Secession and Self: Quebec in Canadian Thought 9780773574861

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secession and self

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Secession and Self Quebec in Canadian Thought gregory millard

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

G

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2008 isbn 978-0-7735-3384-4 Legal deposit third quarter 2008 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free 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 support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Millard, Gregory, 1970– Secession and self : Quebec in Canadian thought / Gregory Millard. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-3384-4 1. Nationalism – Canada. 2. Federal-provincial relations – Québec (Province). 3. Secession – Québec (Province). 4. Biculturalism – Canada. 5. Liberalism – Canada. 6. Canada – English-French relations. 7. Federal government – Canada. I. Title. fc2926.9.s4m54 2008

320.540971

c2008-904999-3

Typeset by Jay Tee Graphics Ltd. in 10.5/13 New Baskerville

Contents

Acknowledgments

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1 Introduction: The Search for Affirmation

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part one: principled affirmations s e c t i o n o n e : Against Quebec-in-Canada: Liberal-Democratic Critiques 2 Liberal Critiques of Quebec-in-Canada 29 3 Democratic Critiques of Quebec-in-Canada 46 s e c t i o n t w o : Affirming Quebec-in-Canada: Justice and Liberalism 4 Just Secession? Partition Reconsidered 83 5 Liberal Affirmations of Quebec-in-Canada 103 s e c t i o n t h r e e : Beyond Justice: The Sense of Mission, Complex Fraternity, and Developmental Visions 6 Quebec-in-Canada as Global Exemplar 151 7 Moral Foundations? Complex Fraternity and Dissociation as “Tragedy” 175 8 From Progress to Dialogue: Developmental Visions of the Multinational State 185 part two: beyond principled affirmations: sketching the experiential 9 Quebec and Experiential Affirmation Concluding Note 247 Notes 251 Works Cited Index 341

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Acknowledgments

“If I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book,” said Huckleberry Finn, “I wouldn’t a tackled it.” That I cannot say the same is due to the help and kindness of many people. Professor Jock Gunn, retired, of the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University (Kingston), supervised the PhD thesis upon which this book is based, with unfailing humour, patience, and no little compassion. In both scholarship and teaching, Professor Gunn’s are the standards to which I still aspire. My debts to him cannot be repaid; but I hope that this book at least does them some justice. It was my privilege to have Will Kymlicka read a draft of this work and offer generous and extensive commentary, particularly on chapter 4. The manuscript benefitted from the comments of David R. Cameron, Matthew Mendelsohn, and Margaret Moore. Eleanor MacDonald shared her thoughts on aspects of the project at its most distant, inchoate stages. I thank them all. Jane Forsey, now at the University of Winnipeg, read and critiqued parts of this work; and so did Ella Ophir (University of Saskatchewan), Craig Jones (late of Queen’s, now Executive Director of The John Howard Society), and Demitrios Glentzakos (parts unknown). Friends, may you ride your hammocks to the stars. Philip C. Cercone and Ligy Alakkattussery of McGill-Queen’s University Press guided the manuscript through its mysterious metamorphosis from thesis to book. The anonymous readers for that press also offered very useful criticisms and suggestions, resulting in a stronger work. And Kate Merriman’s copy editing was both judicious and indispensable. For the flaws that remain, I am, of course, wholly to blame.

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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 Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The PhD thesis that formed the basic draft of the manuscript was facilitated by a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship, 1997–98 (file no. 752–97– 1819), as well as by an Ontario Graduate Scholarship (1999) and Queen’s University Graduate Awards (1995–97). I suspect that Rod and Marie-Paule Millard, my parents, sowed the seeds of this work decades ago through their passionate concern for the unity of Canada. And my daughter, Faith, was born as the essentials of this book reached completion. May she find here something of the Canada she inherits. Finally, to my wife, Maria-Luisa Liberatore, I can only hold out these pages – a work that her love and faith in me have sustained, unceasingly, for the first years of our life together. I dedicate this book to her.

secession and self

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1 Introduction The Search for Affirmation

1 introduction Why have we, Canadians outside Quebec, tended to resist the secession of Quebec, and how plausible are our reasons? These questions are vexed, and they need refining. In the first place, speaking exclusively of secession – the establishment of Quebec as an independent country, albeit one perhaps linked to Canada through treaties of various sorts – risks foreclosing too many alternatives. The existential stakes at play in the Quebec-Canada debate go beyond secession strictly speaking, including such scenarios as “sovereignty-association,” massively “asymmetrical federalism,” other forms of “special status” for Quebec, merely administrative accommodation, the so-called “status quo,” and so forth. And there is also the question of whether we still need to worry about any of this. As I write, Canada enjoys an uneasy quiet on the unity front that has persisted for the better part of a decade. Do we even need to stir up these ghosts? Yes; and for at least three reasons. One is that, despite the electoral struggles of the Parti Québécois since 2003, support for “sovereignty” with an offer of “partnership” continues to percolate at between 40–50 per cent.1 The precise significance of these data is open to interpretation, of course, and certainly falls short of proving Gagnon and Iacovino’s assertion that “the country is living on borrowed time”;2 but it does suggest that we enjoy a ceasefire in rather than a decisive resolution of the wars over national unity. This impression is reinforced by Canada’s patent failure to address the underlying problems, including the continuing conviction of Quebec nationalists that Canadian federalism remains far too centralized and far too limited in its accommodation of

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Quebec’s specificity and the continuing refusal of Quebec governments formally to assent to the 1982 Constitution Act. A second, related, consideration is the type of demographic analysis typified by Clarke, Kornberg, and Wearing in A Polity on the Edge. Working from what they call the “socialization hypothesis” of Québécois public opinion – i.e., that what moulds peoples’ views is primarily “the historical period when their formative socialization experiences occurred”3 – the authors estimate that support for sovereignty will gradually escalate over the first two decades of this century, reaching about 58 per cent by 2016.4 If recent events have not borne out their specific projections from the “socialization” hypothesis, survey research continues to suggest that support for sovereignty will increase as younger generations supplant the older.5 Prediction in the social sciences being a dismal business, we obviously can’t take such analysis as the last word. But it ought at least to give pause to anyone rash enough to pronounce, for the nth time in our history, the “death” of secession as a serious threat to the Canadian order. The dragon is not slain but, arguably, sleeps. The third reason for continuing to pursue these questions is less urgent but, I would argue, more profound. Quebec has posed a fundamental challenge to Canadian institutions for the better part of four decades. This has provoked a vast scholarship that ranges from efforts to understand Quebec nationalism to hypothetical analyses of secession, systematic proposals for redrawing the Canadian order, angry polemics, attempts to theorize a Canada without Quebec, legal arguments, and historically minded studies of “what went wrong.”6 Whether or not relations between Quebec and the rest of Canada have stabilized in the short term, the existential traumas of the past four decades remain fertile ground for anyone interested in questions of identity, value, and ideas in Canadian politics; and especially for those interested in the problem of what might be good about being the kind of political community that we are – which is surely the most fundamental question any citizen must confront about their polity. Such is the terrain that I want to canvass in this book. I want, in particular, to understand the normative dimensions of what I will call a “radical rupture” with Quebec for what others have called “English-speaking Canada.”7 What are the ramifications of this great hypothetical, a radical break with Quebec, for our sense of what is worthwhile about Canada? Addressing this question requires us to delve into affirmations of the Canadian order and the role that Quebec plays in the prospective

