with a figure. This has the effect of putting an unnecessary distance between the state and its citizens, one that cannot but discourage conversation. I say “unnecessary” because, thanks at least to the data warehousing techniques developed by Ralph Kimball about a decade ago, there is no longer any need for numbers to be assigned to files for efficient computer access. Indeed, the kinds of changes that would be required so that Canadian governments today

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could use names (combined with date and place of birth, as well as signatures, perhaps) rather than numbers as the chief means of accessing individual files could be carried out quite easily, and for a cost of less than one million dollars.31 One could also envision the addition of an audio file that contained recordings of names that would help bureaucrats to pronounce them, something particularly useful in the case of the sometimes exotic names of immigrants.32 In calling for a reform of this sort I mean to focus attention on the need for greater sensitivity on the part of our state to the unique identities of individual Canadian citizens. I believe that this will also encourage a deeper awareness of the need, given our increasingly sophisticated database technology, to safeguard the privacy of personal information. It also emphasizes the importance of protecting the liberty of the individual, one of our most cherished goods against which, as Kafka and Michel Foucault so powerfully showed,33 technology and bureaucracy have long stood as silent threats. My suggestion, in consequence, is simply the following: get rid of the numbers, and forthwith!

r e c o g n i z i ng t h e a b o r i g i na l s I want to turn now to “the aboriginal question,” surely the most pressing in Canada today. It involves a relationship that for the most part has come to be shaped by its dominating partner, the non-aboriginal Canadian. It didn’t begin that way, of course. Upon their first arrival from Europe, explorers and colonists found themselves reliant – and sometimes desperately so – on the aboriginals for help in coping with the “monstrous” nature they encountered. This, as I have said, meant granting the aboriginals a certain respect, one that led to their being awarded something like sovereignstate status and so to the negotiation of treaties as a means of dealing with conflicting interests. Not that the negotiations were consistently carried out in good faith, but at least this

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approach, partly enshrined in the Royal Proclamation of 1763, had more justice to it than did its deeply patronizing replacement, which consisted of, first, the imposition of a wardlike status upon aboriginals through the “civilizing,” i.e., assimilationist, policies of the Indian Act of 1869 and then, a century later, the proposal in the Trudeau government’s 1969 White Paper that the act be abolished because assimilation had, presumably, been successfully completed.34 Protests led to the White Paper’s revocation, however, and also contributed to the inclusion of section 25 in the charter, which indeed grants a form of recognition to aboriginals through its reference to “aboriginal, treaty or other rights or freedoms that pertain to the aboriginal peoples of Canada.” The question ever since has been about what, exactly, this ought to mean. One answer has been given by Tom Flanagan, who simply assumes the superiority of modern Western conceptions of politics and economics. In an obviously monarchist spirit, Flanagan and like-minded thinkers argue that the assimilation of the aboriginals is still a worthy goal and so that section 25 should ultimately be erased from the charter.35 The polyarchist alternative is largely what we find in the report of the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, which recommends the regulation of aboriginal and nonaboriginal relationships by treaty. Largely ignoring those aboriginals who now live in Canada’s urban centres, the commission calls for a constitution that would grant extensive autonomy to the land-based aboriginal nations,36 this to such a degree that it would, I believe, amount to a form sovereignty association. To the writers of the report, however, this is the only way to fulfil the spirit of what’s known as the “two-row wampum” vision, an image that, as Alan Cairns describes it, is all about asserting “parallel paths that never converge,” about establishing “coexistence with little traffic between the solitudes.”37 Cairns himself defends a third way. Often, however, it doesn’t seem to be a particularly patriotic one, as when he

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writes that his goal is just to reach a “balance,”38 one that, following Samuel LaSelva,39 paradoxically asserts both monarchy and polyarchy. This is what underlies Cairns’s “citizens plus” conception of the aboriginals’ place in Canada, according to which the “citizen” and the “plus” are seen as two independently distinct “categories.”40 Such an additive approach, however, is incompatible with the notion that all goods are to some extent already integrated in a whole, and so the idea that further integration entails a degree of mutual transformation. For Cairns seems to support a neutralist understanding of citizenship as the basis of what he calls a “oneness,”41 an idea that he believes is well articulated by (an obviously theoretical conception of) the charter42, one supportive of a Canada that is all about “transcending”43 differences rather than, as the patriot would have it, integrating or reconciling them. As a result, instead of recognizing that what it means to be Canadian will always be different for each and every one of us given that we all, aboriginals included, relate to the state in different and changing ways, Cairns assumes that the “citizens” element of “citizens plus” is something uniform and unchanging. Apparently, only the “plus” is to be “left to the political debates of the future,”44 this in keeping with the recommendations of the 1966–67 Hawthorn Report, which first introduced the phrase. At other times, however, Cairns does seem to write as a patriot. For example, there’s his reference to “a pan-Canadian community engaged in common tasks, a coast-to-coast shared citizenship that knits us together in one of our dimensions as a single political people.”45 There is also his criticism of the divisive effects of adversarial negotiations.46 And at the close of his book, there is his praise for aboriginals such as the legal scholar John Barrow and the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations who seem to be calling for a genuine reconciliation between their communities and nonaboriginal Canadians.47 There is something missing from this more patriotic Cairns, however, and that is an appreciation of what, in this case, are the political philosophy’s potentially radical implications.

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Take the current approach to land claims settlements, which Cairns endorses.48 The historian Ramsay Cook does the same: in response to assertions of the kind found in the Assembly of First Nations’ 1992 constitutional statement, he has written that “resolving the problems and even contradictions contained in these extensive claims for distinct constitutional status will doubtless require many years of negotiation, followed by numerous court decisions.”49 But negotiation and the courts, as we have seen, are not the proper routes to reconciliation. Not that we should fail to recognize the judiciary’s (sadly necessary) role in bringing about the contemporary recognition of aboriginal rights to land and selfgovernment. I’m thinking, for example, of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 ruling in Calder v. Attorney General of British Columbia, which played a role in the development of section 25 of the charter, and then its 1997 decision in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, which declared that the aboriginals have legal “aboriginal” title to their traditional territories, meaning that their rights to those of their lands that were never surrendered or made subject to reasonable treaties must be distinguished from those common law notions of property assumed by “treaty” title as registered under the Land Titles Act (1894). Thanks, it must be admitted, to the courts, rights once conveniently forgotten are finally being remembered. But in recognizing only “rights” we are encouraged, as we’ve seen, to turn back to the courts, or to negotiation, or to a mixture of both, in order to determine what they ought to mean in practice. Canada, however, simply cannot afford to do this at present. The fact is that Canadians, both aboriginal and non, are in desperate need of expressive, rather than regulative, rules to guide us in this matter. With the aboriginals this is because their suffering will come to an end only if they can arrive at settlements that they may consider truly satisfactory in social and political terms alike. Socially, what’s required is a significant improvement in the appalling conditions – among them, third world levels of poverty, high

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unemployment, alcohol and their substance abuse, extremely high suicide rates, and serious health issues – that exist in many aboriginal communities today, the legacy, in large part, of colonialism. Politically, only recognition in practice and not just in law of aboriginal nationhood could bring about a just relationship with the rest of Canada and fulfil the responsibilities of contemporary aboriginals to their ancestors. The details of what this means have still to be worked out, but we must admit that at least one interpretation, the sovereignty association called for by the Royal Commission, would certainly do the trick. However, others might do so as well; some might even succeed in maintaining a significant level of integration between aboriginal governance and that of other Canadians. Obviously, my preference would be to try one of these approaches, since it would mean giving conversation a central role. More on this below. First, however, I want to say something about non-aboriginal Canadians and aboriginal land claims. We need to see that any fair and just settlement of these matters, one that takes sufficiently into account the historic legacy of colonialism, is going to demand a great deal from them. Without a genuine understanding of the issues, however, they cannot be expected to go along willingly with what is required. Indeed, there are already signs of a backlash. As Steven Frank has reported, “across Canada, flash points of irritation and hostility are erupting as non-natives struggle to come to terms with the most sweeping and comprehensive social adjustment in the country’s history: the attempt to bring justice and legal closure to the frustrated claims of aboriginal people.”50 Frank cites Peter Russell: “The majority of the population have no sense of history, and they’re saying, ‘Who the hell are these people, and who says they have rights?›51 When the courts say that they do have rights, non-aboriginals tend to view their rulings as an imposition of regulations. Hence the protests, violence, and sabotage that followed the Supreme Court’s 1999 R. v. Marshall decision

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that aboriginals on the East Coast have the right to fish without a license.52 But while the current federal Indian and Northern Affairs minister, Robert Nault, is aware that the backlog of lengthy and costly litigation is a major cause of tension, he nevertheless makes the mistake of assuming that the answer lies in governments working more quickly towards settling claims through negotiation.53 For while it’s true that, when compared to court rulings, having matters negotiated by officials who are responsible to elected representatives tends to produce results that are more acceptable to non-aboriginals, those non-aboriginals are still finding it difficult to embrace the settlements with the required enthusiasm. One reason is that the process of negotiation ensures that settlements are ultimately going to be interpreted as the products of compromise, concessions made to placate adversaries rather than agreements that express the common good. That is why many non-aboriginals decided not to wait for the next round of elections to express their displeasure; witness the five lawsuits that were filed against the Nisga’a treaty in British Columbia.54 Moreover, in time non-aboriginals will find that the settlements, through no fault of the aboriginal leaders with whom they were reached, do not even put the “aboriginal question” to rest. For if, as the élitist critique of pluralism asserts, any significant imbalance of power between negotiators tends to show itself in settlements that favour the stronger, the disparity in this case is so great that unjust settlements are virtually guaranteed. Just the fact that non-aboriginal negotiators refer to aboriginal demands – but not their own – as “claims” says something about the deeply asymmetrical nature of the proceedings, for it reveals an assumption that only aboriginal – but not Canadian – sovereignty is at issue. More serious still is the substance of the negotiations, for the terrible social conditions faced by many aboriginal communities today ensure that their desperate leaders can be expected to accept “deals” that, while perhaps alleviating their people’s immediate

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plight to some degree, nevertheless fail to do justice to the historical realities of the issues at stake.55 This can only mean that, long after those leaders are gone, others are sure to take up the still-existing cause. These substantial limitations of the courts and negotiation are potentially transcended by the patriotic alternative. In aiming for genuine reconciliation, the patriot, as we’ve seen, advocates a form of dialogue in which the power of the interlocutors is measured only by the degree of truth expressed in their claims, the hope being to bring about settlements whose justice rests on their legitimacy in the eyes of all citizens. Regarding the aboriginal question, such a process would differ from litigation or negotiation in two fundamental respects.56 First, it would require that all parties be willing to search for ways of reconciling their differences, say, over their diverging conceptions of land ownership. At present, however, despite the Delgamuukw ruling, the federal government continues to assert that the issue can only be dealt with according to the terms of its Comprehensive Land Claims Policy. Among other things, this means that the government refuses to negotiate, much less converse about, its demand that any settlement include the extinguishing of aboriginal title in favour of treaty title. Moreover, the policy’s assumptions about property and how people relate to the land are utterly foreign to aboriginal traditions, in which individual land ownership plays no part. A genuine attempt at reconciliation, however, would require that both sides transform their conceptions, and this transformation would be reflected in settlements that embraced neither aboriginal nor treaty title but rather some non-compromising hybrid of the ideals underlying the two. This might mean forgoing any notion of exclusive ownership of the land by either aboriginal or non-aboriginal parties in favour of a shared-use policy, for example, one that provided for comanagement of resources and equitable sharing of the revenue drawn from them. Second, the patriotic approach would demand of all parties far greater awareness of the relevant issues and of the

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conversational process being used to deal with them. This is all the more important given the many non-aboriginals whose ignorance of the relevant historical and contemporary realities virtually ensures that they will find any reconciliatory solutions to the issues unacceptable. The suggestion that Canada should establish some version of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up in post-apartheid South Africa should thus be given serious consideration. The point that settlements could make provision for nonexclusive land ownership suggests another potential advantage of taking a patriotic approach: the possibility of real integration between the communities concerned. If the uncompromising assertion of treaty title is indicative of a failure to give due regard to aboriginal nationhood, resting with court rulings that favour aboriginal title only endorses the opposite extreme. For there is an understandable concern that assertions of aboriginal self-government of the kind advanced by the Royal Commission could threaten Canada’s integrity by establishing an archipelago of isolated sovereignties within the country. Of course, given the history of colonialism, such assertions are only to be expected. Indeed, because of it, it strikes me that non-aboriginals have a responsibility to try to bring about self-government in this form should the aboriginals continue to favour it. That said, one wonders whether its attraction for aboriginals consists mainly in the absence thus far of a viable alternative. For, however buried, there are strong intimations of an aboriginal willingness to reconcile with Canada, to affirm the civic community that all of us share. Think, for example, of statements such as that made by Phil Fontaine, former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, in which he suggests that one way to “change the nature of our relationship in Canada, and lead to true and effective self-governance” is to move First Nations affairs “beyond the confining barriers of the Department of Indian Affairs … we are saying that we must be a significant and integral part of every ministry in government.”57 Similarly, Fontaine’s replacement, Matthew Coon Come, has

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declared: “We Aboriginal peoples, who have all the reason in the world to feel cheated and ill-treated, have never nurtured a collective desire for retribution. We have never said: Europeans go home. We recognize that we all live together in this land, that we must share, and that in the end our interests are much the same. We want peace, health and well-being for our children. We strive for clean water and air, happiness and freedom. We insist on mutual recognition and respect for dignity, fundamental rights, and the principle of the equality of peoples.”58 Aboriginals, I suggest, could be convinced to want in, not independence. If that is to happen, however, they will have to receive a genuine invitation from the rest of us, one calling not for more negotiation, however much it is to be carried out in good faith, but for a real conversation. Part of doing this requires recognizing that the threat of aboriginal segregation is not something restricted to polyarchist proposals for self-government but is something that has, to a degree, already been realized, and for a reason that has little to do with the constitution. For the hardship being experienced by many aboriginal communities today not only serves as a barrier to fair negotiation: it also virtually rules out the even more challenging politics of conversation. This should be self-evident, but, as the great Québécois singer Plume Latraverse once reminded us, “Les pauvres, y’ont pas d’argent”59; much that is obvious about the condition of poverty nevertheless tends to escape those who haven’t experienced it themselves. Hence the relevance as well of Hannah Arendt’s observation that “even geniuses would have trouble thinking properly if they were hungry.”60 If one wishes to contribute to the country’s political integrity through conversation, then appreciating that many aboriginals (as well as non-aboriginals) are today just too poor to join in the “dance” should make us even more aware of the urgent need to change this reality. There is much else to be gained from greater aboriginal participation in Canadian politics. The historic contributions aboriginals have made to the country are great, and by this I

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mean to refer to far more than their participation in military alliances that successfully fended off invaders from the south, or in Canada’s overseas war efforts. It has been argued, for example, that nothing other than the Iroquois Confederacy, with its system of clan kinships designed to counteract factionalism, served as Benjamin Franklin’s model for relations between the American colonies. That model became the basis of the American Articles of Confederation, which in turn were a major inspiration for own governmental arrangements proclaimed in 1867. Which is to say that it seems as if federalism itself was a “Great Gift of the Iroquois.”61 There is no reason for such cultural integration, and the benefits that accrue from it, to stop. I’d like to mention just two possibilities. First, the idea of allowing for a different form of criminal justice for self-governing aboriginal communities has been gaining support. Such a system would give a place to the aboriginal tradition of circle sentencing as an alternative to trials governed by the Anglo-American adversarial system. Perhaps, however, we should be going further. That is, perhaps something similar should be enacted in the rest of Canada. After all, like other Western countries, we are clearly having trouble getting beyond pluralist conceptions of penology; meanwhile our prison system is in a state of crisis.62 The example of self-governing aboriginal communities pursuing this different path might thus help us find a way out of this dead end.63 The second benefit has to do with nature. Ian Angus’s A Border Within (1997) attempts to grasp English Canadian national identity by dealing with, among other things, its relation to wilderness. In so doing he draws perspicuously on such largely Western sources as Green ideology, Marxism, and Heideggerian phenomenology. But his conclusions are limited by his failure to take account of aboriginal understandings of the relationship between man and nature. Angus’s fear that in turning to these he would be “appropriating native cosmologies for my own purposes”64 is based on the polyarchist assumption that a nation such as English Canada

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is most clearly conceptualized in isolation from others. Many English Canadians, however, can claim forebears who related to nature in ways that were profoundly shaped by the aboriginals. This wasn’t “appropriation” but “learning,” and it was made possible through the kind of openness that attends successful conversation. We see it in the growing recognition of the benefits of alternative medicine as well as in the awareness of our failure to give environmental concerns their due. One wonders whether the same kind of openness is not something that English Canadians, indeed all Canadians, could benefit from again.

recognizing the québécois “Treat them as a nation and they will act as a free people generally do – generously.”65 When John A. Macdonald made this statement he was referring to the French Canadians, although it’s pretty clear that, when he was in power, there were all too many occasions when he failed to follow his own advice. We must do better. Yet today, as I’ve said, the French Canadian nation is no longer with us, having been transformed into a number of regional-ethnic communities outside of Quebec and the Québécois nation within it. How, then, to give the latter its due? Consider the following analogy. A group of friends live together. One day, one of them undergoes a change, a selftransformation of such magnitude that, among other things, he loses his faith (up until then he had been especially devout) and decides to pursue a completely new career. He also says that he has become aware that some of his flatmates for whom he has been working (they run their own businesses) have been taking advantage of him and that he is just not going to take it anymore. To no one’s surprise, he then announces that he no longer wishes to share a home with them because he no longer considers them friends. It is not his intention to move, however; his preference is to renovate so that his room is provided with a separate entrance. The oth-