Introduction

5

or actual realization of these. Taking a variety of discourses on Canadian identity, polity, and secession, then, this book proposes to tease out a range of ways in which a radical rupture with Quebec has been, or can be, framed as a normative problem: more precisely, as the negation of some set of goods. And all of this is intended to enhance our understanding of the full meaning of such a rupture for Canadians outside Quebec. Two motivations drive this undertaking. One is conservative. As I’ve suggested, the threat of a radical rupture is likely to remain a serious possibility as long as there is a deep and influential nationalist critique of Canadian federalism afoot in Quebec and as long as a sovereigntist political party remains a serious contender for power there. Karl Mannheim observed that conservatism emerges only when a way of life is under threat; only then do those embedded in that order seek to raise to articulation what is most valuable in it.8 This study can be taken as an attempt to contribute to the ongoing process of articulation in Canada – one that has, in various forms, been unfolding since the late 1960s – albeit an attempt of an idiosyncratic kind, as we’ll see. The practical aspiration of the undertaking consists in the hope that a discussion of the richness and diversity of goods implicated in Quebec’s presence in Canada may serve as a resource for the defence of that order. But “it is not easy to articulate”9 the losses given in a scission with Quebec. Doing so in a purely speculative manner, de novo, would take the rigour of a Kant and the imaginative powers of a Tolkien. Luckily, I have an alternative: the reformulation of the task from one of pure invention to one of rough discursive portrait. And this gets to my second motivation, which is more analytical, i.e., a desire to understand more fully the range of ways in which a radical rupture would matter to us. This book is, in a peculiar sense, historical and descriptive. The prospect of a break with Quebec has been a major theme in Canadian politics since the 1960s. How has it confronted our self-understandings and values? What goods has it placed at risk? In tackling such questions, the defence of Quebec-in-Canada here is framed as an intellectual problem suited to an ethically informed, discursive analysis. But this is not simply a matter of summoning some novel, all-purpose argument against radical rupture. Rather it is a question of portraiture: the depiction and vivification of implicit and explicit resistances to this grand hypothetical of Canadian politics, and the self-understandings and values that underpin them. Thus, I want to shed light on some of

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the goods that constitute us as Canadians and probe how they tie into our defence of our political order against the specific challenge posed by the constitutional radicalism of Quebec. The reader will have noted that the special interest here is in affirmations that apply to English-speaking Canada. That is, the goods invoked must be goods for English-speaking Canada; the task is to investigate how Quebec-in-Canada has been framed as a condition that helps English-speaking Canadians to realize a given set of affirmations. Arguments that a constitutional rupture would imperil the ability of Quebecers to realize goods x or y, while certainly worthwhile, are not the main concern of this analysis. Why not? In the first place, Quebecers have been pondering the implications of a break with Canada in a deep way for generations. The ramifications of such a rupture for Canadians outside Quebec, while certainly an established theme in the academic literature, have been less thoroughly canvassed. That sustained efforts to “think ‘English Canada’” really flourished only after the collapse of the Meech Lake Accord illustrates the comparative (not absolute) novelty of the theme. It seems reasonable to try to build on such work by identifying the nature of Quebec’s place in assorted accounts of identity and affirmation that resonate in English-speaking Canada. Furthermore, the 1990s saw an apparent hardening of the attitude of many Canadians toward the demands of Quebec – an increased indifference to threats of secession and a tendency to say “let them go” rather than contemplate even moderate constitutional reform. Such tough-mindedness warrants analysis in its own right, but it also redoubles the significance of an attempt to explicate exactly why some English-speaking Canadians have cared, and perhaps should care, about whether Quebec does go. More needs to be said, of course, about concepts such as “radical rupture” and “implicit and explicit resistance.” But our first concern must be with method. My project is to articulate the meanings given in a situation for a particular set of agents. This implies a view of agency itself. And, in this regard, it is hard to overstate the influence of Charles Taylor upon this book. Admittedly, Taylor’s concerns (even in his justly celebrated Canadian writings) are vastly different from those at play here, both in scope and substance. He is primarily a theorist of human agency and modern selfhood, and his ideas may seem too broad and wide-ranging to serve as grounds for a book that pursues the ultimately parochial matter of English-speaking Canadian resistance to the radical politics of Quebec nationalism. But my claim is that Taylor is an excel-

Introduction

7

lent guide for this purpose because of his profound emphasis on affirmation in human life. His theory of the self invites us to tie questions, great or small, political or otherwise, into a matrix of affirmation – to ask, in other words, such questions as “what is the nature of driving affirmations that move us, we defenders of Quebec-in-Canada?” For Taylor, understanding any important social situation requires that we come to grips with the constitutive affirmations at play in it. And such understanding is best gleaned discursively, through a study of the narratives and texts whereby these affirmations find expression. Taylor’s Sources of the Self, in particular, serves as an example of the sort of thing that – in a far more modest way – I am trying to realize here. In order to make sense of all this, however, a closer look at Taylor’s general theory of identity and agency would help.

2 the self, the good, and the community: a framework for analysis Taylor defines the transcendental condition of human identity, or selfhood, in terms of “the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand.”10 Affirmations are thus, to some degree, constitutive of agency. He goes on to claim that a person bereft of important qualitative distinctions – ideas about what is good to do or be – would be in the grip of a pathological identity crisis.11 This may be too essentialist for some tastes, but it’s a reasonable working hypothesis. What is really indispensable for my purposes is the distinction Taylor draws between “moral commitments” and “particular identifications.” These are analytically separable concepts: “our identities, as defined by whatever gives us our fundamental orientation, are in fact complex and many-tiered. We are all framed by what we see as universally valid commitments (being a Catholic or an anarchist [for example]) and also by what we understand as particular identifications (being an Armenian or a Québécois).”12 The term “universally valid commitments” may worry us. Taylor himself qualifies this in important ways.13 Regardless, there is clearly a distinction at play in Taylor between local attachments and the moral horizons in which these local attachments are embedded. Our ideas about the good (the “incomparably higher,” as he puts it, or that which commands our ultimate awe and respect) are not always reducible to

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the particular “webs of birth and history” within which we are situated, though they do come to us filtered through these particular social and linguistic contexts and are coloured by them. Sources of the Self is largely concerned with the “moral horizon” of the modern West. It probes the content and the history of conceptions of the good as a civilizational concern. Taylor accordingly draws from French, German, British, and American sources, and it is clear that Taylor’s categories are meant to resonate with most – possibly all – denizens of the West (or at least its “North Atlantic region”). That Taylor feels perfectly comfortable fusing the legacy of such diverse local contexts into one colossal, civilizational “modern identity” illustrates the extent to which moral horizons are distinct units of analysis, related to, but not reducible to, particular identifications. The modern identity – that is, the modern moral horizon – ultimately derives from three broad sources: reason and its stance of “courageous disengagement;”14 the “voice of nature”; and God. These sources feed into an intricate network of beliefs and practices, including science, the ethic of individual self-creation, inner authenticity, Romantic expressivism, and the “affirmation of ordinary life” (an egalitarian celebration of everyday involvement in the life of family and production). Being modern, on Taylor’s account, cannot but demand involvement in some of these sources. Indeed, he plausibly shows that many strains in contemporary social thought which affect indifference toward such qualitative moral distinctions are in fact motivated by unarticulated ideas of the good.15 “Particular identifications,” conversely, are distinctive “webs of birth and history” that operate within the civilizational framework just discussed. National identification is an obvious example. Despite being part of the same broad moral horizon of “the modern West,” Britain and Germany partake of rather distinct philosophical, political, social, and cultural traditions. We might say that they have operationalized various themes of the modern identity in quite different ways. In addition to working on this civilizational scale, then, we must remain sensitive to “the tradition of a situation”16 and its intricate interrelationship to wider moral horizons. So one remains a Québécois and an anarchist; there are analytically distinct levels of identification here, interacting in complex and interesting ways. Consider what might be involved in reconciling one’s selfunderstanding as a Québécois with the moral framework of anarchism. The latter commitment, which on Taylor’s account must be viewed as one among many possible ethics ensconced within the moral horizon

Introduction

9

of modernity, would presumably repudiate any interweaving of state institutions with the survival and flourishing of the francophone identity – in short, the whole historical complex of powerful strains of Quebec nationalism. All this permits the following propositions. Generally speaking, people are embedded in moral frameworks; this is a defining element of identity. Our affirmations help to constitute who we are. We may extrapolate that the existential meaning of a situation for an agent hinges on its connection to that agent’s framework of affirmations. A specific issue, such as resistance to Quebec secession, is, therefore, woven into wider complexes of ethics and identity. Hence, the explicitly “ethical” orientation of this study. It seeks to discover what is at stake, for agents, in Quebecin-Canada. This presumes that there are agents for whom the issue is not one of indifference and that explaining why will involve relating it to ideas about the good. But, as agents, we are not constituted only by what we see as “universally valid commitments.” We also understand ourselves through “particular identifications.” An issue such as the secession of Quebec is not just an abstract moral question, to be coolly assessed in some Kantian fashion. It is also inherently a local issue, quite obviously caught up in specific “webs of birth and history.” It bears some connection to the “particular identifications” of at least some Canadians. The exact nature of these attachments, and Quebec’s connection to them, is a crucial part of what is to be explored here. Because a range of such particular identifications stands to be affected by a scission with Quebec, and because such identifications are also constitutive of agents, we cannot understand the meaning of such a rupture for agents without considering this local aspect. So the view of agency at work here assumes a constant interaction between the ideas of the good per se and our self-understandings as local beings. We can’t fully sever the two levels of analysis. If we cast an issue purely in local terms, we risk occluding the ways in which these may be caught up in broader moral horizons. If we work only at the level of civilizationally derived moral goods, we may lose sight of the fact that there are specific, local self-understandings involved. This book is divided into two parts, reflecting these distinctive categories of moral and local goods.17 Affirmations drawn from our wider moral frameworks – which, at the deepest level, originate in Taylor’s “sources” of the modern self but manifest themselves more familiarly in such ethical claims as justice, fraternity, democratic self-governance,

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and so forth – are here referred to as “principled affirmations.” Theirs is the domain of abstract ideas and ethical commitment. When Samuel LaSelva marshals an ideal of fraternity in defence of Canadian federalism,18 or Pierre Trudeau attacks Quebec nationalism as contrary to reason and liberal justice,19 they invoke principled goods. The term “experiential affirmations,” by contrast, is used here to refer to more local narratives of community, identity, place, history, and so forth. These are accounts of the particular: myths of origin, place, history, geography – anything that purports to shed light on the specificity of a community, beyond its relationship to moral ideals. When Bruce Hutchison calls Quebec the “mother of Canada” and formulates its presence as a foundation of his celebratory portrait of Canadian nationhood, for instance, he invokes experiential goods.20 Much more can be said about each category, but this must await later chapters. For now, I would like say a bit more about the implications of these premises.

3 resisting “radical rupture”: our embeddedness in discourse We have glanced at the presuppositions underlying Taylor’s efforts to speak of agents and meaning and seen how these provide a basic framework for organizing this work. Taylor shows that grasping the meaning of a situation demands that we attend to the affirmations, moral and local, that are at stake in it. The problem remains, however: precisely how are we supposed to study these? This question invites further discussion about the connections between agency and its constitutive “moral horizons” or “particular identifications.” Taylor concurs with very broad currents of contemporary thought that argue that the self is innately social. This is more than the claim, perfectly compatible with methodological individualism, that human beings require society for their full development. Rather, it involves the stronger premise that “the subject is irremediably social insofar as it is articulated through public languages.”21 An identity becomes possible only as situated within, and relative to, manifold ontological and ethical discourses. “[O]ne cannot be a self on one’s own. I am a self only in relation to certain interlocutors: in one way in relation to those conversation partners who were essential to achieving my self-definition; in another in relation to those who are now crucial to my continuing grasp of languages of self-understanding ... A self only

Introduction

11

exists within what I call ‘webs of interlocution’.”22 Agency is therefore a condition of discursive embeddedness. Hence Taylor’s metaphor of “moral horizons,” which effectively captures the necessarily embedded tenor of our relation to the good (after all, we operate within horizons and can never come to a “horizonless” point). Viewing identity in this way also enhances our sense of the process whereby we come to hold “particular identifications”; we are necessarily situated – or situate ourselves23 – within a prior context of discourses about such attachments. So specific individuals matter less, for analytical purposes, than their constitutive discourses and narratives about the good and about local communities.24 Certainly, it remains possible for individuals to formulate highly original understandings. They may also have subtly different ways of navigating, fusing, or reconciling their various constitutive attachments. None of the above is meant to preclude individuation. The argument is simply that such variations only make sense against an existing discursive background. For the purposes of analysis, then, an exploration of this background is a crucial step, revealing the discursive resources that agents use to make experiential sense out of an issue such as secession. Using a spatial metaphor, as Taylor does when he writes of “moral topography,”25 we can say that a discursive analysis will try to capture the narrative context within which agents are necessarily located. Despite the large gulf between my primary unit of analysis (Quebec’s presence in Canada) and that of Taylor in Sources, then, we share a basic set of methodological premises. Both take agency as woven into moral and local contexts and take discourses as fundamental data for investigating these. Sources proceeds by probing “developments in philosophy and religious outlook, with an odd glance at aspects of popular mentality”;26 these are adduced from literature, philosophical texts, and popular speeches. Taylor’s exploration of the modern self is consequently filtered through the work of those whose primary purpose consists in articulation – philosophers especially, but also religious, literary, and popular sources. It makes sense that Taylor focuses on theorists and intellectuals, however, because explicating a web of values and self- understandings puts articulacy at a premium.27 The most valuable data for such an enterprise will be the work of those who have already developed some explicit answers to relevant questions. However, these efforts are not so much of interest in and of themselves than as exemplars of certain ways of thinking, relevant to the broader concerns of study.

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This book is concerned with a much narrower field of problems than that which preoccupies Taylor. A formidable body of work exists on Canadian identity, polity, and Quebec’s connection to these. All this offers useful raw materials for an interpretive exploration of the goods interwoven with Quebec-in-Canada. Consistent with the premises discussed earlier, these works must be supplemented by others that shed light on broader “moral horizons” (since, as noted, the local and the civilizational cannot be neatly severed on a Taylorian account of agency).28 This amounts to the obvious point that we cannot throw around normative terms like “justice” and “democracy” without taking into account some of the wider theoretical debates surrounding them. Now, I have claimed to be concerned with “implicit and explicit resistance” to a “radical rupture” with Quebec. The former is a compressed way of saying that, if we wish to understand more fully the costs, to English-speaking Canadians, of rupture with Quebec, it’s not enough simply to examine explicit arguments against dissociation. Any affirmation of the Canadian order, whether or not it explicitly targets the constitutional radicalism of Quebec, may imply a critique of the same, since such radicalism poses a challenge to that order. The phrase “radical rupture,” for its part, is meant to acknowledge that the constitutional radicalism of Quebec nationalists does not always go so far as to demand total secession. Again, alternatives include a symbolic recognition of Quebec’s distinctiveness, across-theboard decentralization, a much more asymmetrical model of federalism in which Quebec enjoys exclusive control over a widely expanded field of jurisdiction, bi-national federalism, a regional confederation (say, British Columbia, the Prairies, Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic Canada), and such bi-national confederal models as “sovereigntyassociation” and “sovereignty-partnership.”29 Of relevance here is any option that would involve a massive disentanglement of Quebec from Canadian institutions, e.g., various confederal models, particularly those that work from the premise that English-speaking Canada and Quebec ought to form the constitutive units of a loosely aligned association, as well as outright secession. The term “dissociation” is used here to encompass both options. Nonetheless, secession enjoys a special significance in these deliberations because it represents disentanglement in its purest form, and also because it raises certain problems that other forms of dissociation do not – the possibility of partition, for instance. My explicitly conservative position resisting the dissociation of Quebec from Canada should not be confused with a more reactionary stance that

Introduction

13

would resist any evolution in the federal relationship.30 Indeed, I shall follow an important current in Canadian political studies that advocates the accommodation of at least some of the standing demands of Quebec nationalism. The point at which change becomes radical rather than evolutionary is, of course, impossible to specify precisely. We can’t dispose of some degree of practical judgment here. But we can say pretty confidently that secession would qualify as a radical departure, as would various models of “sovereignty-association/partnership” in which Quebec remains linked to Canada via a small number of intermediary institutions. Massive jurisdictional asymmetry would also qualify as radical disentanglement, insofar as it is accompanied by a concomitant extrication of Quebec’s representation at the federal level.31 In Canada as we know it, Quebec is bound up with the rest of Canada in a project of substantial institutional sharing. Quebec and its representatives enjoy a large role in instruments of common decision, best exemplified by the federal government. With all of this established, I am now in a position to define this project with greater precision: the affirmations given in this strong zone of institutional sharing (here called “Quebec-in-Canada” for short) and the costs to those affirmations of Quebec’s departure are the subject of this book.