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ers shouldn’t object, he points out, because if he did move out then all of them would end up having to pay more rent. What might a patriot say about this situation? That is, if, since the Quiet Revolution, a significant number of Québécois have grown dissatisfied with Canada, then what should be done? The answer depends on what one’s specific goals are. To those monarchists who would keep the Québécois within the prison-house of an ostensibly unified country, or to those Québécois nationalists for whom outright separation (i.e., renovating not just to provide a separate entrance but to seal off the room from the others entirely) is the only worthwhile aspiration, we cannot say very much. But to those who fall somewhere in between these two extremes, advocates of positions ranging from renewed federalism to some form of sovereignty association, an appreciation of the tenets of patriotism has a great deal to offer. Let us begin with those who are interested in a renewed federalism. Consider the Meech Lake Accord. The process that led to it began with then Quebec premier Robert Bourassa’s introduction of his famous five minimal demands.66 However modest they may or may not have been, the point of interest to us here is that they were just that, “demands,” which is to say that they were not contributions to a conversation aimed at transforming the country into something that all Canadians, not just the Québécois, could enthusiastically affirm. Rather, they represented the opening – and indeed, for the most part, closing – positions of a negotiation session. In making those demands, moreover, Bourassa was only continuing the long-standing practice, established by George-Étienne Cartier and continued by Henri Bourassa, of taking measures to affirm and protect the nation within Quebec without pulling the province out of Canada. Given that this is in keeping with a pluralist approach to the country and its politics,67 however, it should come as no surprise that the patriot will have serious misgivings. For in taking the adversarial stance intrinsic to negotiation, those who defend Québécois interests in this way imply that the nation is already

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outside of, and indeed has no intention of joining or reconciling itself to, a shared civic Canada. Indeed, all those, Québécois or otherwise, who have participated in the debates over Bourassa’s five demands by offering opinions as to whether the provisions of Meech (or Charlottetown, or the Calgary Accord) are or are not “enough” have only reaffirmed this. Because the language of “enough” is the language of negotiated give and take, of zero-sum relations, of adversaries rather than friends, strangers rather than compatriots. As such, it is incompatible with the idea that all Canadians share a common good, that they are all members of a single civic or political community. The most significant of the five demands was certainly that which called for the recognition “that Quebec constitutes within Canada a distinct society.” Note that by placing emphasis on the province rather than on the nation contained within it, this statement does nothing to establish a direct link between that nation and the Canadian state. Instead what we get is support for a connection that is to take place through the Quebec state. Now while there may be nothing wrong with this, it means that even after such a clause has been inserted into the constitution there would be no reason to expect that Québécois nationalists will stop calling for a greater decentralization of powers from Ottawa to Quebec City. For one of the principal reasons behind that call is the sense that the Canadian state, unlike the provincial one centred in Quebec City, does not itself recognize la nation québécoise. It should do so, in my view; but even if one thinks otherwise the point here is simply that this is the kind of thing that we need to be conversing – not just negotiating – about. Something else tends to be overlooked vis-à-vis this, the most important of the five Meech Lake demands: its self-contradictory nature. This is so for the simple reason that recognition has no place in the context of negotiations. As the root of the French word for it (re-connaissance) makes especially clear, recognition is a form of knowledge, and this means that it is not the kind of thing that can be given or taken away as

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part of a bargaining session. What we know or recognize to be true just cannot be denied because we might be dissatisfied with what’s being offered in return for our affirming it: the statement “Wayne Gretzky was a great hockey player,” for example, remains true whether or not we get what we want for saying so. For truth, it should be obvious, is not up for negotiation.68 It is not only those who demand constitutional recognition of Québécois nationhood who fail to appreciate this. Those offering it have tended to do so as well. Five days before the vote in the last Quebec referendum, with polls indicating an impending sovereignist victory, Jean Chrétien went on television to announce that his government was now willing to recognize Quebec’s distinctiveness.69 But a concession of this sort, made in this way, is still a concession, while recognition, if it is to be genuine, requires something different. Chrétien’s offer thus only undercut what he was offering; after all, how sincere can recognition be when it was clearly being granted because the government’s back was up against the wall? A similar question should be asked of all those who claim that renewed federalism is their intended goal and yet express support for the federal government’s “Plan b” (in which it lays down its terms and emphasizes the costs of separation) as a means of discouraging sovereignists; as well as those who see the sense in Canada’s deliberating now over what its position might be should there ever be a yes vote for Quebec independence;70 not to mention those who entertain the idea of partitioning the province.71 All these tactics – and that, given their inherently adversarial nature, is exactly what they are – reveal a fundamental ignorance of what makes a country whole, the civic common good shared by its citizens. Rather than engaging in them, then, what’s needed is a sense of openness, of compassion, even a form of nurturing – all these and more are the kinds of things required if a political community is to survive and indeed thrive. Non-political types of relationship can teach us something in this regard. Think of a marriage. Say one partner begins to

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express serious reservations, indicating that the relationship is in a troubled state. It should be obvious that it makes no sense at this point for the other to broach the subject of how jointly owned property might be divided up in the case of a divorce, as just raising the topic will surely lead to the relationship’s demise then and there. What’s required instead is a willingness to listen, to search with the other for ways to meet the concerns that have been raised. Far too many federalists seem unaware of this simple truth. Reginald Whitaker, for example, has worried that “talk about the pain and anguish of divorce, of the need for compelling emotional appeals to the other party to move back from the brink,” will be perceived as a “sign of weakness to be exploited to exact a better deal.”72 But the concern about whether one is being judged weak or strong is appropriate only for the negotiator, not the conversational partner, which is to say that Whitaker and all those who take his view seem already to have given up on sharing a citizenry with the Québécois, hence on tending to that community within which, as I have said, “strength” is a function of nothing other than the truth of one’s position. If one of the country’s communities is seriously considering leaving, then neither the forced application of some ostensibly neutral theory of justice nor the offer to negotiate in good faith is going to get its members to feel otherwise. On the contrary, if anything, far more effective would be an attempt at something akin to seduction.73 What might the patriot have to say to those favouring some form of sovereignty association? The idea, which appeared in its original form as the historian Maurice Séguin’s notion of “associate states,”74 calls for a significantly greater level of political sovereignty for Quebec along with a common market with Canada. The latter is to be negotiated after sovereignty is approved by a provincial referendum (or two). All this talk of bargaining and economic accords, however, only obscures the existence of the Canadian civic community, which, despite the unwillingness of many Québécois nation-

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alists to acknowledge it, has been a genuine concern not only of citizens in the rest of Canada but also of many Québécois. Indeed, the denial of that community is belied by the nationalists’ own talk of the numerous “humiliations” they have suffered at the hands of the rest of Canada, an accusation voiced particularly loudly in reaction to the demise of Meech.75 After all, if the accord really was only about having five minimal demands met within some constitutional bargaining session, then what place is there for feelings of humiliation? In the practice of negotiation, it makes sense for one to feel disappointed when a deal falls through, but nothing more. Humiliation is appropriate only if there’s a sense that one has suffered a form of misrecognition by another, that other being someone whose opinion is considered to matter, someone, say, with whom one has been sharing a good in common. Talk of humiliation, then, suggests that there has been a failure at conversation, not negotiation, which is to say that, whether they are aware of it or not, those Québécois nationalists who have participated in such talk have actually been invoking that pan-Canadian community of citizens of which many of their nation’s members are also a part. The vulnerability to humiliation in the case of some Québécois is also indicative of another phenomenon at work. The so-called “politics of resentment” can arise only when one party or other feels a sense of victimhood, and it must be admitted that a significant minority of contemporary Québécois still lay claim to this. I say “still” because, though the sentiment was indeed appropriate to the oppression suffered by French Canadians before the Quiet Revolution, in my view it no longer is today. After all, the contemporary reality is that the province’s anglophones are either learning French or marching, not like the Orange order in Northern Ireland but, if anything, out of the province, they having long ago handed over the reigns of political and economic power to francophones, who have used them to impressive effect. The Québécois nation today is, by any measure, a strong and vibrant community, one that can lay claim to a rich and fulfilling

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heritage that has produced compelling cultural works of undeniably world-class quality. Yet there are still those Québécois who choose to perpetuate the myth that they are “losers,” whether by pointing continually to their conquered status (though “the Conquest of 1759” was ultimately more of an exchange between colonial powers) or by invoking two “lost” referendums on independence (when these should instead be seen as successful exercises in democracy). Combined with a wholly unwarranted sense of insecurity on the part of some Québécois about the quality of their nation’s language and culture,76 this is just the kind of thing the politics of resentment feeds on. Regardless of its sources, there are significant political implications to this resentment, which is why it is relevant to raise the question of what the Québécois – whether they still see themselves as victims or not – should be doing about it. There are essentially two ways to go, one negative and the other positive. This, at least, is the lesson to be gleaned from the story of those archetypal victims in history, the ancient Israelites. On the one hand, there’s the option, portrayed in the tales of the Israelites versus the Midianites (Numbers 25: 16–18) and Saul and Samuel’s smiting of the Amelekites (I Samuel 15), of taking revenge on one’s oppressor. Needless to say, this is the negative approach. Despite all the talk about the desire to achieve a “reasonable accommodation” with the rest of Canada, it seems to me that there’s a trace of it lurking behind the demands of Meech, or at least behind the position often heard after its demise that “now Meech is no longer enough.” To be sure, the nation that takes on the tactics of the pressure group within a constitutional bargaining session is often tempted to invoke the spirit of ressentiment if only because, as many a pressure group has learned, it seems to work.77 One wonders, however, whether those demands – given the perceived context of ongoing zero-sum negotiation – are not sometimes driven more by a desire to avenge perceived past defeats (chief among them being, of course, the Conquest) than by a wish to achieve what is genuinely needed. Think, for example, of the

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respected federalist Professor Léon Dion’s statement to the Bélanger-Campeau Commission that the rest of Canada “will make concessions – and even that is not assured – only if it has a knife at its throat.”78 While the intention may ultimately be to bring about a more just accommodation – a new set of compromises of the goods or values in question – one can’t help but wonder whether Dion’s suggestion is favoured, at least by some, because it fulfils a wish more to take away from Canada than to add to Quebec. The alternative positive approach is fundamentally different. It consists of the transforming the experience of suffering into something constructive, and this requires a generosity towards the other. As God reminded the Israelites, “ye were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22: 21). This does not have to mean ruling out what we must admit to be one such constructive project, the creation of a new separate country, a fully independent Quebec. For perhaps, at the end of the day, the Québécois don’t want to “dance politics” with the English Canadians, the aboriginals, or even the French Canadians, much less all of the other communities and citizens of contemporary Canada. This could easily be due not to feelings of ressentiment but to the waning of the desire to continue sharing a civic community, if, that is, the desire was ever really there to begin with. It is one thing to agree that it is better for a person to have “significant others” than not to have them, but it is another to contend that this or that specific person ought to be one of them. Perhaps, then, the basic attraction necessary for maintaining a public common good with the rest of Canada is just not present. One need not be willing to converse with everybody. After all, while most English Canadians can appreciate all that there is to admire about Americans, we would nevertheless shudder at the thought of joining Canada to the United States, no matter how much it may be in our economic interests to do so.79 “You’re no good for me / I’m no good for you,” sing the Guess Who in “American Woman.”80 English Canadians simply have no interest in sharing a civic community with

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Americans, in making and living under laws together. One of the main reasons for this, of course, is that English Canada is integrated with a community, the Canadian one based in Ottawa, whose political culture has, for the most part, come to be marked by a distinctive brand of liberalism that is far from the conservatism (with a smattering of libertarianism) that finds a home in Washington today. Moreover, it is surely the awareness that that political culture was profoundly marked by the struggles for democracy led by the rebels Louis Joseph Papineau and William Lyon Mackenzie and their more political descendants Louis-Hyppolite Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin that many an English Canadian has come to appreciate the benefits of working together with francophones. Hence their strong wish to continue sharing the country with the Québécois. None of this denies the widespread English Canadian ignorance (largely mutual) of the culture of the Québécois, not to mention the cultures of other French Canadians, the aboriginals, and many of the other diverse communities present in the country. This ignorance may be regrettable, but it doesn’t necessarily challenge the connection that exists between the members of all these communities as a result of their sharing in the Canadian political culture. That is what most English Canadians do indeed appreciate and wish to continue. The feeling may not be mutual, however; which is why it bears repeating that there is nothing illegitimate about the Québécois nationalist opting for separation. The full-blown secessionist route, we must accept, may indeed constitute a constructive project that is largely free of resentment. Even the English Canadian should acknowledge that such a move, while entailing the amputation of an important part of the political community that is civic Canada, is not in any direct sense a threat to English Canadian nationhood. Yet we should all be clear about what, exactly, it would mean for the Québécois to make this choice. For they, as well as all other parties concerned, should do everything in their power to work for a clean break that will, as far as possible, allow for respectful relations between the future ex-patriots. If for no

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other reason this is important because, no matter how extensive the “renovations” to the Canadian house, the parties in question will still live side by side, and ensuring good relations, as anyone who’s ever ended a friendship or romance certainly knows, demands a great deal of sensitivity, particularly on the part of the one doing the leaving. If this analogy with personal relations tells us anything, it is that Parti Québécois declarations that the citizens of an independent Quebec would, for example, continue to use Canadian passports and currency81 are rather callous, however sensible they may be in instrumental terms. Moreover, there is no way that the rest of Canada should be expected to embrace a negotiated “deal” for sovereignty association, whether or not it is in its economic interests to do so, and this for the simple reason that the Canadians left behind are likely to feel deeply offended by the suggestion that now they are to be used by their former compatriots. This, after all, is what an economic relationship is for the most part about. If a referendum on Quebec ever leads to the secession of the province, then Canadians are, as melodramatic as this sounds, going to have hurt feelings. Just think of all the talk we’ve already heard about “the pain and anguish of divorce,” to cite Whitaker again. To meet this with offers of a confederal arrangement devised solely to fulfil economic interests, to suggest, that is, an arrangement to continue living in the very same house-that-is-no-longer-a-home solely to save on the rent, is thus as foolhardy as it is insensitive. When people divorce they move apart, and though there are inconveniences associated with this, they are right to do so. So what is required of those Québécois who would establish a new independent country should be clear: a demonstrable willingness to go it alone combined with a sincere hope that the move will ultimately commit the least possible offence, and do the least possible damage, to all concerned. I have been arguing that Québécois nationalists who are interested in sovereignty association should instead be adopting the project of complete separation. But there is another

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positive alternative, namely, that of bringing about a renewed federalism in Canada. It requires that the Québécois, instead of inviting other Canadians to join them in good-faith negotiations, should approach them as friends rather than business partners, making clear their intention to live in a shared political home. This means offering to begin a real conversation aimed at transforming the country in ways that all Canadians could affirm. Among other things, it requires that the citizens of Quebec be willing to engage in the issues jointly with other Canadians and not, as has been the case so far, to expend their energies in isolation from the rest of the country, developing position papers about negotiable demands.82 The federalists outside the province must appreciate the importance of this as well. So rather than going along with all those who have declared that “we must now respond to them,”83 they too must make clear their willingness to converse, to grapple with the issues in such a way that all the relevant parties are considered constitutive, not of a dyad of “us and them,” but of a single “we.” This is not to say that all introspection by the various parties must be banned, only that it must ultimately concern itself with the challenge of working through the issues together. For that is what conversation demands. How might such a conversation go? A conversational response to conflict, I have said, strives for the transformation of the terms at stake, the central aim being reconciliation rather than accommodation. The goods involved need to be rearticulated so as to furnish truer accounts of them than when the conflict first began. At the risk of oversimplification, I suggest that we conceive of the conflict in question as involving basically two goods in particular. Many federalists outside of Quebec, influenced by Trudeau’s vision, understand equality to mean that, since all Canadians deserve to be recognized as equals, all provinces should share a uniform status. This conception of equality as uniformity84 is threatened, in their view, by those who would grant Quebec some form of “special status” in the constitution; they fear that any

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call to treat the province differently from the others means treating it as special, in the sense of better. And this, the claim goes, cannot but compromise equality. Who is demanding this special status? Certainly not those Québécois nationalists who would have their nation secede and lay claim to its own fully sovereign state. Rather, it is those who are willing to negotiate their place in Canada and to make at least some compromises with respect to what the good of national liberation might ultimately require. For what did the Meech Lake Accord represent if not something of a halfway house for their nation in this respect? And so, it appears that two goods are in conflict here, equality and the liberty of a nation, with some people pushing for all-or-nothing solutions and others for a more balanced approach. Either way, some degree of compromise, whether of one or both goods, seems inevitable. But what if the choice is made, instead, to listen for ways of transforming, rather than compromising, these cherished goods? Those favouring equality, for example, could come to conceive of it differently, as an ideal that cannot be reduced to uniformity. That is, treating people equally could be understood to involve taking difference into account. The thinking here might go like this. Say two towns are struck by a terrible snowstorm but that one is hit much harder than the other. Surely equal treatment demands that each should receive relief aid commensurate with the extent of their suffering. In parallel, one could interpret the principle of equality of individuals as demanding sensitivity to the fact that they tend to be members of different communities and may require differential treatment as a result. Should some be nationalists, for example, a Canadian federalist wishing to treat all citizens equally could be true to this ideal only by taking that nation into account and so by rejecting the symmetrical form of federalism found in the United States in favour of an asymmetrical one that makes room for multinationality. Asymmetrical federalism could thus be considered superior to the symmetrical kind not only because of its compatibility with greater