4 the need for interpretation The question of the precise demographic distribution of moral and experiential self-understandings must be taken as distinct from the articulation and examination of their substance. This is one reason why quantitiative methods are not pursued here. Asked to understand the goods involved in Quebec-in-Canada, the classically “behaviourist” political scientist might undertake a massive study of Canadians’ attitudes toward Quebec, posing questions like “how does Quebec matter to you?” or asking respondents to choose from a range of affective statements. From the data thus gathered, generalizations could be extracted about the normative meaning of Quebec’s participation in Canada. Such an investigation would be very interesting. But it would have to assume full awareness, on the part of those framing the study, about the range of ways within which Quebec’s presence in Canada can be conceived as normatively significant. It would also assume full selfawareness and articulacy about this on the part of the respondents. And it would tend to treat a whole set of questions as givens; instead of

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“probing the definitions of agent, other and social relatedness”32 which responses presumably embody, its centre of gravity would lie elsewhere – in the distribution, rather than the nature, of ethical and ontological suppositions at play. The prior step to such a quantitative project has to be interpretive in nature. It must be concerned with articulation, bringing into the open what may have heretofore been only implicit or confusedly or partially expressed – at least in the context of the questions posed here. This is probably not a highly controversial argument. All but the most fanatical student of behaviour will allow for the necessity of some degree of interpretation in social science. A legitimate alternative to a quantitative study, then, will work out and explore the nature of the underlying affirmations that inform our allegiance to Quebec in-Canada. But what exactly should we do with these affirmations, once identified? One obvious task is to see how well they survive critical scrutiny. Note, however, that the project of raising those affirmations to superior articulacy has a stand-alone value regardless of whether they ultimately break down under sustained critical analysis. Flawed or not, they are part of what needs to be understood if we are to grasp the full measure of a situation: they offer a window onto the constitutive self-understandings that inform and help to explain it. On these grounds alone, we need to study them. Furthermore, even if no principled or experiential affirmation proves fully convincing when taken alone, the cumulative impact of a series of such affirmations may be impressive enough to give pause to those who would deny that anything other than political and economic inconvenience is at stake in a possible scission with Quebec. And if, in the end, we reject many of the arguments and visions at issue, a sustained encounter with these discourses might nonetheless instill an affinity and respect for the tradition of deep engagement with the questions raised by Quebec-in-Canada. Grappling with that tradition, even if to criticize its various manifestations, can ultimately strengthen our allegiance to the situation it expresses and defends. These points should be borne in mind if the reader is to find in these pages something more than an eclectic array of occasionally disappointing arguments and nationalist mythologies. My primary concern is not to isolate the single “best” (that is, least vulnerable) argument for Quebec-in-Canada, although the discussion does culminate, in chapter 8, in what are arguably the noblest such affirmations. Rather, the larger aim is to offer a synthetic, if necessarily partial, discursive portrait – imparting some sense of the currents of thought that have swirled

Introduction

15

around the question of what is valuable in the Canadian experience, and then relating the hypothetical rupture with Quebec to these currents, thus teasing out implications that do not always surface in the original formulations. A crucial measure of the merit of this book will be its success in (a) sorting out various streams of thought about Canada and the good, drawing conceptual and theoretical distinctions from the mass of raw materials; and (b) creatively exploring the implications of these accounts for our principal question, i.e., the costs of dissociation for the continued viability of their central affirmations. And more than this: each distinct thread in this complex tapestry of affirmations is subjected to critique, usually conceptual, sometimes broadly empirical. But my hope is that the synthetic qualities of this work will hold at least as much interest as its attempts at critique. Again, however imprudent, the analogy must be with Sources of the Self, in which none of the “moral sources” of modern agency – the great, foundational affirmations that constitute our identities – prove invincible to critical analysis. It does not follow that Taylor’s synthetic exploration of those sources – the ways in which he sorts them out for us, and shows how they interrelate and resonate – is other than a formidable achievement. The investigation at hand is vastly less ambitious and its promise correspondingly modest. But it is similar in kind; or similar, at least, in its approach to the affirmations it seeks to probe, if not as interested in questions of historical genesis.33 Given all this, the principal focus of this book must be Canadian thought, broadly defined; and this text should be read as a contribution, of sorts, to the same. It pursues the affirmations and narratives that have resonated here and that might tell us something about the meaning, for English-speaking Canadians, of a hypothetical radical rupture with Quebec.

5 toward a normative analysis: what’s different about this book? The agenda just described differs both from diagnostics of Canada’s “unity problem” and from prescriptions for resolving it. It is impossible to review here the mass of materials concerning the reform of the federation (indeed, were we to restrict attention to the “Quebec problem” alone, that would remain a Herculean task). But among the most common questions tackled by the innumerable sources that address these matters are, first, why is Canada’s existence in its present form in

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jeopardy, and second, how can Canadians be reconciled? Such questions require no account of why that reconciliation is desirable, but many sources do offer reasons for their bias in favour of unity. Insofar as they do, they offer raw materials for the discussion to follow – albeit materials that will be sifted according to our peculiar priorities. Another body of literature addresses the hypothetical departure of Quebec by spinning out various sociological, institutional, or economic scenarios. Among the pertinent questions addressed there are, What might be secession’s impact on the economic development of Canada or Quebec? On what institutional parameters might a Canadian remainder state be likely to organize itself after secession? What would a loose “association” between Canada and a sovereign Quebec look like? How would the international community react?34 This book differs from such analyses in two ways. First, its emphasis on principled and experiential affirmations is meant to shift attention away from more prudential or instrumental sorts of goods, such as the economic costs and practical inconveniences of secession, which are often emphasized in such inquiries. Of course, too stark a dichotomy between instrumental and non-instrumental considerations is indefensible; normative argument can’t proceed with complete indifference to economic, institutional, and sociological scenarios. Indeed, any prediction on these matters harbours normative implications. Once we ask why, say, economic consequences are important, and thus why an economic analysis matters, we are thrown back on assumptions about the desirability of economic prosperity and growth which rest, arguably, upon the moral framework that Taylor calls “the affirmation of ordinary life.”35 Similarly, hypotheses about the impact of secession on policy and institutional design in a remainder Canada raise further questions about the normative implications of that impact, even if these are not always systematically addressed by those doing the hypothesizing. Institutions cannot but incarnate certain conceptions of the good, favouring some ideals over others. Nonetheless, the emphasis here is entirely normative. I do not engage in any construction of novel empirical scenarios of dissociation, although I am in the business of teasing out the moral implications of some of these. But here we need a second distinction. The question of Quebec’s moral impact on the Canadian polity, and hence the effects of its withdrawal from the same, is a sprawling one. I propose to further contain the analysis by focusing on the significance of Quebec understood as the locus of a distinctive national identity and the concomitant ramifica-

Introduction

17

tions of the loss to the Canadian polity of a “national minority” of the kind represented by Quebec. This is an important point. It immediately creates a wedge between this book and (again) a more empirical approach that would seek to tally up the qualitative impact of Quebec’s participation on Canadian politics in a comprehensive range of areas (policy-related, politicalcultural, institutional, and so forth). For example, in an admirable piece, Thomas Courchene inquires into “the nature of the directional changes were Quebec no longer to be part of the Canadian family.”36 Arguing that “[t]he relevant question is, what are the long-run cultural and value equilibria once Quebec is out of the equation,”37 he offers a series of speculations that nicely link the institutional ramifications of secession with value-laden questions about the political culture of English-speaking Canada as a putative Kulturnation. His method combines empiricism and a sort of algebra, subtracting whatever politicalcultural variables the presence of Quebec currently adds to Canadian politics. What remains after the subtraction are the new “equilibria” of value preferences and institutional dynamics that he expects to reign in Quebec’s absence. Courchene thus speculates that a Canada without Quebec would show less sensitivity to legal and institutional pluralism, including official multiculturalism; it would be less supportive of regional redistribution, more individualistic in its approach to politics and capitalism, more centralized, and more preoccupied with nonterritorial cleavages.38 Much could be gained by expanding Courchene’s analysis. This would involve taking systematic predictions of the institutional, economic, and political-cultural outcomes of secession, of the kind exemplified by Robert Young’s The Secession of Quebec and the Future of Canada, and subjecting them to sustained evaluation in light of what we are calling principled affirmations. For instance, if empirical prediction suggests that secession would bring about a deep and sustained economic recession in English-speaking Canada, the work in question might inquire into the ethical implications of imposing these burdens, the probable consequences of such dislocation for Canada’s capacity to realize other morally important goods (such as redistribution or liberal tolerance), and so forth. That would be a valuable study. But it too would have limitations. Its normative conclusions would be entirely reliant on the notoriously ephemeral foundation of empirical prediction in the social sciences. Change the prediction, and the normative conclusions, which are the

18

Secession and Self

point of the exercise, collapse. One could address this difficulty either by conceding it and moving on or by expanding the project to include the implications of multiple and perhaps contradictory scenarios. In the context of this book, this would risk bloating an already daunting mandate – and at worst, degenerating into a peculiar attempt to survey the normative implications of assorted “parallel universes.” A second and related difficulty is that a procedure such as Courchene’s multiplies the number of variables that must be taken as fixed. Thus, Courchene’s predictions work from snapshots of the political values and attitudes currently prevalent in the “Rest of Canada” and Quebec and extrapolate from there. But as the characteristics of the respective political cultures shift over time, so must the value of these normative inferences. Were Quebec, for example, to evolve or lurch away from the supposedly “communitarian” model of capitalism that Courchene attributes to it – a move that is urged by Lucien Bouchard among others39 – then secession would no longer deprive Canada of the influence of this model. And Courchene’s arguments to this effect would lose interest. This point reflects a major conceptual distinction that will resurface throughout part I. Normative arguments can vary in their reliance on hypothetical scenarios of dissociation in general and secession in particular. There are certain consequences that are intrinsic to the act, e.g., the transfer of sovereignty over a given territory from the wider state to the seceding unit, and the affirmation of the principle of secession itself. Other kinds of consequences are extrinsic to the act, i.e., contingent upon particular contexts, idiosyncratic variables, and assorted historical and sociological facts. Some contexts, for example, are marked by intense ethnic hatreds and a history of violence. In such settings, the act of secession per se might unfold peacefully – the autonomist subunit might manage to set up its own state, win international recognition, and so forth –without bloodshed; but the act might also set into motion a spiral of distrust and resentment, ratcheting up the odds of future violence in the affected societies. Thus, secession, without being intrinsically violent, could be an important part of a causal chain leading to massacres, “ethnic cleansings,” and so forth. In such a case, we would have a critique of secession from its likely extrinsic consequences, rather than an argument from the intrinsic character of the action. So a useful distinction can be drawn between “extrinsic” and “intrinsic” consequences, or between arguments that proceed from the contingent (the realm of empirical probability) and the inherent (that which is conceptually or logically entailed in action x or y).

Introduction

19

Normative argument can ignore neither axis of concern. But we can say this: the more dependent an argument is on contingent speculative analyses of the effects of dissociation, the more easily it can be refuted through the construction of alternative speculations. Therefore, it would be better to defend Quebec-in-Canada in a fashion that showed that the inherent consequences of dissociation would be such as to impoverish our capacity to realize some normative ideal. This is not to say that we can proceed without reference to some empirical prediction and without taking certain variables as fixed. The point is simply that the more dependent a normative argument is on (a) debatable predictions and (b) assumptions about the fixity of an array of variables that are by nature dynamic and changing, the less compelling it will be. The trick is to avoid excessive dependence on such elements without sliding over into an arid deontology. Assuming we can manage that, it would be preferable to avoid too heavy a reliance on empirical prediction by organizing the discussion in a fashion that is likely to minimize independent variables and emphasize inherent consequences. But the decisive consideration, from my perspective, is that a method such as that of Courchene would tend to downplay or ignore what is arguably the most interesting thing about Quebec, what sets it apart from other units of Canadian federalism – namely, its nationalist consciousness. Quebec nationalism, on such an account, becomes merely a possible explanation for some of the political, cultural, and institutional impacts that are the real subject of analysis. But this nationalist consciousness as such might create a set of moral dangers and opportunities for the Canadian polity worth studying in themselves. In fact, considerable currents of Canadian thought grapple with the meaning of this minority nationalism for the wider community, just as great swaths of political philosophy wrestle with normative issues given in “multinational states.” At least a credible case can be made for zeroing in on this aspect of the larger problem of dissociation: it is its most conceptually compelling dimension, and it makes the hypothetical departure of Quebec a categorically different order of problem from an equally hypothetical withdrawal of some other province (say, British Columbia or Nova Scotia). Thus, in saying that my primary question is the dissociation of Quebec, I mean that I want to explore the ramifications, for Englishspeaking Canada, of ceasing to share considerable institutional space with a distinctive national identity of the kind at play in Quebec. Focusing on this distinction, rather than the much more diffuse question of whatever “cultural and value [and economic, and institutional] equilibria”

20

Secession and Self

are made possible, at the moment, by Quebec’s participation in the Canadian order, also limits the range of variables that must be considered before we can reach some satisfactory general conclusions. Instead of being interested, potentially, in every single impact of Quebec’s presence on Canadian politics, we can move at a higher level of abstraction, being mainly interested in the normative implications of Canada’s ceasing to be a multinational polity of the kind that, at present, it is.

6 refining the unit of analysis: quebec-in-canada as a multinational polity Let’s grant all this. What, then, is a “multinational polity?” James Tully defines multinational democracies as “constitutional associations containing two or more nations or peoples ... [that] are, or aspire to be, recognized as self-governing peoples with the right of selfdetermination as this is understood in international law and democratic theory.” Such a right might entail “external” self-determination (i.e., full statehood) but often is mobilized “internally,” i.e., directed toward the recognition and accommodation of the multinational character of the state. Citizens and their representatives typically participate in both “the political institutions of their self-governing nations and the larger, self-governing multination.” And, of course, in addition to being constitutional democracies, such states are also “multicultural,” containing many other forms of cultural, linguistic, religious, and ethnic diversity.40 Claims of this sort are quite familiar to Canadians. Quebec has long seen itself as the territorial, historical, and jurisdictional locus of a “national fact” which used to be called la nation candienne-française and now tends to be called la nation québécoise, however problematic the label. Quebec is centred on a national minority and is a crucial element in making up Canada’s experience as a multinational federation. This can be expressed in any number of ways. Quebec can, following Lijphart, be viewed as a “virtually separate subsociety,” systematically differentiated from the wider community along lines of language, media, communication, identity, solidarity, history, and so forth, thus adding what he calls an “incongruent” element in what would otherwise be a more-or-less “congruent” federation.41 Similarly, Taylor, contemplating the Canadian situation, famously writes of “first-order” and “deep diversity.” The former describes a situation in which a range of culturally and regionally diverse individuals share in a sense of unmedi-