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diversity (a distinct intrinsic good in its own right) but also because it actually ensures greater equality – when, that is, equality is no longer reduced to, or equated with, uniformity. Progress along these lines could also help to clear up various other confusions that derive from the equality-as-uniformity approach. For example, why was a connection made in the first place between the principle that individuals should be treated equally and the notion that provinces require uniform treatment? And what, moreover, is the implication here with respect to the territories, which do not have the same rights as the provinces: couldn’t it be claimed that provincial citizens were getting “special,” in the sense of unequal, treatment? For that matter, what about the distinction between provinces and municipalities? While there’s something to be said for lumping Manitoba in with, say, Saskatchewan or New Brunswick, what about a comparison between, say, Prince Edward Island and Toronto? Given the factors of size, population, and economy, anyone concerned about the equal treatment of persons might question the placing of Prince Edward Islanders and Torontonians in different constitutional categories. For isn’t there something fundamentally unequal, hence unjust, about the few hundred thousand Prince Edward Islanders getting their own province and all the self-governing powers and privileges that go with it, while millions of Torontonians must share those powers and privileges with every other Ontario citizen? Moreover, what about regional equality? How should we interpret the claim that four provinces constitute the West, two Central Canada, and four the East? Couldn’t this mean that different regions are being given different, seemingly unequal, treatment as well? How might we justify this? With history, of course, with the traditions passed down to us. But the concept of equality as uniformity does not reconcile well with tradition, which is simply too messy, too rich, and too dependent on context for its meaning. That is why different communities need to be treated differently, and why doing so does not necessarily compromise equality. Like any

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good, then, equality ought to be understood to require different things in different contexts. After all, as Erasmus’s fool wisely said of equality as uniformity so very long ago, “This equality applied to such a diversity of persons and temperaments will only result in inequality, as anyone can see.”85 There is at least one other advantage to the transformation of our understanding of equality along the lines I suggest: the support for asymmetrical federalism it implies underlines yet another important difference between Canada and the United States, always a concern to the border-sensitive Canadian. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that there is something fundamentally honest about this, because it acknowledges the de facto asymmetry that has long been true of Canadian federalist practice. For example, this asymmetry accounts for Quebec’s civil code, its guarantee of a minimum number of Supreme Court justices, and special federal-provincial administrative accords such as that governing immigration. None of these arrangements has ever been criticized by Canadians who defend equality as uniformity, which begs the question whether equality was ever the chief worry of those neutralist federalists who felt affronted by the nationalist demands emanating from Quebec. Perhaps, then, despite the objections explicitly raised, they have actually been more worried about how Québécois nationalist concerns seem to fly in the face of the integrity of the country as a whole. If so, then I hope that the conception of Canada that I have been defending will serve to dispel this. For a genuinely civic community, a citizenry, is anything but threatened by a recognition of the diversity of its parts. If, however, equality has indeed been the central concern, then the richer conception of it that I am calling for brings yet another benefit: it helps us to be more articulate about the justice of the often-controversial matter of language policy in Canada. Those who appeal to the principle of equality as uniformity in order to criticize, say, a Quebec sign law requiring that French be given prominence on all public signs run into a contradiction if they wish, as many of them do, to support

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the federal government’s own Official Languages Act. For in affirming the equal status of English and French, the act awards these languages a special status vis-à-vis all others. Any rigorous application of equality as uniformity in this domain should instead demand either that no language be given official status of any sort or, even less realistically, that the federal government and its agencies operate in something like Esperanto. That is why any proper understanding of what equality requires when it comes to language policy must rely on a judgment of the particularities of the context, and this will always be incompatible with equality as uniformity. Thus, while there’s a great deal to be said for bilingualism when it comes to the institutions of the state centred in Ottawa, Quebec’s responsibility for maintaining the “French fact” on a continent that is overwhelmingly anglophone gives us ample reason for supporting a provincial law that ensures French prominence on public signs. Far more argument would be necessary to support this claim, of course, but at least such argument would not be distorted from the start by an obviously inappropriate Cartesian principle of equality as uniformity.86 I’ve said a great deal about what federalists concerned with equality might learn from participating in a genuine conversation about the conflict between it and national liberation. What about Québécois nationalists? To recall, they begin with the notion that full liberty for their nation will have been achieved only when that nation can claim to be governed by a sovereign state that is exclusively its own. Having the nation reside in a province within what is de jure a symmetrically federalist country seems, in the nationalist view, to compromise this liberty significantly, and this despite the relatively decentralized nature of the Canadian federation. Constitutional recognition of Quebec’s distinctiveness would help to alleviate this somewhat, the thinking goes, but only somewhat, for the nation would still have failed to achieve full sovereignty, and its liberty would to that degree be compromised.

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There are two possible analogies implicit in this conception of national liberation. First, there’s the one already referred to, in which the state is likened to a house that serves the purely instrumental purposes of the nation living within it.87 Although in the patriotic view a state has the potential to be much more than this – indeed, there are a number of reasons why it must be conceived of as something more88 – the analogy nevertheless helps to remind us that nationalists’ primary responsibilities lie with their nation and not with the politics that takes place in and around the state. That is, it is the culture and heritage of a community situated for the most part in civil society that must always be accorded priority. Depending on the circumstances, the state may or may not have an important role to play here, but it is only to the degree that it does that nationalists ought to be concerned with it. Yet even if we accept that having a “house of one’s own” is an appropriately nationalist goal, there remains the question whether the nation must occupy that house alone. If the state is conceived of merely as an instrument used to further the nation’s independent interests, then there seems no reason why this question must always be answered in the affirmative. After all, depending on the housemate, sharing an abode can bring significant conveniences. Surely, then, this is a matter for contextual rather than a priori judgment. But this will not satisfy the nationalist, and rightly so; there is indeed something special about the relationship between a nation and its state that is missed if we conceive of it in purely instrumental terms. The state must succeed in expressing the nation, in a sense, and no tool, no separate, contingently useful object, can do this. What is thus required is a form of integration, which is to say reconciliation, between nation and state. But our question then returns: who is to say that this may only happen between a single state and a single nation? In answering, the nationalist might turn to some of the patriotic arguments advanced above and assert that the state is itself expressive of a distinct community in its own right, namely, a citizenry, and so claim that a more appropriate

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analogy for the nation-state relationship would be one that conceived of the two not as business partners but as a pair of monogamous lovers. National liberation, the argument would go, requires the nation to find expression in a state exclusively its own because the very integrity of the bond between the two communities depends on it. Should that nation share its state with others, all involved would be to some extent cheapened, compromised. Even worse, members of the nation might be led astray by the other communities’ cultures, thus detracting from their allegiance to the nation. As Richard Handler sums up a typical sovereignist view, “The crucial axiom is always the same: an individual, human or collective, cannot be two things at once. To divide one’s allegiance, affiliation, or identity is to court disaster.”89 At this point, the reader might expect me to retort that monogamy is not always essential to fulfilling the ideal of romantic love. But while there may indeed be something to this claim,90 it is not helpful here. Instead I suggest that the whole analogy of nation and state as monogamous lovers is inappropriate. This becomes evident when we appreciate that one member of our couple, the citizenry expressed by the state, is a unique sort of community in that the common good on which it is based is realized through nothing other than the ongoing process of reconciliation between its constitutive parts, whether these are seen as individuals, themselves communities, or both. That is, where most other kinds of community are distinguishable by the subtantive ends they fulfill – as with the flourishing of a nation’s culture, the developping relationship between a regional community and its geography, the worship of the sacred among the religious, the social activities of the civil association, and so on – a civic community cannot be identified in that way. For a great deal of what it consists in is that process of reconciling conflicts between its parts, which happens to be what politics at its best is all about. That is why no citizenry can ever be said to lay claim to an existence independent of the other communities in its midst. It is also why to see the state chiefly as the expression

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of such a shared community is to accept that part of its very raison d’être is the embrace of any and all of the communities, including national ones, that live under it. Otherwise put, the state at its best is like a home, making this, not the image of monogamous lovers, the most appropriate analogy for the nation-state relation. Given the multicultural character of our Western societies, it makes little sense for a nation to choose to live at home alone, for there will inevitably be citizens who are not also nationalists, not also members of the nation, and the potential for conflict between what they hold to be good and what the nation holds to be good will always be present. This need not always be considered a threat; indeed, it could be quite the opposite. After all, single people living alone tend to lead more limited lives than do those who share an abode with others, whether friends, lovers, relatives, or just flatmates. While such sharing may lead at times to discord and the need to compromise, it may also bring a diversity of experience and level of intimacy that can only assist in the never-ending struggle for personal authenticity. In keeping with the stateas-home analogy, one might even go further and claim that, just as a house is never so much a home as when a family or group of friends resides in it, the nation that shares its state with other communities, be they ethnic, regional, religious, or themselves national, may have that much more reason to feel truly at home there. To return to the matter of the Québécois in Canada, it must be admitted that because they do not constitute the majority of Canadian citizens, a democratic Canada offers them anything but a guarantee that the law-making process will consistently produce results in their favour. Hence the nationalist argument that sovereignty is the only way for the Québécois to overcome the potential tyranny of majority rule (an argument that belies the sovereignists’ own invitations to minority communities in Quebec to share in their project). But there is another way, one that calls for a more patriotic democratic politics, in which policy making is carried out as far as possible

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through conversation, with reconciliation as the aim. To the extent that it succeeds, the limitations associated with antipolitical vote counting would thus be overcome. Nor should the Québécois nationalist fail to forget the significant instrumental advantages that accrue from sharing a country with others. No nationalist concerned with a flourishing culture can fail to recognize the benefits of multiple sources – federal as well as provincial – of public funding for the arts,91 or that Radio-Québec’s contributions to Québécois culture have for a long time paled in comparison to those made by Radio-Canada. The loss of the Quebec Nordiques, moreover, one of the province’s two nhl hockey teams, is a reminder that the nation is under constant threat from the free market, which is why there is something to be said for being part of a country that is large enough to claim membership in the economic group of eight industrialized states or that can apply a significant amount of pressure when it comes to negotiations with other countries over trade and other economic matters. Further along these lines, there’s the fact that a separate Quebec making use of the Canadian dollar would mean even less Québécois control over monetary policy affecting Quebec than is the case at present, thanks to what would become Québécois-free institutions such as the Bank of Canada. And what, finally, of Québécois influence in the rest of Canada? After all, does not a concern for the fate of the almost one million French Canadians living outside the province need to be counted as amongst the authentic responsibilities of the Québécois nation? Or would its members rather join the French signatories of the Treaty of Paris and play the role of abandonneurs themselves?92 There are no overwhelming arguments in this domain, however, and much that could be said in support of opposing positions. But while I believe that Quebec-within-Canada ultimately offers more to the Québécois nationalist than a scenario that would see it go it alone, consideration of any and all such arguments is ultimately an unaffordable luxury as long as the fundamental requirement that Québécois nation-

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hood be recognized within Canada’s constitution remains unmet. Until it is, no respectable nationalist could even begin to consider points such as those made above. From this perspective the Québécois’ seemingly insatiable demands for greater decentralization of powers from Ottawa to Quebec City are eminently understandable. To reiterate my point, then, the required recognition can be achieved through a renewed federalism only if both the Québécois and all other Canadians strive for it in what I have been calling a patriotic way, that is, through conversation aiming at reconciliation. At the time of this writing, sovereignist sentiment is at a low ebb, making for an atmosphere that is especially conducive to taking such an approach. One would have to be utterly ignorant of contemporary Quebec history to assume that this mood will last indefinitely, however. Which is why the time for conversing is now.

r e c o g n i z i n g t h e e n g l i s h c a na d i a n s I remember once attending a Tragically Hip concert in London, England, with a Québécois friend. He expressed astonishment at how many members of the audience had brought large Canadian flags with them, which they proudly waved throughout the show. But what did they have to be so proud of then and there? The civic, political community that is Canada? At a Tragically Hip concert? Similarly, one might ask what it means when the “Canadian Rock” and “Canadian Indie Rock” Internet radio feeds of theiceberg.com never play a song in French or in an aboriginal or any other language; or why so many books of literary criticism billed as addressing “Canadian literature” make nary a reference to works not written in English; or why the Toronto Globe and Mail, which is published only in English, sees fit to call itself “Canada’s National Newspaper.” Are we to gather from all this that the Québécois, other French Canadians, the aboriginals, and the various allophone ethnicities in the country are not really Canadian?

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Of course not. What we have here are cases of that popular monarchist-inspired error whereby two distinct communities, the English Canadian nation and the Canadian citizenry, are blurred into one. Recognizing English Canada does not mean, of course, that we should assume that every anglophone Canadian is also (as I am) an English Canadian nationalist. To be so one must genuinely identify with the nation’s culture – its heritage and artistic productions – which is to say, participate in that culture, or at least take some kind of a proprietary interest in it, as well as hold the hope that it will thrive into the future – what the Québécois call la survivance. These conditions are essential to any affirmation of a national common good, and only those who fulfil them can be considered a part of the community based upon it. The first of Frye’s senses of culture, that of lifestyle, is again irrelevant, and for the same reason that the unique friendship of two people is in no way put into question by pointing out that they tend to wear the same kinds of clothes, speak with the same accent, watch the same tv shows, etc., as a third person whom they don’t happen to consider a friend. Friendship involves sharing something far more substantial than such lifestyle-related things, and the same must be said of the members of a nation, who share a culture by means of at least one of Frye’s other two senses, those having to do with a shared heritage and cultural productions. If you want to tell an English Canadian from someone of an American nationality, for example, only these kinds of things, and certainly not lifestyle, are going to count. Of course, identifying with a national community often requires some effort (although it can also be a great deal of fun). And as I’ve said, many anglophone Canadians, while they are certainly willing to affirm their Canadian citizenship and so take an interest in Canada the civic community, are not eager to make a similar effort when it comes to English Canada the nation. One reason for this, I believe, has to do with the influence of Trudeau’s vision of the country, which has led

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many anglophones to assume that affirming the distinctiveness of English Canada somehow threatens the integrity of Canada as a whole. Beyond that, however, is the relatively straightforward reason that many anglophones are just not interested in English Canada the nation. That is, they simply don’t care. O what of that? What is there left to say? A great deal, it seems to me. But at this stage I wish only to make a single point. It begins with an objection to Michael Ignatieff’s claim that Serbians and Croatians – who, he thinks, are not really that different – have relied upon a “narcissism of minor differences” in order to distinguish themselves.93 I think Ignatieff is mistaken here for the reason mentioned above, namely, that such differences will only be detected if one looks to the affirmation of distinctly national common goods rather than to the qualities of lifestyle. Talk of narcissism may indeed be justifiable, however, when it comes to those individuals who are so ignorant of their own nation that they themselves will be found invoking lifestyle as a means of asserting their community’s distinctiveness. Many an English Canadian, I’m not proud to say, can be found doing just this, especially when they’re challenged to differentiate themselves from Americans. Think, for example, of “The Rant,” that immensely popular beer commercial in which the ranter Joe has this to say: “Hey. I’m not a lumberjack or a fur trader. I don’t live in an igloo or eat blubber or own a dogsled. And I don’t know Jimmy, Sally or Suzy from Canada, although I’m certain that they’re really, really nice. I have a prime minister, not a president. I speak English and French, not American. And I pronounce it ‘about’, not ‘aboot.’ I can proudly sew my country’s flag on my backpack. I believe in peacekeeping, not policing; diversity, not assimilation; and that the beaver is a truly proud and noble animal. A toque is a hat. A chesterfield is a couch. And it’s pronounced ‘zed’ – not ‘zee’ – ‘zed.’ Canada is the second largest land mass, the first nation of hockey, and the best part of North America! My name is Joe, and I am Canadian!”94

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Now while there are allusions here to certain distinctive features of Canadian political culture (our head of government, an important foreign policy tradition, our immigration policy), one cannot help but be struck by the superficiality of all the socially relevant citations. As an account of English Canada, then, “The Rant” fails miserably. The reference to hockey might have passed muster, since hockey is one of the few activities constitutive of an English Canadian culture in the sense of heritage or pastime, but for the reality that the professional game is increasingly being sold off to the Americans.95 The point about speaking French would also have been relevant – if, that is, Joe and his fellow anglophones could in fact speak French, the myth of our widespread bilingualism being yet another symptom of that misguided pan-Canadian civic nationalism of the Trudeauite. Perhaps I’m asking too much of what is, after all, just a beer commercial. Yet its popularity is telling. Something that was intended to sell a beverage to Americans actually came to be so widely admired that Joe ended up being paraded throughout English Canada to rant in front of rapturous crowds at the openings of numerous sporting and other events. Many of those in attendance obviously didn’t think that this was “just a commercial.” Joe spoke to them, and what he had to say resonated with who they believe they are.96 That is what so disconcerts. My point is certainly not that anglophone Canadians are, except for their politics, just like Americans. Rather, it is that many of them can also be identified as English Canadian nationalists, and that they themselves would be more cognizant of this, more sensitive to the distinct and substantial qualities of their nation’s culture, had that nation’s very existence not been hidden from them by Trudeau’s version of things. Only by rejecting that version and becoming sensitive to the distinction between citizenries and nations can they come to a better understanding of what makes Canada whole and of the various communities, including their own national one, that are contained within it. Nation, know thyself!