Introduction

21

ated citizenship; thus Canadians outside Quebec are marked by “great differences in culture and outlook and background [but] nevertheless share ... the same idea of what it is to belong to Canada. [Their] patriotism or manner of belonging is uniform, whatever their other differences.” In “deep diversity,” citizens’ allegiance to the state “passes through” their prior attachment to its constituent units. “For Quebeckers, and for most French Canadians, the way of being Canadian ... is by their belonging to a constituent element of Canada, la nation québecoise, or canadienne-française.”42 And Will Kymlicka describes Quebec as a “nationality-based unit,” quite unlike the other provinces, which are best understood as “territorially-based units.” This is because “English-speaking Canadians do not define their national identity in terms of some subset of Canada, such as a particular province or ethnolinguistic group; they simply see themselves as members of a ‘Canadian’ nation that includes all citizens [while] Québécois view the government in Quebec City as their ‘national’ government.”43 Kymlicka distinguishes between “multinational” and “polyethnic” pluralism. The former arises when a state contains one or more “national minorities” – by which he means “historical [or ‘intergenerational’] communities, more or less institutionally complete, occupying a given territory or homeland, sharing a distinct language and culture.”44 Such identities are often used as the basis for the construction of a distinctive “societal culture.” This denotes a “territoriallyconcentrated culture, centred on a shared language which is used in a wide range of societal institutions, in both public and private life – schools, media, law, economy, government, etc. – covering the full range of human activities, including social, educational, religious, recreational, and economic life.”45 And minority “segments” or societal cultures are typically autonomist, seeking to maintain their distinctiveness from the majority culture and pursuing an “exit-based” politics that demands self-government rights from the wider state, if not necessarily secession. “Societal cultures,” on Kymlicka’s account, are at least potentially inclusive of other orders of diversity. They are defined in terms of shared language and institutions, but not necessarily “thicker” cultural markers such as “common religious beliefs, family customs, or personal lifestyles.” One need not be of a specific ethnic or religious origin, say, to participate in a “societal culture,” to be a full member of its social, political, and economic life. A societal culture, indeed, may be replete with Kymlika’s second category of cultural diversity, namely

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Secession and Self

“polyethnic” pluralism. This originates in “individual and familial immigration.”46 Such “ethnic groups” generally “wish to integrate into the larger society, and to be accepted as full members of it.”47 So Quebec is here understood as a nationality-based unit, originating in but not necessarily reducible to a national minority, in which the French language is used as the lingua franca for a putatively inclusive “societal culture.” Kymlicka has a great deal to say about the challenges posed by such diversities. But I am, for the moment, using his categories as descriptive ones. Without denying the immense debate surrounding the meaning of such concepts as “nation” and “identity,” it is enough for my purposes to accept that Quebec is categorically distinct from sub-units within English-speaking Canada – that this deep diversity matters, sociologically, politically, and perspectivally. The question is whether, or how, deep diversity matters morally and experientially. Which goods does it help us to affirm, and why? So inquiring into what is good about Quebec-in-Canada means, in part, asking what is good about the presence in our polity of this large and powerful nationality-based unit, which is analytically distinguishable from the other, territorially-based units of our federation. Quebec’s presence in Canada is part of what makes Canada a particular kind of multinational state. What affirmations are given in the project of sustaining a rich institutional sharing between the large and powerful societal cultures of Quebec and English-speaking Canada? This task can be seen as seeking local answers to the general question of what is good about multinational federations. There is, of course, a bountiful literature concerning multinational states per se, and this offers useful (and sometimes indispensable) inroads into the debates over Quebec-in-Canada. At the same time – and bearing in mind the folly of generalizing about such immense literatures – I would nervously assert that the primary concerns of this book differ from the dominant preoccupations of contemporary theory in this area.48 This is so in the obvious sense that we are preoccupied, on grounds of self-understanding, with Canadian debates. But it also holds insofar as contemporary scholarship on multinational pluralism tends to concentrate on such matters as the explanation and conceptualization of nationalism, the conditions of stability in multinational states, and – overwhelmingly among normative theorists – questions of justice: the justice or injustice of nationalism and nation-building, the nature of just terms of multinational cohabitation, the substance and limits (if any) of the principle of national self-determination, the (in)justice of secession, and so on.

Introduction

23

All these questions are hugely important. Whether multinational pluralism/federalism is a desirable thing in itself, however, is often dispatched with reference to such factors as its unavoidability in the modern world, the economic and social costs of a disruptive transition to independence, the desire of citizens in a multinational state to continue to live together (taken more or less as a given), the need to reconcile ourselves to the increasing transnationalism of contemporary economic and political institutions, the “material benefits of economic integration,” or “threats like the superior power of some aggressor state.”49 We are, of course, interested in affirmations that can explicate why Canadians and Quebecers should want to stay together, not simply the brute fact that they do or do not; and we want these affirmations to be principled ones – ideals – and experiential ones, not merely instrumental considerations such as the inconveniences and possible transition costs of secession.

7 different orders of national minority A last bit of nuance is needed here. There are different kinds of national minority. “Stateless nations,” as Kymlicka and Norman call them, tend to fit the profile sketched above, of distinct “societal cultures” within a state; Quebec is clearly one of these. Indigenous peoples, however, “cannot hope to have their languages become languages of public life in the way that French has nor can they hope to establish an elaborate system of higher education or the full range of economic and professional opportunities and services within the boundaries of the political units that they (aspire to) control.”50 Thus, “while other minority nations dream of a status like nation-states – with similar economic, social, and cultural achievements – indigenous peoples usually seek something rather different: the ability to maintain certain traditional ways of life while nevertheless participating on their own terms in the modern world [as well as securing from the larger society] longoverdue expressions of respect and recognition.”51 There is another difference having to do with the degree to which a given “societal culture” enjoys substantial power and influence in those institutions it shares with the wider society. Of course, this kind of institutional power is hard to quantify, but it is less important to offer a detailed list of objective criteria – numbers, electoral weight, institutional positions occupied by members of the culture, wealth, etc. – whereby we could somehow measure it than to appeal to the obvious

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Secession and Self

political fact that Quebecers are a much larger presence in federal institutions than, say, Aboriginal peoples. In no way does this imply that Quebecers are somehow more important in moral terms, or that they deserve a greater say on the basis of anything other than comparatively neutral criteria (such as sheer electoral weight). It simply shows that there can be qualitative differences in the experience given in various sources of multinational diversity. This distinction is sometimes overlooked – e.g., by those who attach great significance to the fact that an independent Quebec would itself be a multinational state, just like Canada. For some federalists, this proves the futility of secession, since sovereignty would merely defer the problem of diversity while raising worrisome questions about Quebec’s own territorial integrity.52 Some Quebec nationalists, on the other hand, argue that a sovereign Quebec, unlike Canada, would be willing explicitly to affirm its own multinational character and thus realize justice in a way that Canada has failed to do.53 But such arguments assume that all multinational states are morally interchangeable; that, because they are categorically similar, the goods they express must likewise be identical. Quebec-in-Canada, though, represents a particular kind of experience of multinational diversity, one where each of the constitutive nations exercises a considerable degree of power over the other.54 It is not self-evident that the sort of multinational diversity given in a Canada without Quebec, or in a Quebec without Canada, would possess this quality – barring, of course, extensive consociational mechanisms giving Aboriginals in Quebec a degree of influence in Quebec’s affairs radically disproportionate to their numbers. So this book seeks to explore the resources for affirming multinational diversity but also looks to defend a kind of multinational experience based on a considerable degree of institutional sharing, where the constituent nations are, if not exactly equal in terms of power, at least able to command formidable clout in the workings of those institutions. Although Aboriginal and Québécois nationalism are categorically similar – both expressing the aspirations of “national minorities” within a wider state – they should not be assumed to harbour similar normative implications. The goods affirmed by Quebec-in-Canada may or may not be interchangeable with those affirmed by the Aboriginal presence. The degree to which they are is one of the matters to be worked out in the pages to follow.

part one Principled Affirmations

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section one Against Quebec-in-Canada: Liberal-Democratic Arguments

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2 Liberal Critiques of Quebec-in-Canada

1 introduction Part I explores ideals, or “principled” affirmations, and how Quebec might be thought to play into the capacity of the Canadian polity fully to realize them. The ultimate goal, of course, is to find defensible principled discourses that endorse Quebec-in-Canada and so help to explicate its full meaning for English-speaking Canadians. But it might be useful to begin by considering the reverse; for principled rejections of substantial institutional sharing with Quebec have formed significant currents in the discourse of English-speaking Canada. The next two chapters critically engage arguments afoot in English-speaking Canada that run counter to the normative thrust of this book, drawing attention to some liberal and democratic manifestations of a tradition – what might, glibly, be called English-Canadian separatism – that is perhaps not as well explored as it might be.1 And because my subsequent analysis of discourses favourable to Quebec-in-Canada will be informed by some of the challenges posed here, this chapter introduces a structure of debate that will carry us through the remainder of part I. Democracy and liberalism, our stated concerns for the moment, are colossal fields, and I can till them only lightly. Nonetheless, it’s possible to identify a certain tremor of anxiety that runs through Canadian thought, and political theory writ large, concerning multinational states. Such states are sometimes thought to rest uneasily with the full realization of either ideal, and no adequate defence of a multinational polity can ignore this concern. Of interest now is not whether multinational states can be made compatible with basic liberal or democratic values. That many successful

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liberal democracies (Canada, Britain, Switzerland) encompass a number of nationality-based units proves that they can. The question is whether they might undermine or foster the best realization of these ideals. And the liberal-democratic critique of multinational states may be read in these more nuanced terms. Once we admit degrees of democratic and liberal realization, we vacate the unpromising terrain of arguing that multinational states are a necessary precondition for, or a necessary negation of, basic liberal-democratic goods. This allows us to speak of the conditions of the maximal flourishing of ideals. The present chapter discusses liberal arguments against Quebec-in-Canada; it is followed by an examination of democratic challenges to multinationality. The former are rather lightweight, serving mainly as a vehicle for clarifying some of my important assumptions. (Indeed, readers who consider the debate over whether nationalism can be compatible with the optimal realization of liberalism to be a dead horse, resoundingly settled in the affirmative, would be well advised to skip ahead to chapter 3). The latter concerns, about the democratic challenges faced by multinational states, are, as we shall see, more ominous.

2 liberalism: a working critical standard Debates abound over what liberalism should mean, how best to justify it, and whether liberal formulations are sufficient to capture all our intuitions about justice. Since I am using liberalism as one critical standard among others, distinct from ideals such as democracy, fraternity, and so forth, my concern is mainly with the first and third questions. No effort is made to justify liberalism in these pages. Rather, I will assume that a broad commitment to basic liberal ideals is widespread in English-speaking Canada and that liberal thought helps to articulate important currents of its political culture. Insofar as citizens outside Quebec care about liberal values, then, one important way of asking how dissociation might matter is to ask how it relates to them. This requires only a general definition of liberalism: a plausible, if somewhat rough-and-ready, critical standard. Let’s understand liberalism, then, as a theory of political legitimacy according to which at least the “basic structure” of the state ought to uphold the principles of individual autonomy and equal respect for persons.2 The former speaks to the capacity of individuals to stand back from their commitments about what is good in life, rationally to revise their ends in light of this reflection.3 This does not necessarily mean that an introspective reflexivity or

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a personal commitment to living by the light of reason are the highest forms of human life; it simply means that ends in life ought to be freely chosen (or at least endorsed) by individuals, rather than externally imposed upon them. The central insight is that we must live our lives as we please, informed by our own ideas about the good life. The imposition of such notions of the good by the coercive apparatus of the state is deeply problematic. A related principle is that “the government [must] treat all those in its charge as equals, that is, as entitled to its equal concern and respect.”4 I take this to mean that respect for autonomy must apply to all persons meeting minimal criteria – such as a certain age and, perhaps, certain basic mental capacities – within a society. Differences of gender, race, ethnicity, language, and so forth cannot justify restrictions on the exercise of autonomy or the devaluation of some members of the society relative to others, without extraordinary additional argument. Other ingredients might be added to the definition. Gray, for instance, includes universalism and meliorism in his account of the tradition,5 and individual autonomy raises many problems, even in the fairly constrained sense described here.6 Nonetheless, while no definition of liberalism will satisfy everyone, autonomy and equal respect do seem sufficiently canonical to justify their use as the basis of working criteria of evaluation, and it is here assumed – crucially – that such categories as “justice” and “liberal rights” are intended primarily to articulate and uphold these.7 One influential extension of these bedrock commitments to autonomy and equal respect is the idea that the state ought not to intentionally discriminate against particular ways of life. It should strive to be as neutral as possible about the ends of life, or what Rawls’s Political Liberalism calls “comprehensive doctrines”8 about how people should live. If we assume an irreducible plurality of such doctrines, then it seems to follow that mustering the coercive power of the state on behalf of a particular conception of the good life violates our autonomy to choose and revise our plans of life and discriminates against those who do not share in that conception. This is another way of stating the famous liberal distinction between what is a matter of public (i.e., state) concern and what is private. Rawls uses the debatable label of “the right” to describe a set of rules within which political contestation may occur and individual projects and ways of life may be chosen.9 This is the primary concern of the state. Specific choices about what is valuable in life – “the good” – are matters of individual conscience. Liberalism in the

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Rawlsian tradition has thus become associated with the idea of a state that is maximally neutral about the nature of the good.10 Dworkin’s famous formulation further reinforces this idea.11 Predictably, cashing out these abstractions invites still more controversy. It can be argued that the genuine realization of equal respect is incompatible with the principle of state neutrality. Raz, for example, holds that liberals cannot but be “perfectionist” – i.e., committed to substantive judgments about the good life – because autonomy has meaning only insofar as the individual enjoys a range of choice-worthy options. On this view, the liberal state cannot avoid making qualitative judgments about the nature of the good.12 Equally pressing are questions of cultural imperialism. Not all communities within culturally diverse liberal states share the concern with individual autonomy as defined above; hence, there is some anxiety over whether it is consistent with liberal justice to compel these sub-cultures to submit to liberal norms and institutional structures. But however we address these problems, it is unlikely that liberals really can surrender some bedrock commitment to equal respect and freedom of choice. The whole worry over cultural imperialism appears to be seated in the intuition that equal consideration is owed to the goods of others, while the fact remains that we cannot be indifferent to abuses of what we consider basic liberal principles without effectively ceasing to be liberals.13 In any case, since I am, to repeat, using liberal justice as one among many standards of evaluation, and am in no way attempting to develop a full-blown theory of liberalism, this book is free to bypass these conceptual snares, at least for the moment.

3 quebec and the “liberal purity” of canada Armed with this working definition of liberalism, we can now ask whether the presence of Quebec affects the capacity of the Canadian state optimally to realize liberal justice. Some argue that Quebec is an obstacle to this end and view the demands associated with Quebec nationalism – for distinctive recognition and an asymmetrical degree of autonomy – as essentially unjust. More to the point for our purposes, they argue that secession is preferable to even a moderate accommodation of those demands. Call this the argument from “liberal purity.”14 Indisputably a minor current in Canadian political thought, it did enjoy a certain influence during the constitutional crises of the 1990s and also affords an opportunity to lay out some basic assumptions about the

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33

nature of justice in multinational states that will see us through the remainder of this study. The Canadian case for separation from Quebec on grounds of “liberal purity” rests on several premises, the most important of which holds that Quebec nationalism is illiberal. That is, of course, an old saw. Observers such as William Johnson, Rainer Knopff, Ramsay Cook, and (seminally) Pierre Trudeau15 have vigorously insisted that “Quebec nationalism is a modern form of ethnic self-determination”16 which marginalizes citizens who do not fit the ascriptive profile of la nation. Having made that claim, the argument goes on to say a) that Quebec’s (illiberal) nationalism cannot be counted upon to wither away of its own accord; b) that Canada will continue to face serious threats to its integrity in the absence of an institutional accommodation of Quebec nationalism; and c) that liberal justice must trump other goods, such as our sentimental desire to preserve national unity.17 That is, some people might be willing to concede the injustice of accommodating Quebec but nevertheless wish to pursue accommodation on the grounds that unity is more important than perfect justice. Naturally a secessionist “liberal purist” would disagree. Justice, not sentiment, must rule. Assumptions a), b), and c) are all questionable in various ways but will not be contested here. The debate must be joined at its heart, which is the first premise – that Quebec nationalism is illiberal. The argument from liberal purity varies according to how its advocates articulate this premise. There are two main strategies for doing so. One is the hard-nosed position that states must be absolutely neutral as to culture. Since none of Quebec nationalism’s many faces18 have yet been entirely free of cultural referents (e.g., religion or language), or so runs the argument, the nationalist phenomenon simply cannot be neutral, and so cannot be just. The second stance is perhaps more moderate, conceding a contained role for cultural referents in liberal politics but arguing that Quebec nationalism nevertheless defines its referents too narrowly and, therefore, becomes exclusionary. On this more plausible account, absolute cultural neutrality is not expected of the liberal state, but the state is required to be as neutral as possible among its citizens’ conceptions of the good within that culturally bound framework. The acceptability of bias thus remains a question of degree, and Quebec (we are told) systematically crosses the line. David Bercuson and Barry Cooper take the former tack. They explain, after Knopff, that “by Quebec nationalist logic, the purpose of