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Part of acquiring this self-knowledge would be to accept that English Canada, like any nation, requires some form of state recognition. We’ve seen this with the aboriginals, who have called both for the numerous treaties between them and the Canadian state to be respected as well as for the establishment of a new order of government under which their nations would live and be recognized. And with the Québécois, I obviously follow all those who think that the inclusion of a national recognition clause in the constitution, one giving de jure status to an already de facto asymmetrical federalism, is essential. For as Charles Taylor has written, “Anyone who can use the expression ‘just symbolic’ has missed something essential about the nature of modern society.”97 What, then, of the English Canadians? They look to Ottawa as the centre of their nation’s state, but that state has never explicitly recognized them as a nation. How to do this, keeping in mind that the very same state is also the locus of the civic community of which all Canadian citizens must be considered full members? At this stage, I want to make but one suggestion: establish, within the federal Department of Canadian Heritage, alongside the current secretaries of state for Multiculturalism, Status of Women, and Amateur Sport, the position of secretary of state for English Canada, along with a parallel one for the Québécois. It would be the responsibility of the two new cabinet members to ensure that the needs of their respective nations are given special consideration in the department. And once the work of establishing self-government for the aboriginals is completed, the closure of the Department of Indian Affairs, which would then be possible, could be followed by the institution of a similar secretary of state for Aboriginal Canadians, thus ensuring that all three of our country’s nationalities would be given their due. Not only would they receive a form of recognition within the ongoing activities of the federal government but those activities would be able to complement the contributions to cultural development carried out by the nations’ other states: the municipal and

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provincial governments that govern English Canadians and Québécois, and whatever governing bodies would be set up by the aboriginals. Putting English Canada on par with the other Canadian national and ethnic communities in this way would constitute an important step in making its national status evident, and it would be one taken by the only state that could do it properly, that whose activities made way for its very creation.

a r e f o r m e d pa r l i a m e n t The advent, given the Charter of Rights, of a monarchist Supreme Court in this country should be a source of worry for all those concerned about the quality of dialogue in our politics. But it is not enough just to deal with the monarchist threats; the rise of a dictatorial prime minister along with highly influential and narrowly focused interest groups is a sign of the presence of polyarchist threats as well. One way of responding to all this is to reform Parliament. I want to describe two kinds of reforms that might be carried out. The first has as its aim the decentralization of power. Removing the Supreme Court’s capacity to strike down legislation – which, by the way, is a main reason why interest groups have come increasingly to bypass Parliament in favour of litigation – would certainly contribute to this end. Yet, ultimately, it would only mean more power for a prime minister who has become much more than a first among equals in cabinet. Not that diffusing power throughout cabinet would itself be sufficient, for it does nothing to challenge the highly adversarial nature of Parliament’s proceedings, and it is this that ensures that conversation is almost wholly absent from its chambers. Does this mean that we should contemplate abandoning the parliamentary system altogether, should we turn to a republicanism in which the source of power would be situated in a pre-political people located in civil society and then ask how that power might be transferred to the citizenry and its

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representatives? But this would be to abandon one of our most fundamental political traditions,98 which is rarely a good idea. Anyhow, there is another way, one that would in effect take at least some of the power that, as our tradition has it, originally derives from the Crown and move it out past the prime minister and cabinet towards Parliament and the citizenry as a whole. I’m thinking here of the proposal to reform the electoral system by bringing in a degree of proportional representation. For by increasing the chances of electing minority governments and so reducing the ability of party leaderships to discipline individual mp s, it would ensure that those mp s have significantly more influence.99 Many of those who support this idea do so because they see it simply as a means of reaffirming the increasingly violated principle of responsible government. I think, however, that it would do more than that: it would actually transform our understanding of the principle in a way that would make it truer to the ideals underlying it. For while proportional representation would not remove cabinet’s almost exclusive ability to propose legislation, it would constructively challenge a fundamental boundary asserted by responsible government as it has commonly been understood, one arising from the central notion that ordinary mp s are elected not to govern but to hold those who do so to account by granting or withholding their consent.100 Such a scheme calls on us to draw a solid line between the governed and the governing. By bringing in proportional representation, however, the effect would be to do more than just strengthen the legislature as it would also take the winner-take-all element associated with our first-past-the-post system out of politics and thus help to reduce the overall level of adversity. This would mean that cabinet members would be both able and required really to listen to parliamentary debate, or at least to do so to a far greater degree than at present. Numerous reconciliations between cabinet and the legislature would then be possible, and ordinary mp s could then be said to have attained a pro- and not just reactive role in governance. No longer

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would they just be holding cabinet to account: in a sense they would now be participating in and not just on government, “holes” having been punched in that line separating them from cabinet, the governed from the governing. We might help to bring about a similar result by adopting another reform, one that is even more directly concerned with altering the nature of parliamentary debate. Currently, the House of Commons is basically structured along polyarchist lines, as the many highly adversarial exchanges that take place within it make most evident. To a pluralist polyarchist such as C.E.S. Franks, however, this is largely to the good, because “politics,” as he sees it, “is a war of words,” an activity which is, with good reason, called the art of compromise. Governance is a continuous balancing act between competing and conflicting interests, where limited financial and human resources must be juggled to satisfy unlimited and often opposing claims. An expenditure in one area will raise complaints in another. Labour versus capital, east versus west, big city versus small town, welfare versus lower taxes; the whole, enormous gamut of government services and programmes is constantly being disputed. A government must continually make a mix of trade-offs and compromises between these competing interests which will ensure that the electorate, although never entirely satisfied, is satisfied enough that it will return them to power.101

Parliament, to Franks, has an important role to play in this pluralist world. For in legitimizing the compromises and accommodations that he considers fundamental, it helps government achieve the “consent” that links it to the electorate.102 That link, moreover, is understood to be essentially one of responsibility, and to Franks, “the driving force in holding the government responsible is an official opposition motivated by a desire to prove the government incompetent or worse, and itself as better. The process of context and confrontation should ensure that the government, to overcome and forestall criticism, pro-

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duces policies that have the widest possible acceptance. The opposition, in turn, should attempt to win comparably wide support for its side. A weak opposition will not be able to ensure accountability, nor will it be a credible alternative. A strong, effective opposition is essential to good parliamentary government.” Franks goes on: The format of parliamentary discussion is adversarial. It assumes that multi-sided problems can be reduced to two viewpoints: in favour and opposed. Often the truth is that many on the government side are opposed or lukewarm, while some in the opposition are in favour. But these subtleties disappear in parliamentary debate. This system is similar in structure to our law courts, which are adversarial rather than inquisitorial. Consent is mobilized through the parliamentary struggle: the government, by withstanding the attacks of the opposition and by putting forward its proposals with conviction and vigour, proves the sincerity and the justness of its cause. This process is neither rational nor scientific, but it achieves consent, though through conflict rather than co-operation.103

One of the dangers of a weak opposition, Franks points out, is that the opposition party, thanks chiefly to the inequalities of position and expectation, is not subjected to “the discipline of compromise” and becomes a negative force, criticizing government in a knee-jerk way without offering coherent policy alternatives of its own and, at its worst, engaging in the obstruction and delay of parliamentary proceedings.104 This is an understandable concern, particularly given the pluralist worry that political practice often threatens to degenerate into that other form of polyarchy, realpolitik, in which the conflicting parties feel in no way bound to respect each other’s right to disagree. For when that happens, genuine politics, the kind that involves dialogue, has for all intents and purposes been abandoned. The patriot, however, will raise an additional concern. It is not enough to ensure that there is a place in parliamentary politics for just any form of dialogue. What is needed, at least

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on occasion, is conversation and thus reconciliation, the realization of the common good. Not that this is totally absent: Parliament’s committee system is somewhat less partisan than its other proceedings, to a degree that, according to Franks, allows it to be generally oriented towards consensus building. But Franks doesn’t favour giving committees a greater role, and he is right not to do so, although not for the reason he gives. His chief worry is that such a reform would increase the influence of interest groups and reinforce bureaucratic pluralism105 at the expense of parties that, he recognizes, tend to have a much wider focus than interest groups (this rather patriotic concern about “the extremes of particularism in Canadian politics”106 is, we note, at odds with his pluralism). But Franks is wrong to assume that political parties can only stand before each other as enemies, and that partisanship and opposition are necessarily synonymous with adversity. When he writes of Parliament’s adversarial format, for example, he says that it makes it “perforce the role, and even the obligation, of the opposition to criticize and oppose.”107 But it is possible to do these things with an ear not towards harming an enemy but rather towards fulfilling the good that you and your “opponent” hold in common. This is because opponents may choose to take part in a conversation whose aim is reconciliation; only real “adversaries” are limited to a dialogue – when, that is, they choose dialogue over force – of inherently zero-sum dynamics.108 Indeed, we should see the attempt to take on the stance of the opponent who is not also an adversary as the central responsibility of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. After all, to what, exactly, is the opposition supposed to be loyal? “Her Majesty,” according to tradition, stands for the whole body politic and cannot be identified with any particular political party. It thus seems that, if we don’t want to interpret her along monarchist lines, we should choose instead to invoke the common good of the civic community, of the citizenry as a whole. Of course, Parliament itself, as it is currently designed and operated, fails to encourage this. There are many

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possible paths one might take here, but I’m going to restrict myself to a single proposal for reform, in the hope, once again, that it will indicate the direction others should take. My proposal centres on the architecture of Parliament’s assembly chambers. David Smith has noted that Canada’s provincial legislatures, though all incarnations of the Westminster tradition, nevertheless exhibit a genuine diversity of architectural styles.109 When it comes to the design of their assembly chambers, however, they are all rectangular. This reinforces an image of those sitting opposite from each other as clashing adversaries rather than opponents who, though in disagreement, nevertheless advance their arguments as accounts of what they think the good they all share requires. This latter less-adversarial spirit would be conveyed, I suggest, by a semicircular setting, for it would imply that working towards integration or reconciliation is, at least in principle, what is expected of those present.110 To that end, we might also consider reducing the size of the chambers, and for the reason offered by Winston Churchill, perhaps the greatest parliamentarian of the past century. During a debate about a proposal to enlarge the Westminster assembly room, Churchill argued the following: “If the House is big enough to contain all its Members, nine-tenths of its Debates will be conducted in the depressing atmosphere of an almost empty or half-empty Chamber. The essence of good House of Commons speaking is the conversational style, the facility for quick, informal interruptions and interchanges … But the conversational style requires a fairly small space, and there should be on great occasions a sense of crowd and urgency. There should be a sense of the importance of much that is said and a sense that great matters are being decided, there and then, by the House.”111 Churchill, however, opposed the horseshoe design because, as he put it, “the party system is much favoured by the oblong form of Chamber. It is easy for an individual to move through those insensible gradations from Left to Right but the act of crossing the Floor is one which requires serious consideration.”112 But it is exactly the

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subtleties of position made available by the semicircular setting that should be of interest to anyone who, as Churchill did, professes a concern for making “conversational style” available to Parliament. Not that dialogues of the more adversarial sort ought to have no place. The parties in Parliament or the provincial legislatures, after all, are also meant to be vying for or maintaining the position of government, and except in the case of minority governments, this is basically a winner-take-all competition. Legislatures have more than just a policy-making function. They are also the arenas in which parties display themselves to electorates that will one day choose between them. That is why I believe that Question Period, though to take place within a redesigned chamber, should persist in its adversarial ways, for Parliament and the provincial legislatures must continue to provide a setting in which parties strive for nothing but winning the most votes in the next election.113 In sum, then, a reform along the lines I have been suggesting should have as its aim a basic change in how we should understand the point of parliamentary debates.114 We need to see them, at least in principle, as striving for the kinds of reconciliations that, today, are more apt to take place in committee or as a result of royal commissions and other task forces (a greater reliance upon these latter should also, for similar reasons, be encouraged). Of course, I am under no illusion that architectural changes alone are going to be enough to bring on some real conversation. For one thing, the inescapably public context will always stand as a barrier to the kinds of speaking and listening it requires. Yet as the symbolic centres of political dialogue over all matters of import to their civic communities, Parliament and the provincial legislatures ought at least to stand for overcoming, rather than entrenching, divisive adversarial relations, and so for fulfilling their citizenries’ common goods. Should the reform I propose manage to do this, the overall effects of even partial success could serve as a response to some of the concerns that have been raised by those, be they

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Westerners, women, or other marginalized groups in our society, who have consistently received minority representation in an adversarial Parliament and have thus, in many cases, come to feel alienated from Ottawa. For as we’ve seen, success at reconciliation means success at meeting the needs of all citizens, including those who perceive themselves as members of minority groups. That success should also help make way for other reforms that could be interpreted as helping to protect our democracy against monarchist tendencies. For example, those calling for a “Triple-e” senate (elected, effective, equal) have often come up against the Central Canadian concern that boosting representation from regions such as the West will detract from its own representation. But this is so only given the winner-takes-all relation between the majority and the minority that results from democratic vote tallying, and this is something that would be to a degree transcended by an approach that was more concerned with reconciling than voting. Similarly, an Ottawa that was more sensitive to regional concerns would also be more open to reconciling the conflicts that have arisen between it and the provinces and territories, this going against the thrust of that “Westphalian model” of federal and provincial governments that has for so long encouraged them to relate as if they were semi-sovereign states.115 Its replacement? What David Cameron and Richard Simeon have called “collaborative federalism,” in which countrywide goals are achieved not by Ottawa acting alone but by it and the provinces and territories working together.116 Integration within all these legislatures, then, may help make way for integration between them.

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6 Conclusion: Divide and Listen What on earth put it into your head, master, to go dancing? Do you fancy all brave men can dance and all knight errants are good at hoofing it? I can tell you this much – if you do, you’re wrong. Sancho Panza to his master, Don Quixote1

One might think that there is something contradictory about my account of Canadian politics. On the one hand, I claim that at the heart of the Canadian political community beats a civic common good, one that lives or dies on the willingness of citizens to reconcile their conflicts through conversation, to disagree with each other as opponents who are not also adversaries, as friends rather than enemies. On the other hand, however, I complain that Canadians have by and large approached politics in a way that is antithetical to all this. How, then, can we assert the existence of a kind of friendship between citizens when they themselves seem unaware of it and even act contrariwise? My answer is that, rather than as a contradiction, these realities should be interpreted as evidence of a certain circularity. The question is whether we Canadians will choose to move along that circle in a vicious or virtuous way. Otherwise put: the survival of our civic community is not an all-or-nothing affair. True, current practice indicates that that community is seriously ill, and the treatments usually recommended, whether monarchist or polyarchist, have only been killing the patient. But the Canadian common good is not quite dead yet; signs of life still, perhaps surprisingly, appear. That so many

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Québécois voted against sovereignty, that so many aboriginals continue to forgo violence, that a hospitalized Lucien Bouchard received so many thousands of get-well cards from anglophones – how can we not continue to hope? I have chosen to express that hope with a call to – or, perhaps better, a plea for – conversation. And that plea has been coupled with suggestions as to how some of our institutions might be reformed to facilitate rather than discourage this form of dialogue. Ultimately, however, these words are somewhat premature. For if we Canadians already thought that conversation merited a place in our politics, then focusing on the structure of our institutions would make sense. But thanks to the many monarchist and polyarchist voices in our midst, most of us just do not see a viable role for conversation in politics, or we do not see it clearly enough. Thus our main obstacle at present is, I believe, a mixture of ignorance and lack of will, which is why I have chosen to emphasize issues and ideas in this work rather than focusing on the structural reforms that might encourage us to practice our politics more patriotically. My central purpose has been to show, first, that the patriot’s assumptions about our country, past and present, make far more sense than do the alternatives, and second, that patriotic conversation really could provide us with a better future. Of course, this claim will seem irremediably naive to some, exhibiting an idealism of which only a philosopher could be capable. To them I can only say, “So be it,” for I see no other way. Yet I have never failed to appreciate the extreme fragility of the mode of dialogue that I recommend. If someone is not willing or able to listen, then no matter how much one desires it, conversation with them will simply not be possible. The adversary, it seems, has what is virtually a veto over the opponent, a reality that parallels the situation between the negotiator and those who choose to use force. For if one wishes to negotiate with someone who employs force instead, then negotiation will just not be an option; indeed, one will probably have to use force as well, if only to defend oneself.

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But perhaps not. After all, a well-known defence has been fashioned of an alternative, what’s known as the “non-violent approach to resistance.” As the historian Gerda Lerner has shown, it has its origins in the Christian notion of “non-resistance to evil,” which is based on the New Testament’s famous call for us to “turn the other cheek” (Matthew 5: 39). The idea was brought to the United States by the Quakers, whose martyrdom for the toleration (and more) of their faith later inspired those who worked for the abolition of slavery. The abolitionist Thoreau then transformed it into the idea of an active non-violent resistance, a development to which Leo Tolstoy also contributed. And it was, famously, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., who put it into practice, with great success.2 Non-violent resistance, to reiterate, consists of an active use of non-violence: by suffering injury, the resister is said to exert a moral pressure that induces his or her adversaries to relinquish the use of force. The resister relies in this on the adversary’s basic morality, as is clear from Ghandi’s talk of the central role played by a form of love, ahimsa, in disarming the perpetrator of violence. One recalls Rousseau’s reference to the basic pitié that is, he said, invoked within all of us when confronted with the suffering of others.3 Yet non-violent resistance, as its advocates are well aware, is an extraordinarily difficult undertaking, demanding not only a great deal of courage but also a willingness to make sometimes incredible sacrifices. This must be kept in mind by anyone who would engage in a parallel means of encouraging their fellow citizens to make the move – not from force to negotiation now – but from negotiation to conversation. I wish to suggest such a means here. The idea is that, when faced with negotiating adversaries, patriots would respond by doing nothing other than making their desire to reach a genuine reconciliation explicit. Should this be met with still more demands to be negotiated, what is required is yet another show of one’s willingness to listen, this combined with tactful speech intended to facilitate the other’s capacity to

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reach an understanding. Unlike what is supposedly the case with non-violent resistance to force, this “non-adversarial resistance to negotiation,” as we might call it, does not require the invocation of some deeply buried moral sense, for one’s opponents, given their willingness to negotiate, are after all clearly already there: we can trust them, which is to say we already count on their good faith. Our aim, however, is to go further – indeed higher – than this, as it requires us to attempt to get them to see that the full realization of their morality comes not from the willingness to compromise what they cherish but from joining with us in the search for justice as truth. This relies neither on a form of love nor any sort of altruism, only on the fullest engagement of a capacity that is amongst those that define our very humanity: our ability to understand. Of course, as with non-violent resistance to force, there is no guarantee of success. But given our country’s comparatively peaceful history, it seems to me that we Canadians have not only the luxury to opt for conversation at least occasionally but also a responsibility to do so. Because if a patriotic politics cannot be shown to work here, then where? It is not as if it has never done so in the past. There is a striking period in our history that, as I see it, not only culminated in the genuine reconciliation of conversing parties but also marked the birth of our country as a truly political community. I’m referring to the rise, during the late 1830s and 1840s, of responsible government in Canada.4 This event holds a prominent place in our history books, but I want to tell the story again, in a way that shows how it has the mark of a patriotic politics. I shall begin by identifying the goods involved in the original conflict and then demonstrate how they were transformed, reinterpreted in such a way that they were able to be reconciled without compromise, the result being better expressions of these goods than existed before the conflict. At first, the division in question led to the rebellions of 1837. Evidently, the parties involved not only chose not to converse but they also ruled out negotiation, leaving force as

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their only option. Who were they and what did they stand for? On one side were the Lower Canadian patriotes, led by Louis-Joseph Papineau, along with the Upper Canadian followers of William Lyon Mackenzie. Their central aspiration was to bring an American-style republican system to Canada, which would mean replacing the oligarchy they lived under with democracy. In Lower Canada, this was to be combined with the affirmation of a modernized French Canadian nationalism that asserted that the nation could only be selfdetermining if it dissociated itself from the Church. Also present was a strong concern for the welfare of the general populace whose poverty and sickness were attributed to the oppressive rule of the mercantilist oligarchs, the Lower Canadian “Château Clique” and the Upper Canadian “Family Compact.” And so, in the name of democracy, national selfdetermination, and economic justice, they rebelled. Their opponents saw matters very differently, of course. The “King’s Loyal Subjects,” as they sometimes referred to themselves, could be divided into two distinct groups. On the one hand, there were the tory mercantilists, who indeed ran the show in an oligarchic way, serving their own economic interests. On the other hand were the colonies’ various governors, from Lord Gosford to Sirs John Colberne and Francis Bond Head and, later, Lord Sydenham, all of whom ultimately had a different concern, namely, the maintenance of British control over the colonies. This, of course, occasionally brought them into conflict with the interests of the mercantilists. But when faced with the rebellions, the two groups saw themselves as sharing a common cause. It was only after the rebellions were put down that the conversation really began. The democrats were led by the Reformers, Robert Baldwin of Toronto, Joseph Howe of Nova Scotia, and the French Canadians Étienne Parent and LouisHyppolite Lafontaine (Lafontaine had done a short stint in prison and then split from Papineau). To them, responsible government better met the aims of those for whom war seemed the only solution. With the French Canadians, there

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was Parent’s argument, advanced in his paper Le Canadien under the slogan “Nos Institutions, notre Langue, nos Droits,” that a parliamentary, rather than republican, system was ultimately the best safeguard for those concerned with la survivance of their nation. This was complemented by Lafontaine’s claim that, since Catholicism was here to stay (something that Papineau had never been able to accept), their nation was best served by an alliance with, rather than division from, the Church. Both agreed with the Upper Canadian Reformers that the idea of holding cabinet responsible to the legislature could be considered a genuine form of representative democracy, one that would empower the people to do something about their economic oppression. Indeed, when responsible government was later brought in they were able to pass the controversial Rebellion Losses Bill of 1849, which granted compensation to all those, on both sides, who had suffered losses because of the rebellions. Moreover, Lafontaine was now in a position to realize his wish that colonial politicians be able to reward their followers, many of them frustrated professionals, by granting appointments, commissions, and salaries. While the lower classes were still left out, this provision nevertheless did do something about the economic injustices stemming from the oligarchic past, and it should be noted that Lafontaine also paved the way for George-Etienne Cartier to modernize the civil code and extinguish the exploitative seigneurial system. But what of the King’s Loyal Subjects? How did they come to decide that responsible government better served their interests – moral and material – than the status quo? In the case of the British government’s agents, from Lord Durham to the new governors, John Harvey in Nova Scotia and Lord Elgin in the newly united Canada, they first began to change their minds as a result of a growing appreciation of the divergence of interests between Britain and the colonies’ mercantilists. For one thing, Lafontaine’s idea about patronage for the bourgeoisie did seem a useful tool for preventing another rebellion, and it would indeed require politicians empowered

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with responsible government. For another, they increasingly came to realize that the short tenure of their appointments, five to seven years, meant that whenever Britain’s interests seemed to diverge from those of the mercantilists, the latter’s entrenched positions on the colonies’ executive councils ensured that they – and not Britain – would get their way in the end. Only responsible government, it seemed, could guarantee their at least periodic ousting. Lord Durham’s take was different. He became convinced that, by putting into effect a distinction between powers that were vital to colonial rule (control over foreign affairs, Crown lands, etc.) and those that were not and could thus be handed over to local jurisdiction, less could become more when it came to British control. (The spirit of this approach came much later to characterize the rulings of Westminster’s Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.) In any case, Durham argued, given that responsible government had already been installed in Britain in the 1830s, wouldn’t bringing in a system that was “similar in principle” only underline the ties between it and the colonies? Less also came to mean more in another respect. The colonies had become extremely expensive for Britain. In 1846, Peel’s new Tory government in London repealed the Corn Laws, the most decisive step yet in the journey to British free trade. That journey was completed by the relatively antiimperialist Whigs when they replaced Peel. As they made clear to Lord Elgin, they considered it in Britain’s interests not only that it withdraw certain economic benefits to the colonies but that British military protection ought to go as well. Under such conditions, of course, any objection to responsible government couldn’t be justified. This trend towards free trade had a significant impact on the economy, which, as we’ve seen, was the chief concern of the mercantilists. For what could the rise of free trade mean but the fall of mercantilism? This, combined with the threat posed to Montreal shipping by the dropping of American duties and the increased popularity of the Erie Canal, meant

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that if the mercantilists were going to protect their pocketbooks they were simply going to have to change, that is, to become capitalists. For all the reasons that Karl Marx would later highlight, democracy, hence responsible government, was the political system most compatible with capitalism. The change did not come about without some serious second thoughts, however. Witness the decision of anglophone Montrealers in 1849 to burn down the Parliament buildings, which housed the Reform government, and then sign a us Annexation Manifesto calling for the British colonies to be absorbed into the United States. But it wasn’t long before their new cooler capitalist heads prevailed and they came to support the Reciprocity Treaty that Lord Elgin negotiated with the Americans in 1854. With that the last of the parties to the conflict had fully converted to responsible government, which, they had come to see, served their ends better than a British-directed oligarchy could ever do. There have, of course, been other, far less sanguine readings of these events. I certainly don’t mean to imply that minds were changed solely out of a desire for reconciliation. For one thing, as I pointed out, the situation on the ground also altered in ways that rendered the previous positions obsolete for purely instrumental reasons. Nor ought we to forget that, throughout the process, significant injustices were committed, not the least of which was implementation of the Act of Union (1840) between Upper and Lower Canada, which was essentially designed to assimilate the French Canadians. Yet new interpretations of real goods were developed, and few if any commentators will be found arguing that the overall result – the replacement of oligarchy with responsible government – was not a positive thing. There was genuine progress, and this was progress that was driven by individuals who offered reconciliatory accounts of conflicting goods, goods that had at first seemed compatible only with the use of force. An important lesson arises from an appreciation of the diversity and, sometimes, divergences that characterize each of

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the two sides in this saga. It is that essential to any attempt at making conversation work in politics is an ability to distinguish between those of one’s opponents who are at least willing to listen and those who are not. This latter group must be identified as an adversary, made up of those with whom reconciliation is simply not possible. A further distinction must be made, however, between placable adversaries, those who accept as legitimate the right of others to disagree and so are capable of negotiating in good faith, and implacable adversaries, who can be expected to make concessions only because they see it as the most effective way to further, or do the least damage to, ends of theirs that do not include that of respect for the other. Such people, we should thus be aware, never really negotiate in good faith; they merely make use of force by other means. One should thus never be surprised when they resort to a more naked employment of it the moment they decide that it will get them more of what they want. Nor should one forget that accommodations reached with them will be even less durable than those reached by negotiating in good faith, which themselves must be judged fragile when compared to the understandings made possible by conversation. That is why one must be constantly on guard against the tactics, tauntings, and other seductions of one’s adversaries, for they can be expected to do whatever is in their power to sabotage any attempts to converse with those who are more open to reconciliation. But at least there will (almost) always be some of them. That said, perhaps we must admit, in the end, that the call to conversation in politics is still naive. After all, even the non-violent resistance movements relied on charismatic leaders for their successes. Could it be, then, that we are in need of creative, rather than interpretive, responses to our predicament? That is, could the Tragically Hip be right when they sing that “our only chance is to stop making sense,”5 the assumption being that conversation is just too reasonable a way of dealing with what are, after all, fundamental disagreements? One listens to their haunting “Bobcageon,”6 which is

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about a police officer who comes to question his profession only after receiving some heaven-sent inspiration, and wonders if this is indeed the kind of thing that’s required if we’re ever to induce the monarchists in our midst to open up their garrison, or the polyarchists to begin striving for reconciliation. I must admit that I simply do not know the answer to this question. But nor do I think that we should be willing just to wait and find out. That is why, if we are ever to really “dance politics” in this country, then at least some of us are going to have to be prepared take up the difficult challenge of issuing repeated invitations to potential partners to do so. Rebuffs are only to be expected. But if we persevere, some may, in the end, accept. And as anyone who has ever been to a dance surely knows, all it takes is for a single couple to hit the floor for others to follow. Then may the dancing, and so the journey home, truly begin.

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chapter one 1 In Live between Us. 2 In Le Dôme. 3 See Lucien Bouchard, On the Record, 179–80, 220–46; Bouchard, À visage découvert, 247–8, 295–325. 4 The Québécois nationalist Christian Dufour has seen fit to repeat essentially the same point thirteen times in his Lettre aux souverainistes Québécois et aux fédéralistes canadiens qui sont restés fidèles au Québec. 5 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, part 1, no. 85. 6 Ibid., no. 231. See also no. 232. 7 Ibid., no. 231. 8 Ibid., no. 232. 9 Ibid., no. 233. 10 Ibid., no. 234. 11 Ibid., no. 224. 12 Ibid., no. 241.

chapter two 1 As Moses declared in Deuteronomy 6:4, “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one” (my translation).

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2 On the tendency to ground sovereignty in an (often disguised) theological absolutism, see Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. 3 See Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. 4 See David E. Smith, The Invisible Crown: The First Principle of Canadian Government. 5 On this theme, see Nicholas Lobkowicz, “On the History of Theory and Praxis,” 14. 6 See, for example, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, The Essential Trudeau. 7 There have, however, been those political thinkers who, while still working within the neutralist theoretical tradition have argued that exceptions such as the last two of these are not really exceptions at all but true to the tradition properly understood. For example, Ronald Dworkin, in A Matter of Principle, part 5, has argued this with regard to affirmative action programs; and Will Kymlicka, drawing on some of Dworkin’s arguments (e.g., ibid., ch. 11), has argued for the recognition of special ethnic group rights, Québécois national distinctiveness, and aboriginal self-government. See Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights and Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ethnocultural Relations in Canada. For both these thinkers, as for Trudeau, neutralist justice takes the form of a liberalism ideologically, one in which (a certain conception of) the equal autonomy of individuals is given an absolute or uncompromisable status, all citizens being considered unified in accepting the principles that flow from this. Where they differ from him is that, when it comes to the application of those principles, different arrangements are considered appropriate for different groups, just as the referee in hockey brings different rules to bear on goalies than on those playing forward or defence. Differential treatment, then, is understood as not necessarily conflicting with unity. 8 Trudeau, “A Constitutional Declaration of Rights,” 54. 9 Toronto Star, 27 May 1987. 10 Trudeau, “Forward,” in Federalism and the French Canadians, xxi. 11 The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. 12 See Aristotle, The Politics, 1292a10-12.

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13 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 60; de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique 1, 109. 14 See Janet Ajzenstat and Peter J. Smith, eds., Canada’s Origins: Liberal, Tory, or Republican?, part 3. 15 See Peter H. Russell, Constitutional Odyssey: Can Canadians Become a Sovereign People?. 16 The term “Divine Economy” comes from Andrew Fraser, The Spirit of the Laws, 12. On the rule of the capitalist class in Canada, accounts developed in the wake of John Porter’s classic, The Vertical Mosaic, see Robert J. Brym’s survey, “The Canadian Capitalist Class, 1965–1985.” For an example of the more benign view towards this monarch, see Joseph Heath, The Efficient Society: Why Canada Is as Close to Utopia as It Gets. 17 See, for example, Robert N. Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial. 18 A necessity according to Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political. 19 See Donald J. Savoie, Governing from the Centre: The Concentration of Power in Canadian Politics, and Jeffrey Simpson, The Friendly Dictatorship. 20 Northrop Frye, “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada,” 219. 21 Macdonald, “Speech to the Legislative Assembly,” 31. 22 See, for example, Isaiah Berlin, “Does Political Theory Still Exist?” in Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays. 23 Regarding Canada, this pluralist point has been made most forcefully by Paul M. Sniderman et al. in their study The Clash of Rights: Liberty, Equality, and Legitimacy in Pluralist Democracy. For another pluralist take on the country, see Kenneth McRoberts, Misconceiving Canada: The Struggle for National Unity. 24 Hence Ian Hacking: “I suspect that many admirers of unity have, au fond, a thoroughly theological motivation, even though they dare not mention God. I wish they would! It would get things out in the open.” Hacking, “Disunited Sciences,” 42. 25 Stuart Hampshire does the former, for example, and Martha Nussbaum the latter. See Hampshire, Justice Is Conflict, ch. 2; and Nussbaum, “Transcending Humanity,” 370. It is Max Weber, however, who asserts the connection most explicitly: “The various value spheres of the world stand in irreconcilable conflict

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32

33 34

35 36

Notes to pages 20-5 with each other … If one proceeds from pure experience, one arrives at polytheism.” Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 147. See A.J. Loughlin, Alienation and Value-Neutrality. See Rousseau, The Social Contract, bk. 1.7; Rousseau, Du contrat social, bk. 1.7. Quoted in Stephan Clarkson and Christina McCall, Trudeau and Our Times, vol. 1, The Magnificent Obsession, 280–1. The Tragically Hip, “The Rules,” in Phantom Power. Jacobs, The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle over Sovereignty, 8. This is the translation of Exodus 24: 7 that is associated with (a certain conception of) the rabbinic tradition. See Isidore Epstein, ed., The Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Shabbath, 88a-b; as well as Emmanuel Lévinas’s commentary in his “The Temptation of Temptation,” especially 42; Lévinas, “La tentation de la tentation,” especially 92. I say “perhaps” to follow because there is a tension within rabbinic Judaism with regard to the extent to which hearing/understanding (i.e., expressive rules, or mishpatim) is the goal, as against the openness to God’s spirit (the Shekhinah) that, for the Orthodox descendants of rabbinic Judaism in particular, is said to accrue from meticulously following regulations that one does not understand (hukkim). Both have a place within this form of Judaism. For more on the tension, see David Hartman, A Living Covenant: The Innovative Spirit in Traditional Judaism, especially ch. 2. Tannen, The Argument Culture: Changing the Way We Argue and Debate, 161. This accords with Émile Durkheim’s point about the need for a precontractual, custom-based sharing of values if people are to be capable of following contracts. See Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, bk. 1, ch. 7, sect. 2; Durkheim, De la division du travail social, bk. 1, ch. 7, sect. 2. See, for example, Max Weber, Ancient Judaism; and Stephen Sharot, Judaism: A Sociology, ch. 1. See Haim H. Cohn, “The Penology of the Talmud,” 72.

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37 See Andrew E. Kim, “The Absence of Pan-Canadian Civil Religion: Plurality, Duality, and Conflict in Symbols of Canadian Culture,” for a summary of the historical divisions in Canadian society. 38 Scott Merritt, “Moving Day.” 39 See, for example, Aristotle, The Politics; Machiavelli, The Discourses; and Arendt, The Human Condition: A Study of the Central Dilemmas Facing Modern Man. I would claim, however, that classical republicanism is also monarchist, as strange as that may sound, for it also demands that regimes constitute founded unities. 40 For more on this patriotic conception of conversation, in particular on its roots in philosophical hermeneutics, see my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First, especially ch. 3. 41 The original inspiration for this metaphor comes from Martin Heidegger, who conceives of conversation as an interpretive process aimed at “gathering” all of what is being interpreted, that is, at reconciling it with the “mirror-play” of the “world,” all of which he compares to a “round dance.” See Heidegger, “The Thing.” See also Charles Taylor, “The Dialogical Self.” 42 See, for example, Noël, “Deliberating the Constitution”; Kingwell, A Civil Tongue: Justice, Dialogue, and the Politics of Pluralism; Chambers, “Contract or Conversation: Theoretical Lessons from the Canadian Constitutional Crisis”; and Mendelsohn, “Public Brokerage: Constitutional Reform and the Accommodation of Mass Publics.” 43 As Jürgen Habermas, one of the founders of the approach, has described those dialogues that respect the deliberative democrat’s rules: “Discourses are islands in a sea of practice.” Habermas, “A Reply to My Critics,” 235. 44 For an extended critique of deliberative democracy, see my “Patriotic, Not Deliberative, Democracy.” 45 Joseph Carens, “Dimensions of Citizenship and National Identity in Canada,” 120. 46 See LaSelva, The Moral Foundations of Canadian Federalism: Paradoxes, Achievements, and Tragedies of Nationhood, especially ch. 9;

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48

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50

51 52 53 54 55

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Notes to pages 32-7 Saul, Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century, especially ch. 6; Ignatieff, The Rights Revolution, especially ch. 3; and Carens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community: A Contextual Exploration of Justice as Evenhandedness, especially ch. 1. The first expression is Emmanuel Lévinas’s, the second Richard Rorty’s, both of whom are leading postmodernist thinkers. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, 306; Lévinas, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité, 342; and Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, 25. See, for example, Taylor, Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism; Webber, Reimagining Canada: Language, Culture, Community, and the Canadian Constitution; Tully, “Diversity’s Gambit Declined”; Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity; and Laforest, “Standing in the Shoes of the Other Partners in the Canadian Union,” and “The Need for Dialogue and How to Achieve It.” This seems to be the form of dialogue that Webber is calling for when he writes, alternately, of “conversation” and “negotiation.” See Webber, Reimagining Canada, especially 118–19. See, for example, Taylor, “Shared and Divergent Values,” 166, 172, and “The Stakes of Constitutional Reform,” 146–7, both in Reconciling the Solitudes. Taylor, “The Stakes of Constitutional Reform,” 154. Ibid. Taylor, “Shared and Divergent Values,” 157. See ibid., 174–82; and Taylor, “Impediments to a Canadian Future,” in Reconciling the Solitudes, 198. See, for example, Laforest, Trudeau and the End of a Canadian Dream, ch. 6, for the beginnings of such a deconstruction. Perhaps Laforest, as a Québécois, considers that it is not his place to go all the way here; as an English Canadian, I have no such compunction. See François Guizot, Philosophie politique: De la souveraineté, sects. 1–4. See, for example, Psalm 95:3. Indeed, as the Christian theologian Peter L. Berger points out, even Paul, writing at a time

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when Judaism had certainly become a fully monotheistic religion, was able to accept the existence of a multiplicity of gods: “For though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or in earth, (as there be gods many, and lords many,) but to us there is but one God.” 1 Corinthians 8: 5–6. See Berger, “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven: 2,500 Years of Religious Ecstasy,” 200.

chapter three 1 To invoke just two well-known examples: in 1839 Lord Durham referred to the English and French Canadians as the country’s two “founding races” in Lord Durham’s Report; while André Siegfried did the same in his Le Canada, les deux races: Problèmes politiques contemporains. 2 For the Lockean conception, see Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution, and Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke; for the Kantian, see Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle; and for the Machiavellian, see J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Bruce Ackerman’s We the People, Vol. 1: Foundations constitutes, as its title implies, a democratic view, albeit one that attempts to meet some of the above theorists’ concerns. 3 See Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”; and Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, chs.1–5. 4 See, for example, James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, especially 840, 853–62; Tim Flannery, An Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples, for an account of immigration with a much wider scope than one might expect; and Philip Fisher, Still the New World: American Literature in A Culture of Creative Destruction, on the contemporary frontiers of market, technology, and literature. 5 For example, David Miller’s “Distributive Justice: What the People Think” provides an account of the divergences between contemporary American public opinion on the one hand and

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Notes to pages 42-5 John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice on the other, the latter being the most influential neutralist theory amongst American political philosophers today. See Russell, Constitutional Odyssey, ch. 2. See, for example, Kenneth McNaught, “Approaches to the Study of Canadian History.” Lipset, Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada. See Heinz Weinmann, Du Canada au Québec: Généologie d’une histoire, 158–64. Ibid., 154 (my translation). See Lamontagne, L’hiver dans la culture Québécoise (xvii e-xix e siècles), 32. Weinmann, Du Canada au Québec, 162 (my translation). See ibid. Rogers, “Northwest Passage.” Rogers’s song is, of course, about the disastrous Franklin expedition of the nineteenth century, but his characterization seems to me to be no less appropriate for the coureurs de bois. See Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History. Frye, “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada,” 225. Moodie, quoted in Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, 50. Angus, A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality, and Wilderness, 126. Although I’m obviously adopting a great deal of Angus’s distinction between border and frontier here, one that he shares with the historian Ramsay Cook, I think that what the “border” means, or ought to mean, for Canadians today is different. I will explain why below. A stated goal of seventeenth-century Jesuit Father Pierre Biard, quoted in Ramsay Cook, “Making a Garden Out of the Wilderness,” 60. See, for example, Pierre Berton, The Mysterious North; and Margaret Atwood, Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature.

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21 See, for example, Harry Robinson, Nature Power: In the Spirit of an Okanagan Storyteller; and Robert Hunter and Robert Keziere, Greenpeace. 22 Cohen, Beautiful Losers, 83. 23 Cooper, “Western Political Consciousness,” 220, 221. 24 Ibid., 220. 25 The title of a poem by Métis poet Marylin Dumont, contained in her collection A Really Good Brown Girl, 46. 26 Alison Strayer certainly wishes that the Western and the Central Canadian could have related differently, her novel, Jardin et Prairie, containing what can only be interpreted as a kind of dialogue between them. For a “dialogue” between the Central Canadian garrison and nature herself, see Marian Engel’s Bear. 27 Which is to say when the garrison faces challenges to its established order that originate from the outside. Limited internal conflict, as embodied in institutions such as Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition or practices such as fighting on the ice in hockey, is allowed, even encouraged. Not so when it comes to threats that have an external source. This, for example, is how I interpret the exaggerated security measures taken against protesters at the 2001 Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, not to mention the abuses committed during the 1997 apec affair at the University of British Columbia. On the latter, see W. Wesley Pue, ed., Pepper in Our Eyes: The apec Affair. 28 See Cook, “Imagining a North American Garden: Some Parallels and Differences in Canadian and American Culture,” in Canada, Québec and the Uses of Nationalism, 202–3. 29 See, for example, the critique implicit in Frederick Philip Grove’s novel The Master of the Mill. 30 See Grant, Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America. 31 Bacon, in fact, urged no such thing, but some of his admirers, such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Ernst Cassirer, certainly did. See Peter Pesic, “Wrestling with Proteus: Francis Bacon and the ‘Torture’ of Nature.” The popularity of the myth is nevertheless telling, given Bacon’s central role in the genesis of modern experimental science.

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32 The basis of this argument can be found in Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, bk. 1, ch. 7, although it goes beyond what Aristotle says there to echo positions advanced by Isaiah Berlin and Charles Taylor. See Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” in Four Essays on Liberty; and Taylor, “How Is Mechanism Conceivable?” in Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1. 33 Contrasting contemporary America and Britain, David Bodanis has written that, in the us “the idea of the ground and all such intrusions of nature are banned from the house. Walk into a Texan’s or any other home and you will be informed that already you’re on the first floor. The host is reaffirming that he is no mere servant of nature, but its controller.” Bodanis, Web of Words: The Ideas Behind Politics, 10. 34 Fulford, Mary Pickford, Glenn Gould, Anne of Green Gables, and Captain Kirk: Canadians in the World’s Imagination, 6. 35 See Janet Ajzenstat et al., eds., Canada’s Founding Debates. 36 Miguel de Cervantes, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, 617. 37 See, for example, Jacqueline de Romilly, Alcibiade: Ou les dangers de l’ambition. 38 “A policy of multiculturalism … is basically the conscious support of individual freedom of choice.” Trudeau, “Statement on Multiculturalism,” 351. 39 According to Denis Monière, many of the habitants of New France, at least, were marked by a spirit of independence, individualism, and even insubordination. See Monière, Ideologies in Quebec: The Historical Development, 39–45; Monière, Le développement des idéologies au Québec, 58–65. 40 David Kwavnick, ed., The Tremblay Report, 50. For an earlier account, see Louis-François Laflèche, Quelques considérations sur les rapports de la société civile avec la religion et la famille. 41 See Fernand Dumont, Genèse de la société Québécoise, 103–4, 117. 42 See Warren E. Kalbach and Wayne W. McVey Jr., The Demographic Basis of Canadian Society, 194–6, where it is pointed out that, until 1901, the Irish constituted the largest component of anglophone Canadians with British Isle origins, followed by the English and the Scots. Only in 1921 were they exceeded by both English and Scots.

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43 Indeed, as Chad Gaffield has pointed out, religion, not language, was the main official preoccupation of the federal government until well into the twentieth century, questions concerning language having first appeared on the Canadian census only in 1901. See Gaffield, “Linearity, Non-linearity and the Competing Constructions of Social Hierarchy in Turn-ofthe-Century Canada: The Question of Language in 1901.” 44 There is far from a guarantee here, however. Kenneth D. McRae, for example, in his “The Structure of Canadian History,” 219n., is careful to point out that he uses the term “English Canada” to refer only to a linguistic group, but that does not prevent him from going on to describe Canadian social history in dualist terms. 45 For the former, see Schmitt, The Concept of the Political; for the latter, Hampshire, Justice Is Conflict. 46 See, for example, Peter Bachrach, The Theory of Democratic Elitism: A Critique. 47 McRoberts, Misconceiving Canada, 261. 48 Ibid., 3.

chapter four 1 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, sect. 41. 2 See Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, bks. 8–9. 3 For what follows I have found especially helpful the collection edited by Bernard Crick, National Minorities: The Constitution of the United Kingdom. 4 Jeff Jacoby, ‹The Essence of Greekness,’ So Far Away from Home,” 7. 5 See, for example, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. 6 As Adrian Hastings argues this position, the most important factor in the transformation of ethnicities into nations was the literary development of an oral vernacular, an event marked particularly by the translation of the Christian Bible into various languages. See Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism. 7 Not that the modern ones are necessarily as irreligious as it is often supposed. See the discussion in my “Importance of Language

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9 10

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Notes to pages 65-9 in the Life of Nations.” Regardless, this evolution of the concept of “nation” is in keeping with the hermeneutical idea that political concepts, hence the ideologies made up of them, evolve in meaning. See Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach, part 1. Freeden makes a particularly good case in his book with regard to the evolution of liberalism (see part 2), an ideology that, since John Stuart Mill, should no longer be identified with the doctrines of, say, John Locke. For a contrast between the highly public and state-focused religiosity of the Ulster community and the nationalism of the Scots, who are more secular overall and whose Protestants have come to consider their religion a largely private affair, see Steve Bruce, “Protestantism and Politics in Scotland and Ulster.” See Isaiah Berlin, “The Bent Twig: On the Rise of Nationalism.” What the number here should be, exactly, is difficult to determine, but if it’s more than one then the popular cultural demarcation between the north and south of England will probably make for the decisive distinction. See, for example, Beryl Bainbridge, Forever England: North and South. See A.I. Silver, The French-Canadian Idea of Confederation, 1864– 1900, 11–16; and Kenneth McRoberts, Quebec: Social Change and Political Crisis, 130. By referring to these communities as “regional-ethnic,” I am trying to capture the sense in which they are, to varying degrees, in between nations and ethnicities. See Joseph Yvon Thériault, “Entre la nation et l’ethnie,” in L’identité à l’épreuve de la modernité: Écrits politiques sur L’Acadie et les francophonies canadiennes minoritaires. See McRoberts, Quebec, 130–1. Angus, A Border Within, 205. See Philip Resnick, “English Canada and Quebec: State v. Nation,” in The Masks of Proteus: Canadian Reflections on the State, 208. On the German and French models, see Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. The irony is augmented when we appreciate Adrian Hastings’s point (see Hastings, 35–65, 70–1) that the English nation preceded the kingship that encompassed it, putting it on par with the German

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and Québécois developmental patterns, while with the Scots (some of whom are today contemplating sovereignty outside of Britain) kingdom preceded nation, making their formation comparable to that of the English Canadians and the French. See, for example, Sylvia Bashevkin, True Patriot Love: The Politics of Canadian Nationalism, especially chs. 1, 7, and 8. See McRoberts, Misconceiving Canada, 24–5. See Resnick, The Land of Cain: Class and Nationalism in English Canada, 1945–1975; “English Canada and Quebec: State v. Nation,” in The Masks of Proteus; and Thinking English Canada. See, for example, Thinking English Canada, ch. 4. George Grant, of course, has gone even further, arguing that Canadian dependence on the United States marks the death of the (English) Canadian nation. See Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. See Frye, “The Cultural Development of Canada.” See ibid., 132. Something that is, of course, less true of the Québécois, given their roots in the much older French Canadian (premodern) nation. See Frye, “The Cultural Development of Canada,” 129. With regard to much earlier artistic movements such as the Group of Seven painters and the writers and poets they inspired, I am willing to admit that they had taken the necessary step of turning their cultural backs on Europe and asserting a North American sensibility. But while this step was essential if a distinctly English Canadian national culture was ever to emerge, it nevertheless did not mark the actual birth of that culture, for their rejection of Europe and concomitant assertion of an American sensibility was simply too strong. The Group of Seven still too closely echoed the themes of American naturalism, and they, moreover, were too restricted to the Laurentian Shield region to be considered representative of a pan-English Canadian nationalism. Tellingly, in theatre, George Luscombe did not need to “overcome” his English influences in order to establish an innovative and uniquely English Canadian voice in the 1950s and 1960s. See Neil Carson, Harlequin in Hogtown: George Luscombe and Toronto Workshop Productions.

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26 Details of the survey can be found in Rudolf Kalin, “Ethnicity and Citizenship Attitudes in Canada: Analyses of a 1991 National Survey,” 30. 27 Not that aboriginal communities could ever be said to have been structured along the hierarchical lines of those of premodern Europe. Neither the highly egalitarian nomadic ones, nor the sedentary or semisedentary chiefdoms, among which the matter is much more complicated, could be properly described as “authoritarian.” See the discussion in Olive Patricia Dickason, Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times, 45–7. 28 See Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 71–8. 29 For an account of the current manifestation of these effects in many aboriginal communities, see Canada, Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Report, Vol. 3: Gathering Strength. 30 What has been termed the “compact theory” of confederation, which assumes that the fundamental units of the country are the provinces, can be understood as claiming that the only communities of import at the time were those that I would identify as regional. For a thorough account of compact theory’s role in Canadian constitutional politics, see Robert C. Vipond, Liberty and Community: Canadian Federalism and the Failure of Constitutional Vision. 31 This claim accords with the thesis of William Christian and Colin Campbell’s Political Parties and Ideologies in Canada. For more on the notion of a country’s “home” ideology, see my “Political Philosophies and Political Ideologies,” 204–8. 32 Angus, A Border Within, 113. It should be noted that Angus’s book, while largely pluralist in its orientation, exhibits significant elements of postmodernism as well. 33 See Paul Ricœur, Oneself as Another; Ricœur, Soi-même comme une autre; or Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity, ch. 4.

chapter five 1 John Ralston Saul, who presents a similar dichotomy, is also concerned with the relation we assert between them. I think, how-

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ever, that he calls for too much loup overall (for this, combine chapters 11 and 16 of his Reflections of a Siamese Twin) and fails to see that we are in need of more of it only as regards our politics. Thus, Daniel Drache and Roberto Perin, eds., apologetically open their book, Negotiating with a Sovereign Quebec, 1, with the following: “Yet another book on Canada’s ongoing constitutional saga? Canadians are justified in reacting with a mixture of weariness, irritation and boredom to a thirty-year-old crisis that tenaciously reappears as soon as it is apparently resolved.” And Peter H. Russell opens the second edition of his Constitutional Odyssey, 1, with an “earnest wish that the people of Canada will not soon be put to [the test of having to grapple with another round of constitutional negotiations] and that, for a few years at least, nothing too serious will happen in the constitutional arena to make a third edition of this book necessary.” Cairns, Charter versus Federalism: The Dilemmas of Constitutional Reform, 65–6. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 251. See, for example, Isaiah Berlin, “Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century,” in Four Essays on Liberty, especially 11; Michael Walzer, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands”; Bernard Williams, “Politics and Moral Character”; and Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience, especially 170–7. Walzer, “What Rights for Cultural Communities?” See Russell, Constitutional Odyssey, 222–3. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 23. Trudeau, “The Values of a Just Society,” 361. Ibid., 362. This is why I utterly disagree with Peter Russell’s argument that the charter, specifically because of its inauguration of the process of judicial review, can act as an integrating agent. See Russell, “The Political Purposes of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” 31–43. Waldron, “When Justice Replaces Affection: The Need for Rights,” 373. Cairns, Charter versus Federalism, 49. Ibid., 74

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15 This accounts for the initial widespread support of the Trudeau government’s suspension of civil liberties through the use of the War Measures Act during the October Crisis of 1970 – as judged by public opinion polls, editorials, votes in the House of Commons and Quebec National Assembly, Montreal elections and two federal by-elections in Quebec. See Kenneth McNaught, The Pelican History of Canada, 320–1. 16 See, for example, John Rawls, The Law of Peoples. 17 See, for example, Jürgen Habermas, “Citizenship and National Identity: Some Reflections on the Future of Europe.” 18 See Cairns, Charter versus Federalism, ch. 1. 19 Ibid., 85. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 75. 22 Ibid., 85. See also Webber, Reimagining Canada, 96–7; and Peter H. Russell, “The First Three Years in Charterland,” 380. 23 Avishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal thus rightly criticize Will Kymlicka’s theory of multiculturalism for its decontextualizing abstractness, although they do so from a pluralist, rather than patriotic, perspective. See their “Liberalism and the Right to Culture,” 502–6. 24 “Manifeste pour une politique fonctionnelle” (my translation). 25 Balthazar, “The Dynamics of Multi-Ethnicity in French-Speaking Quebec: Towards a New Citizenship,” 90, 82. 26 Seymour, La Nation en question, 104 (my translation). For a similar reason, Wayne Norman seems to be onto something when he argues that civic nationalism leads logically towards cosmopolitanism rather than nationalism. See Norman, “Les paradoxes de nationalisme civique,” 163–5. 27 Katherine A. Graham and Susan D. Phillips, “Citizen Engagement: Beyond the Customer Revolution,” 256. 28 Ibid., 264. 29 Ibid., 269. 30 Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, 525. Not that the cold meaninglessness of an assigned number can never be overcome. I think of the special significance the number fourteen has for me as the number worn by my childhood hero,

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former Toronto Maple Leafs captain Dave Keon. But this is quite a rare phenomenon – as rare, one might add, as genuine heroes. I want to thank Christophe Leblay of Nortel Networks’ Division of Information Systems for providing me with this estimate. I want to thank Barry McCartan for this suggestion. See, for example, Franz Kafka, The Trial; and “In the Penal Colony”; and Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison; Foucault, Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison. On the White Paper, see J.R. Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada, 223–9. See Flanagan, First Nations? Second Thoughts. See Canada, Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Highlights from the Report: People to People, Nation to Nation. Cairns, Citizens Plus: Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State, 92. Ibid., 115. See ibid., 202–3. Ibid., 165. Ibid., 200. See ibid., 167, 206. Ibid., 158. Ibid., 182. Ibid., 188. See ibid., 192–9. Ibid., 205–9. See ibid., 200. Ramsey Cook, “Sauvages, Indians, Aboriginals, Amerindians, Native Peoples, First Nations,” in Canada, Quebec, and the Uses of Nationalism, 83. Frank, “Getting Angry over Native Rights,” 18. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 23. As he does in ibid., 24. Ibid., 21. This point parallels Michael Walzer’s about the extortionate character of what he has aptly referred to as the “desperate exchanges” that can sometimes take place within a free market. See Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality, 102.

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56 For these two I have drawn from a discussion paper drafted by the Aboriginal Rights Coalitions of Victoria and British Columbia. 57 Fontaine, “Opening Remarks.” 58 Coon Come, “Remarks to the Canada Seminar.” 59 Latraverse, “Les Pauvres.” 60 Arendt, “Civil Disobedience,” 73n. 38. 61 See the albeit somewhat exaggerated account of this in Robert Hunter and Robert Calihoo, Occupied Canada: A Young White Man Discovers His Unsuspected Past, ch. 23. See also Bruce E. Johansen, Forgotten Founders: Benjamin Franklin, the Iroquois and the Rationale for the American Revolution. Of course, aboriginal contributions have been far from just political in nature. See Louise Côté et al., L’Indien généreux: Ce que le monde doit aux Amériques. 62 For a representative example, see Mark Tunick, Punishment: Theory and Practice. On the crisis in our prisons, see David Cayley, The Expanding Prison: The Crisis in Crime and Punishment and the Search for Alternatives. 63 David Cayley has already begun this journey (see ibid., chs. 10 and 11), as have all of those who argue that there is a place for a restorative justice system in Canada. 64 Ibid. 65 Quoted in Donald G. Creighton, John A. Macdonald: The Young Politician, 227. 66 Bourassa’s five demands were as follows: (i) the constitutional recognition of Quebec as a distinct society; (ii) a greater provincial role with regard to immigration; (iii) a role for the provinces in the appointment of Supreme Court justices; (iv) limitations on the federal government’s spending powers; and (v) a veto for Quebec on any future constitutional amendments. See Canada, Special Joint Committee of the Senate and the House of Commons, The 1987 Constitutional Accord, 5. 67 As with Michael Keating: “The relationship between Quebec and the rest of Canada will continue to evolve and will always be the subject of negotiation. It is just part of normal politics.” Keating, “Canada and Quebec: Two Nationalisms in the Global Age,” 185.

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68 In his powerful essay “The Politics of Recognition,” Charles Taylor nevertheless fails to make this important point, namely, that recognition requires conversation and not negotiation. 69 See McRoberts, Misconceiving Canada, 336 n. 24. 70 See, for example, Stéphane Dion, “The Supreme Court’s Reference on Unilateral Secession: A Turning Point in Canadian History”; Jeffrey Simpson, “A Wake-Up Call for the Rest of Canada”; McRoberts, Misconceiving Canada, 269–75; Robert A. Young, The Secession of Quebec and the Future of Canada; and Paul Boothe et al., Closing the Books: Dividing Federal Assets and Debt if Canada Breaks Up. 71 “If we are rejected by Quebec, we should have a generous divorce, with continuing trade and contacts. We must not, however, accept such a divorce with the current boundaries of the province of Quebec.” Bruce W. Hodgins, “The Northern Boundary of Quebec: The James Bay Crees as Self-Governing Canadians,” 149. See also Drache and Roberto, eds., Negotiating with a Sovereign Québec, part 3; and David Jay Bercuson and Barry Cooper, Deconfederation: Canada without Quebec, 37–66. 72 Whitaker, “With or Without Quebec?” in Granatstein and McNaught, eds., “English Canada” Speaks Out, 25. 73 And the mass federalist rally held in Montreal days before the vote in the last Quebec referendum, it should go without saying, fails to meet this standard! 74 See Séguin, L’idée de l’indépendence du Québec: Genèse et historique. 75 And this despite the fact that seven of nine provinces, containing about eighty-eight percent of the relevant populations, endorsed the accord. 76 I have, for example, been astonished at the willingness of some Québécois to take seriously the dismissive attitude occasionally expressed towards them by those from the once-colonial metropole, Paris. They shouldn’t take it personally, however, Parisian snobbery tending to be directed at the whole world outside of the city, including that autre pays, as I once heard it referred to, France. 77 This applies to more than just some of the Québécois, for the tactic has also been made use of by some representatives of

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Notes to pages 111-22 Quebec’s anglophone and allophone minority communities. On the contemporary struggle for the monopoly of victimhood status in the province, see Daniel Salée, “Quebec Sovereignty and the Challenge of Linguistic and Ethnocultural Minorities: Identity, Difference and the Politics of Ressentiment.” Quoted in J. Stéphan Dupré, “Canada’s Political and Constitutional Future: Reflections on the Bélanger-Campeau Report and Bill 150,” 73–4. See Chalk Circle, “Sons and Daughters.” The Guess Who, “American Woman,” in American Woman. See articles 13 and 14 of the 1995 Quebec Sovereignty Bill. “Their positions were arrived at by Quebec debate among Quebec voices, cast in terms of Quebec national interests and articulated as a Quebec option. The participation of English Canadians from outside Quebec was neither sought nor welcomed.” Whitaker, “With or Without Quebec?” 21. Ibid., 1, my emphasis. For an articulation of the concept on this basis, see Isaiah Berlin, “Equality,” in Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays. Erasmus, In Praise of Folly, 131. For more on language policy in Quebec, see my “Hébreu en Israël: Des leçons pour le français au Québec?” See Ernest Gellner’s functionalist account in Nations and Nationalism. For arguments to this effect concerning matters of governance, welfare, and recognition in politics, see my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, chs. 5–7. Handler, Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec, 48–9. I touch on the question in my “What’s Wrong with Hypergoods.” I note, for example, that leading Québécois pop singer Jean Leloup received financial support for his critically-acclaimed album, Les Fourmis, from the federal Heritage Canada but not, for whatever reason, from Quebec’s Ministry of Culture. The cd, it’s also worth pointing out, was nominated for a Juno music award. It was to the French signing of the treaty in 1763, ceding almost all of their North American holdings to the British, that Philippe

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Aubert De Gaspé referred when he wrote, “A sombre veil covered all of New France, for the mother country, a truly wicked stepmother, had abandoned her canadien children. / Un voile sombre couvrait toute la surface de la Nouvelle-France, car la mère patrie, en vraie marâtre, avait abandonné ses enfants canadiens.” De Gaspé, Les anciens canadiens, 162 (my translation). See Ignatieff, “The Narcissism of Minor Difference.” www.adcritic.com/content/molson-canadian-i-am.html. It has, for example, been predicted that a number of English Canadian nhl teams will soon follow the Winnipeg Jets and the league’s head office in moving south. Indeed, I believe that, sooner or later, we are going to realize that the Americans’ greater wealth means that we will probably never again see a Canadian team win the Stanley Cup. The lesson here, I would suggest, is that we need to be ready to abandon the rest of our nhl teams and establish a new, professional but public, Canadian Hockey League. This will ensure that the game will never again be corrupted by money (the fate, it’s worth mentioning, of most North American professional sporting leagues – no surprise given their nature as private monopolies) and that cities such as Halifax and Hamilton could finally get their own prominent professional franchises and participate fully in this, one of our nations’ most important cultural pastimes. Or are not. Katherine Monk, for example, praises “The Rant” for its ability to define us by what we are not. See Monk, Weird Sex and Snowshoes: And Other Canadian Film Phenomena, 89–91. I would suggest, however, that it fails even at this empty project. Taylor, “Impediments to a Canadian Future,” in Reconciling the Solitudes, 194. See David E. Smith, The Republican Option in Canada, Past and Present. See Nick Loenen, Citizenship and Democracy: A Case for Proportional Representation. See Peter W. Hogg, “Responsible Government.” Franks, The Parliament of Canada, 157. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 14–15.

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115 116

Notes to pages 131-8 Ibid., 47. Ibid., 222. Ibid., 226. Ibid., 47. I have further developed this distinction in my “Opponents vs. Adversaries in Plato’s Phaedo.” See Smith, The Republican Option in Canada, Past and Present, 57. One notes that two of the three new assemblies in Britain, the Scottish and the Welsh (but, perhaps tellingly, not the Northern Irish), contain horseshoe-shaped debating chambers that, as one observer has put it, are “designed to encourage co-operation, not sword’s-drawn, combative debate.” Lesley Abdela, “Women on Top – Wales and Scotland Lead the Way.” Quoted in Franks, The Parliament of Canada, 144. Franks himself concurs with this. See ibid., 158. Quoted in ibid., 144. Not that we should be endorsing the media’s overemphasis of Question Period (see ibid., 158–60). On the contrary. But curing it of its addiction to adversity is a matter for journalistic ethics and so lies beyond the scope of the discussion here. Deborah Tannen has at least diagnosed the problem for us in her The Argument Culture, ch. 3. Proceedings that, even Franks admits, have significant failings. See The Parliament of Canada, 147, 157, as well as “The Problem of Debate in the House of Commons.” See Richard Simeon, Federal-Provincial Diplomacy: The Making of Recent Policy in Canada. See Cameron and Simeon, “Intergovernmental Relations and Democracy: An Oxymoron If There Ever Was One?”

chapter 6 1 In Cervantes, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, 910. 2 See Lerner, “Non-Violent Resistance: The History of an Idea.” The relevant classic texts here are: Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience”; Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays; Gandhi,

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Non-Violent Resistance: Satyagraha; and King, Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, ch. 6, Why We Can’t Wait, especially ch. 5. See Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality; Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité parmi les hommes. For a more recent example of reconcilliation, see Chambers, Reasonable Democracy: Jürgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse, ch. 14, where she describes the understanding reached by (what I identify as) the English Canadian and Québécois communities with in Quebec over the issue of the sign law in the 1980s and 1990s. Chambers considers this to be exemplary of the discourse of deliberative democracy, but I would point out that few, if any, of the participants in the debate at the time had even heard of the procedures outlined in Habermas’s or any other such theory, much less conformed to them. The Tragically Hip, “Save the Planet,” in Phantom Power. In ibid.

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Index

Abdela, Lesley, 168n110 aboriginal peoples, 100–4; abuse of, 102; assimilation of, 95; attachment to Canada, 10; and citizenship, 96; conception of nature, 45–6, 103– 4; and constitutional reform, 14, 95–9; invisibility of, 54; as nations, 36, 75, 60, 75; political weakness of, 54–5; recognition, 60–1, 75, 88, 95, 97; self-government of, 14, 94–5, 101, 103, 127–8; social conditions of, 97–8, 102; treaty agreements with, 76, 94, 97; as wards of the state, 54 Aboriginal Rights Coalitions of Victoria and British Columbia, 164n56 Acadians, 68 accommodation, 23 Ackerman, Bruce, 153n2 Act of Union (1840), 143

Adams, Gerry, 3 affirmative action, 14, 148n7 Ajzenstat, Janet, 149n14, 156n35 alternative medicine, 104 American Transcendentalists, 41 Anderson, Benedict, 157n5 anglophone Canadians, 124. See also Canadians Anglo-Saxons, 53 Angus, Ian, 45, 68, 79, 103 apec affair (1997), 155n27 “approaches to politics.” See politics. Arendt, Hannah, 27, 102 Aristotle, 15, 26, 156n32 Assembly of First Nations, 97 asymmetry, 78, 115–18. See also federalism Atwood, Margaret, 44, 154n20 Avineri, Shlomo, x

Bachrach, Peter, 157n46 Bacon, Francis, 48 Bahai: in Britain, 62. See also British communities Bainbridge, Beryl, 158n10 Baldwin, Robert, 112, 140 Balthasar, Louis, 90 Bank of Canada, 122 Barrow, John, 96 Bashevkin, Sylvia, 159n16 Bélanger-Campeau Commission, 34, 111; report of, 166n78 Bellah, Robert N., 149n17 Bercuson, David Jay, 165n71 Berger, Peter, L., 152n57 Berlin, Isaiah, 49, 149n22, 158n9, 161n5, 166n84 Berton, Pierre, 154n20 Biard, Pierre, 154n19 biculturalism, 70 bilingualism, 118, 126 Bill 101 (Charte de la langue française), 78

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190 Bloc québécois, 3 Bodanis, David, 156n33 Boothe, Paul, 165n70 border, 44–5, 47, 49, 64, 68, 89, 117, 154n18; vs. frontier, 41–2, 45– 6, 154n18 Bouchard, Lucien, 3–4 Bourassa, Henri, 105 Bourassa, Robert, 105 Britain, 70 British Columbia, 76, 97, 99 British Columbians, 53 British communities: Arabs, 62; Bahai, 62; Catholics, 62; East Indians, 61–2; Jews, 62; Catholics, 62; Muslims, 62; Protestants, 62; West Indians, 62–3 British Conquest of New France (1759), 110 British North America (bna) Act, 17 British Proclamation (1763), 95 Brock, General, 52 Brown, Russell M., 42 Brubaker, Rogers, 158n15 Bruce, Steve, 158n8 Brym, Robert J., 149n16 Burke, Edmund, 42 Cairns, Alan, 84, 88–9, 95–7 Calder v. Attorney General of British Columbia (1973), 97 Calgary Accord, 106 Calihoo, Robert, 164n61 Cameron, David, 135 Campbell, Colin, 160n31 Canada: as civic community, 66, 77–9;

Index founding nations of, 52; founding of, 42– 7; as multi-ethnic, 79; as multinational state, 115 Canada clause, 91 Canadian, 17, 74 Canadian citizenry, 72, 79, 89; architecture, 76, 89; dualism, 24, 52, 55 Canadian government, 17, 93 Canadian Hockey League, 167n95 Canadian Pacific Railway, 52 Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance, 77 Canadians, 79, 83, 136; Aboriginal, 75; English, 68–70; Québécois, 78 Carens, Joseph, 151n45 Carson, Neil, 159n25 Cartier, GeorgeÉtienne, 105, 141 Cartier, Jacques, 46, 53 Cassirer, Ernst, 155n31 Catholic: francophones, 53 Cayley, David, 164n62–4 Celts, 53 Central Canada, 46, 76, 116 Cervantes, Miguel de, 136, 156n36 Chalk Circle, 166n79 Chambers, Simone, 30, 169n4 de Champlain, Samuel, 42 Charlottetown Accord, 84, 106 Charlottetown Conference (1864), 34 Charte de la langue française (Bill 101), 78

Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 14–15, 86–9 Château Clique, 140 Cherry, Don, 57 Chinese Canadians, 61 Chrétien, Jean, 77, 107 Christian, William, 160n31 Churchill, Winston, 133 citizen engagement, 91 citizenship, 36–7, 74; equality of, 114–15 civic nationalism, 70–1, 90. See also nationalism civilization, 41, 44–5, 48 civil society, 59, 61–3, 67, 69–70, 72–3, 76–7, 119, 128 Clarkson, Stephan, 150n28 classical republicanism, 66 von Clausewitz, Carl, 16 Cohen, Leonard, 46, 74 Cohn, Haim H., 150n36 Colberne, Sir John, 140 Come, Matthew Coon, 101–2 community: civic (citizenry), 59, 62, 65–6, 76, 111; civil associations, 59; definition of, 52–3; ethnic, 59, 61, 76; kinds of, 59: nation, 59, 62–5; regional, 59, 76; religious, 59, 61–2, 64–5 compact theory, 76 concession, 22, 34, 99, 107, 144 Confederation, 34 conflict, 16, 27–9, 37, 54, 60, 100, 115. See also political conflict Consent, 20, 33, 86, 129–31

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Index conservatism, 77 Conservative Party of Canada, 77 constitution, 7, 9, 14, 40, 50, 86 Constitution Act (1982), 12, 14, 84–6 constitutional home, 6, 19, 23 constitutional recognition, 5, 88, 107, 118, 164n66 conversation, 27–9, 32, 35, 39, 62, 82–3, 85, 88, 90, 92, 102–14; distinct from negotiation, 30, 33; like dancing, 28; like learning a new language, 28–9 Cook, Ramsay, 45, 97, 154n19, 155n28 Cooper, Barry, 46, 165n71 cosmopolitanism, 90, 162n26 Côté, Louise, 164n61 country, 7. See civic community coureurs de bois, 43 Creighton, Donald G., 164n65 criminal justice, 103; restorative, 164n63 Croatians, 125 Crown, the, 11, 15–6, 21 culture, 72–4; as artistic productions, 73– 4; as lifestyle, 72–3; as shared heritage, 72–3 customer-service revolution, 91 decentralization of power, 106 Declaration of Human Rights (un), 89–90

Delgamuukw v. British Columbia (1997), 97 democracy, 15; deliberative/discursive, 30 Department of Canadian Heritage, 127 Descartes, Réné, 83 Desmond, Viola, 52 dialogue, 10–11, 17–18, 27, 29, 30, 34, 62, 80, 100, 128, 132–2, 134, 137 Dickason, Olive Patricia, 160n27 Dion, Léon, 111 Dion, Stéphane, 165n70 distinct society clause, 78, 164n66 Divine Economy, the, 16, 21 division of powers, 69, 106, 123, 164n66 Don Quixote, 51, 136 Drache, Daniel, 161n2 Dream Warriors, 74 Dufour, Christian, 147n4 Dumont, Fernand, 156n41 Dumont, Marylin, 155n25 Dupré, Stéphan, 166n78 Durham, Lord, 141–2, 153n1 Durkheim, Émile, 150n34 Dworkin, Ronald, 40, 148n7 Eastern Canada, 53, 76, 116 economic monarchy. See Divine Economy. Elgin, Lord, 141–3 Engel, Marian, 155n26 England, 53, 64, 123 English Canada, 112; state recognition of, 127

191 English Canadian nation, 68–70, 74–5, 103–4 English Canadians, 53, 73–4, 104–11, 123; “The Rant,” 125–6 environmental movement, 45–6 Epstein, Isidore, 150n31 equality: as respect for difference, 116–17; as uniformity, 115–17 Erasmus, 117 Erie Canal, 142 Esperanto, 118 ethnic community, 61. See also community ethnicity, 60–1 Europe, 36, 40–2, 49 family/kinship, 58–60; as common good, 58–9, 66, 71, 79, 88, 99, 106–7, 111, 120, 124–5, 132, 136 Family Compact, 140 federal Heritage Canada, 166n91 federalism: asymmetrical, 78, 115–18; in Britain, 67; in Canada, 103, 105; collaborative, 135; executive, 84; symmetrical, 115 Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations, 96 First Nations. See also aboriginal peoples, 75 Fisher, Philip, 153n4 Flanagan, Tom, 95 Flannery, Tim, 153n4 Fontaine, Phil, 101 foundation, 11, 40, 50; American mythology of, 40–2; Canadian mythology of, 42–7

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192 Foucault, Michel, 94 France, 36 Frank, Steven, 98 Franklin, Benjamin, 103 Franklin, Sir John, 52 Franks, C.E.S., 130–2, 168n111, 168n114 Fraser, Andrew, 16 Freeden, Michael, 157n7 freedom: individual, 89; national, 89; political, 63. See also liberty French Canadians, 104, 143. See francophones friendship, 58 frontier, 41–2, 45–6, 154n18; vs border, 44–5, 47, 49, 64, 68, 89, 117, 154n18 frontierism, 46 Frye, Northrop, 17, 43–4, 72–3, 77, 124, 159n24 Fulford, Robert, 50 Gaffield, Chad, 157n43 Gandhi, M.K., 138 garrison (Canadian), 44–51, 88, 155n26–7 de Gaspé, Philippe Aubert, 166n92 Gellner, Ernest, 166n87 Globe and Mail, The, 123 goods/values, 57–8, 115; common, 26–7, 32, 37, 71, 88, 91 (citizenries, 59, 107; civil associations, 59; ethnicities, 59; nations, 59, 124; regions, 59; religions, 59); instrumental, 58; intrinsic, 5, 58; personal, 58; public, 58–9, 88 Gosford, Lord, 140

Index governance, 129–30, 166n88 Graham, Katherine A., 91–2 Grant, George, 47–8, 159n20 Greeks, 63; ancient, 11, 13 Gretzky, Wayne, 57, 107 Group of Seven, 159n25 groups, 53–6, 73, 79, 88, 135, 140, 148n7; vs. communities, 52–4, 59–61, 64, 67, 70, 72–3 Grove, Frederick Philip, 155n29 Guess Who, The, 111 Guizot, François, 152n56 Gzowski, Peter, 17 Habermas, Jürgen, 151n43, 162n17, 169n4 Hacking, Ian, 149n24 Halbertal, Moshe, 162n23 Halifax, 167n95 Hamilton, 167n95 Hampshire, Stuart, 149n25, 161n5 Handler, Richard, 120 Hartman, David, 150n32 Hartz, Louis, 153n2 Harvey, John, 141 Hastings, Adrian, 157n6, 158n15 Hawthorn Report (1966–67), 96 Head, Francis Bond, 140 Heath, Joseph, 149n16 Hebrew University of Jerusalem, x Heidegger, Martin, 151n41, 157n1

hockey, 13, 57, 126, 148n7, 15n27 Hodgins, Bruce W., 165n71 Hogg, Peter W., 167n100 home: and constitution, 6, 19, 23; vs. house, 23, 26, 113, 121 House of Commons, 130, 133, 162n15 Howe, Joseph, 140 human morality, 48 Hunter, Robert, 155n21, 164n61 identity, 49, 70, 79, 93, 103 ideology, 67, 77 Ignatieff, Michael, 31, 125 immigration, 41, 153n4, 164n66 Indian Act (1876), 95 individuals, 14, 21, 36, 52, 59–61, 61, 88, 90, 115–16, 148n7 inequality, 117 Innis, Harold, 43 institutions, 26, 59, 62, 70, 82 Ireland, 53 Irish, 53 Iroquois, 46 Israel, x Israelites, ancient, 23, 25, 110–11 Jacobs, Jane, 23 Jacoby, Jeff, 157n4 Jews: in Britain, 62. See also British communities Johansen, Bruce E., 164n61 Joyce, James, 85 Judaism: Rabbinic, 23–4

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Index Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, 142 Juno music awards, 166n91 justice, 18 just society, 86 Kafka, Franz, 94 Kalbach, Warren E., 156n42 Kalin, Rudolf, 160n26 Kanada, 46 Kant, Immanuel, 40 Kantorowicz, Ernst H., 148n3 Keating, Michael, 164n67 Keon, Dave, 163n30 Keziere, Robert, 155n21 Kim, Andrew E., 151n37 Kimball, Ralph, 93 King, Mackenzie, 77 King, Jr., Martin Luther, 138 King’s Loyal Subjects, the, 140–1 Kingwell, Mark, 30 Kymlicka, Will, 144n7, 162n23 Laflèche, LouisFrançois, 156n40 Lafontaine, LouisHippolyte, 112, 140–1 Laforest, Guy, 32, 152n55 Lamontagne, SophieLaurence, 43 land claims, 97–8 land rights: aboriginal, 97–8, 100, 102; treaty, 95, 97, 100 Land Titles Act (1894), 97 languages, official, 76 LaSelva, Samuel V., 31, 96

Latraverse, Plume, 102 law, 15, 24, 30, 49, 66, 81 Le Canadien, 141 legal systems: American, 24; Anglo-American, 103 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 155n31 Leloup, Jean, 3, 166n91 Lerner, Gerda, 138 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 150n31, 152n47 liberalism, 77, 112, 148n7, 158n7 Liberal Party of Canada, 77 libertarianism, 112 liberty, 63, 115, 118; individual, 14, 19, 94; national, 63, 72, 115, 118; political, 63, 66 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 42 Lobkowicz, Nicholas, 148n5 Locke, John, 40, 42, 157n7 Loenen, Nick, 167n99 Lord Durham’s Report, 153n1 Loughlin, A.J., 150n26 loups of Montreal, 42–4, 51–2, 81. See also moutons of Quebec City Lower Canada, 53, 143 Luscombe, George, 159n25 Macdonald, John A, 17 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 27, 40, 42, 66 Mackenzie, William Lyon, 77, 112, 140 majorities, 15, 135; vs. minorities, 14, 88, 135 Manitoba, 116 Margalit, Avishai, 162n23

193 Marx, Karl, 143 Marxism, 103 Mayflower, 40 McCall, Christina, 150n28 McGuiness, Martin, 3 McNaught, Kenneth, 154n7, 162n15 McPherson, James M., 153n4 McRae, Kenneth D., 157n44 McRoberts, Kenneth, 55, 149n23, 158n13, 159n17, 165nn69–70 McVey Jr, Wayne W., 156n42 Meech Lake Accord, 4, 14, 34, 83, 105–6, 110, 115 membership, 60, 74 Mendelsohn, Matthew, 30 mercantilism, 16 Merritt, Scott, 74, 151n38 Mill, John Stuart, 157n7 Miller, David, 153n5 Miller, J.R., 163n34 minorities, 14, 88, 121, 135; vs majorities, 15, 135 Mitchell, Joni, 74 monarchy, 11, 16, 21, 26 Monière, Denis, 156n39 Monk, Katherine, 167n96 monotheism, 11, 19 Montreal, 43 Moodie, Susanna, 44–5 moutons of Quebec City, 11, 42–4, 51–2, 81. See also loups of Montreal Moses, 147n1 multiculturalism: individualist (Trudeau), 52, 156n38; patriotic,

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194 52, 162n23; pluralist, 52, 162n23 Muslims: in Britain. See also British communities names, 93–4 “narcissism of minor differences,” 125 Nash, 153n3 nation, 59–63, 70–1; modern, 64; premodern, 64 National Hockey League (nhl), 122 nationalism: civic, 70– 1; ethnic, 71; modern, 64; premodern, 64. See also aboriginal peoples, English Canadians, French Canadians, Québécois national unity, 25 nation-state, 121 nature, 47; as “monster,” 45, 94 Nault, Robert, 99 Nazis, 93 negotiation, 18–19, 22– 3, 26–7, 30–4, 55, 62, 79, 84–5, 87, 90, 94, 97, 99–100, 109, 138, 164n67. See conversation neutralism, 14 New Brunswick, 116 New Deal, 41 New Democratic Party of Canada, 77 New France, 42, 156n39, 166n92 Nisga’a treaty, 99 Noël, Alain, 30 non-violent resistance, 138–9, 144 Norman, Wayne, 162n26

Index Normans, 53 North, the, 45, 64, 76 North America, 41, 42, 46 Northern Ireland, 3, 63–5 North West Mounted Police, 47 Nova Scotia, 140 Nussbaum, Martha, 149n25 October Crisis, 162n15 Official Languages Act (1969), 76, 118 Ontario, 76, 116 Opposition, Her Majesty’s Loyal, 132, 155n27 Orange Order Protestants, 109 Oslo peace process, x Ottawa, 10, 68–70, 73, 77, 106, 112, 118, 123, 127, 135 Palestinians, x pantheism, 48 Panza, Sancho, 51, 136 Papineau, Louis Joseph, 112, 140 Parent, Étienne, 140–1 parliament, 130, Britain, 3; Canada, 3. Parti Québécois, 113 Patriotes, 140 patriotic multiculturalism, 52 patriotism, 6, 26–30, 37, 39, 81, 85, 105 people, 14–15, 31, 49, 60, 65, 72, 82, 84, 96, 102, 115, 128 Perin, Roberto, 161n2 Pesic, Peter, 155n31 Phillips, Susan D., 91–2 Platonic tradition, 48 pleading, x, 10–12, 18, 37

pluralism, 17–19, 23, 87 pluralist constitution, 19 pluralist polyarchy, 17, 19, 22, 50, 84, 130 Pocock, J.G.A., 153n2 Poitu-Charentes, 53 political conflict, 6, 10, 26, 30, 32 political community, 33, 36. See civic community political culture, 77 politics, x, 19, 25, 31–2; vs. antipolitics, 16; and dialogue, 26–7, 128, 135; monarchist, 10–11, 13, 19–23, 26– 7, 37, 39, 40, 48–9, 50, 66, 74, 84, 95; neutralist liberalism, 19, 47– 8, 77; neutralist theory and, 13, 18, 21, 36, 70, 86, 89–90, 96, 117; patriotic, 6, 26– 30, 32–3, 37–9, 66, 79, 81, 92, 100–1, 108, 119, 123, 132; pluralist, 17–19, 20–3, 26–7, 32–3, 55, 87–8; polyarchist, 16, 20, 22–3, 26, 38, 40, 54, 95, 103, 128, 130, 145; of resentment, 109–10 polyarchy, 16, 26, 52, 54 polytheism, 19 Porter, John, 149n16 postmodernism, 31 poverty, 97, 102, 140 power, 5, 17, 29, 47, 55, 67, 99, 100, 106, 112, 128–9, 142 practice, 8, 20 prairies, 46 prime minister, 17, 90, 128–9 Prince Edward Island, 116

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Index proportional representation, 129 Protestants, in Britain, 62. See also British communities provinces, 14, 69, 76, 84, 114–16, 135 public opinion, 14 Quakers, 138 Québec: anglophones in, 78; in Canada, 5, 105, 108, 121–2; constitutional recognition of, 118, 127; distinctiveness of, 107, 118; language legislation in, 76–7, 117–18; National Assembly of, 78, 162n15; Quiet Revolution, 68, 105, 109; referendum, 107, 113; separation from Canada, 4, 35, 105, 111; sign law, 118; special status for, 78, 114 Quebec Ministry of Culture, 166n91 Quebec National Assembly, 78, 162n15 Québécois: birth of, 68; as nation, 5, 68; national distinctiveness of, 14; recognition of, 5, 60, 78, 106–7, 118, 122–3 Québécois sovereignist movement, 3 Quebec Sovereignty Bill, 166n81 Question Period, 134 R. v. Marshall (1999), 98 rabbinic Judaism, 24 Rant, the, 125–6 Rawls, John, 153n5, 162n16

Rebellion Losses Bill, 141 Rebellions of 1837, 139 realpolitik, 16–17, 19 realpolitik polyarchy, 84 Reciprocity Treaty (1854), 143 Recognition, 60, 63–4, 70, 106; special ethnic group rights, 14 reconciliation, 85, 88, 92, 100 Red River Settlement, 46, 53 referendum, 14, 84, 107–8, 110, 113 Reformers, 140–1 regulations, 20–5. See also rules: regulative religion, 19 renewing federalism, 35, 105, 107, 114 republican system, 4, 15, 141; vs. parliamentary, 15, 129–30, 132, 141 Resnick, Philip, 69–70, 72, 158n15 responsible government, 15, 139 Richler, Mordechai, 75 Ricœur, Paul, 160n33 Riel, Louis, 47 rights, 14, 36, 87–91, 102, 116; and negotiation, 87, 90, 97 rights talk, 88–90 Robinson, Harry, 155n21 Rogers, Stan, 43, 74 de Romilly, Jacqueline, 156n37 Rorty, Richard, 152n47 Rousseau, JeanJacques, 21, 138 Roy, Gabrielle, 75 royal absolutism, 21 Royal Canadian Mounted Police, 47

195 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1995–96), 95, 98, 101 Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963– 71), 70 Royal Commission on Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (1949), 69 Royal Proclamation (1763), 95 rules, 7–9; expressive, 8–10, 23–6, 29, 38, 97; regulative, 20, 23 Russell, Peter H., 85, 98, 149n15, 154n6, 161n2, 161n11, 162n22 St Francis of Assisi, 48 Salée, Daniel, 165n77 Saskatchewan, 116 Saul, John Ralston, 31, 160n1 Savoie, Donald J., 149n19 Schmitt, Carl, 148n2, 149n18, 157n45 Schumpeter, Joseph, 84 Scotland, 53, 65 Scottish, 53, 63, 168n110 Séguin, Maurice, 108 self-government (aboriginal), 148n7 Selkirk, Lord, 46 Senate (Triple E), 135 separatism, 4 Serbians, 125 Seymour, Michel, 90 Sharot, Stephen, 150n35 Siegfried, André, 153n1 Silver, A.I., 168n11 Simeon, Richard, 135 Simpson, Jeffrey, 149n19, 165n70 Sinn Féin, 3

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196 Smith, David E., 133, 144n4, 167n98 Sniderman, Paul M., 149n23 socialism, 77 sovereignty, 5, 50, 65, 72, 99, 108, 118, 121, 137, 148n2, 158n15 sovereignty-association, 4, 95, 98, 105, 108, 113 Special Joint Committee of the Senate and the House of Commons, 164n66 Stanley Cup, 167n95 state, 59, 70, 119; distinct from nation, 59, 70; as expressing civic community, 119; state recognition of nations, 60, 63 Steele, Sam, 52 Strayer, Alison, 155n26 Summit of America (2001), 155n27 Supreme Court of Canada, 97–8, 117 survivance, la, 124, 141 Sydenham, Lord, 140 Tannen, Deborah, 24, 168n113 Taylor, Charles, 32, 34– 6, 49, 93, 127, 151n41, 160n33, 165n68 technology, 46–7 Tecumseh, Chief, 52 territories, 97, 116, 135 theory of justice, 12–13 Thériault, Joseph Yvon, 158n12 Thoreau, Henry David, 41, 138

Index de Tocqueville, Alexis, 15 toleration, 50, 138 Tolstoy, Leo, 138 Toronto, 116, 140 Toronto Maple Leafs, 163n30 Tragically Hip, 3, 74, 123, 144, 150n29 treaties, 76, 94, 97, 127 Treaty of Paris (1763), 122 Tremblay Commission (1953), 53 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 101 Tully, James, 32, 160n28 Tunick, Mark, 154n62 Turks, 63 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 153n3 Trudeau, Pierre Elliot, 10, 12, 14–15, 21, 25, 47, 52, 70, 74, 85, 88, 90, 114, 124 two founding peoples myth, 39, 52 Ulster community (Northern Ireland), 64–5 United Empire Loyalists, 53 United Nations (un): headquarters of, 89; Human Development Index, 51; Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 89–90 United States, 53, 70; Civil War, 41; constitution, 103; Declaration of Independance, 40; Supreme Court, 23

Universal Declaration of Human Rights (un), 89–90 unity: vs. holism, 26; and monarchy, 17; systematic, 13, 86; and theory, 11, 15–17, 36, 40, 48, 66, 87, 148n7 Upper Canada, 53, 143 Vipond, Robert C., 160n30 Waldron, Jeremy, 87 Wales, 53, 65 Walzer, Michael, 86, 163n55 War Measures Act, 162n15 ways of life, 18, 26 Webber, Jeremy, 152n49, 162n22 Weber, Max, 149n25 Weinmann, Heinz, 154n9, 154n12 Welsh, 53, 63, 168n109 Western Canada, 53, 76, 116. See also prairies Westminster, 3 Whigs, 142 Whitaker, Reginald, 108, 113, 166nn82–3 White Paper on Aboriginals (1969), 95 wilderness, 44–5, 48, 103 Williams, Bernard, 161n5 Winnipeg Jets, 167n95 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 7–9, 20 women’s rights, 88 Young, Robert A., 165n70