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the government of Quebec ... is to represent the interests of the French and not the interests of the citizens of the Province of Quebec.”19 But being good liberals, they “dispute the validity of ethnic and cultural nationalism as a sound foundation for decent government.”20 Because equal respect for citizens requires the state to stay out of partisan disputes about the good life, “culture today may be an aspect of human life that should be banished from the public realm ... In order [for a culturally neutral politics] to work, however, divergent ... ethnic groups must agree that there should be a ... culturally neutral sphere. And this the contemporary Quebec nationalist denies. Here is the core of the conflict of principles.”21 Since Quebec rejects this kind of cultural neutrality – which is remorseless and uncompromising – Canadian constitutional history has been marred by illiberal measures, such as special constitutional provisions for Catholic schools. What’s more, “liberal democracy in Canada is in danger” as long as nationalist Quebecers persist in pressing their demands.22 “The demands of Quebec’s ethnic and cultural nationalism are simply incompatible with the continued existence of Canada as a liberal democracy.”23 Therefore, Canadian liberals should welcome secession. The authors hold out the (somewhat inexplicable) hope that an independent Quebec would eventually shed its exclusionary nationalism.24 And they carry through their commitment to cultural neutrality by arguing for the abolition of multiculturalism, bilingualism, and religious-language schooling rights in the new “Canada without Quebec.”25 Much of this outlook, then, rests on an unyielding commitment to cultural laissez-faire. The state must be absolutely neutral with regard to culture. But this conception, besides being alien to Canada’s constitutional and political experience, is notoriously inadequate. The relationship between the liberal state and culture is a subject of formidable controversy in political philosophy, but even a quick glance at these matters should suffice to dispatch this first argument from liberal purity, while also helping to offer some important theoretical context for the discussion to come.

4 reflections on culture and justice: liberal minoritarianism, even-handedness, LA SURVIVANCE, and recognition At first blush, the idea of culture implies distinctive ways of life and thus appears to be part of what is given in Rawls’s idea of the “comprehen-

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sive doctrine.” It follows that, if we accept that liberalism requires that the state be as neutral as possible vis-à-vis such doctrines, the liberal polity should leave cultural questions to individual choice and concern itself only with the conditions of just cohabitation among individuals of diverse cultural backgrounds. And this has often been taken to mean that the state should draw no cultural distinctions, protecting only individual rights, lest it violate the principle of equal respect. Within the general boundaries of respect for basic rights, rule of law, and so forth, the liberal state should not be seen to incarnate any particular, substantive culture. While Bercuson and Cooper’s absolute and implacable adherence to this principle might be viewed as inflexible, it certainly is consistent with this kind of approach. But such “difference-blindness”26 is massively contested, both by critics of liberal theory and by self-defined liberals such as Will Kymlicka, who argue that equal respect and autonomy are best realized by some accommodation of group-based rights for minority cultures.27 Kymlicka’s influential case for such group-differentiated citizenship is multi-pronged. In the first place, as we saw, he distinguishes between “multinational” and “polyethnic” forms of cultural diversity; and his thesis is here understood to apply to the former category. Perhaps his most famous claim is that what he calls “cultural structures” form an indispensable “context of choice”: “liberals should be concerned with the fate of cultural structures, not because they have some moral status of their own, but because it’s only through having a rich and secure cultural structure that people can become aware, in a vivid way, of the options available to them, and intelligently examine their value.”28 Thus, “cultural membership [i]s a primary good ... in its capacity of providing meaningful options for us, and aiding our ability to judge for ourselves the value of our life-plans.”29 Liberalism can accommodate distinctive institutional arrangements for members of minority “societal cultures” if these are required to uphold their “context of choice.” Indeed, it must do so, because assimilation into alien societal cultures (unless undertaken voluntarily, as with immigration) imposes unfair costs upon individuals, placing them at a competitive disadvantage relative to those born into the culture in question. Kymlicka provides additional arguments for such group rights: they might be defended as a means of remedying injustices, as when a persecuted minority seeks refuge from the yoke of an oppressive culture; they might serve as the contractual basis of a voluntary political framework, thereby attaining the moral force of a promise, as in the “terms of

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union” of a federation; or they might help to strengthen representative democracy by giving members of disadvantaged groups enhanced representation.30 In Multicultural Citizenship, Kymlicka raises a further, and arguably decisive, consideration, which is the impossibility of cultural neutrality in state institutions. States cannot do without, say, official languages, or legal and institutional traditions derived from a substantive cultural inheritance. “The state cannot help but give at least partial establishment to a culture when it decides which language is to be used in public schooling, or in the provision of state services ... [g]overnment decisions on languages, internal boundaries, public holidays, and state symbols unavoidably involve recognizing, accommodating, and supporting the needs and identities of particular ethnic groups.”31 So a genuine “difference blindness” is impossible in a state. With this in mind, Kymlicka suggests that, while cultural minorities that originate in immigration (“polyethnic” pluralism) might be said to have implicitly consented to integration within these structures, the same is not true of “societal cultures” built on national minorities – i.e., “previously self-governing, territorially concentrated cultures [incorporated] into a larger state.”32 Given all the above considerations, such communities have a legitimate right to establish autonomous institutional structures, based on their language and other facets of their ascriptive identity, which may then serve as the basis for “fair terms of integration” for their own share of immigrants. While Kymlicka is mainly interested in enhancing the justice of multinational states by defending the autonomy of cultural-national groups within their confines, his arguments also imply the compatibility of secession with liberal justice: “[p]erhaps,” he muses, “we [liberals] should be more willing to consider secession” in light of these arguments about group-differentiated rights.33 Interestingly, Joseph Carens has argued that the ideal of neutrality, which informs Kymlicka’s theory and its insight that autonomy should be granted to minority cultures where neutrality is impossible, may be too abstract to satisfy the full range of our intuitions about justice. Thus, he introduces the notion of “justice as even-handedness,” according to which “fairness entails ... a sensitive balancing of competing claims for recognition and support in matters of culture and identity.”34 On this account, it is permissible “to make political judgements differentiating more fundamental interests from less fundamental ones”35 quite apart from some universal theory of primary goods, such

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as Kymlicka’s redefinition of culture as one such good. Indeed, many political decisions (such as public expenditures on recreational facilities) hinge on such judgments. Rather than shy away from them, in Carens’s view, the appropriate response is to use a kind of practical wisdom, based on a nuanced understanding of the context at hand, in determining the demands of fairness. Such even-handedness is more congenial to another version of the argument for group-differentiated rights that emphasizes the importance of culture to individual self-respect and identity.36 “The conditions of my identity,” writes Taylor, “are a horizon of meaning ... [which] I have access to through a culture, that of my community ... [i]t is essential to me that this culture be a rich and healthy one, that it be a going concern.”37 Thus, “we have a right to demand that others respect the conditions of our linguistic community being a viable pole of identification.”38 Taylor argues that a community will ultimately fade from relevance if it cannot demonstrate achievements in “crucially prestigious” sectors of modern endeavour, such as “artistic creation, technological innovation, economic production, and, of course, political self-rule.”39 On this account, a cultural identity must be more than mere folklore if it is to survive as an attractive pole of identification in the deep sense Taylor has in mind – say, in the sense that could attract and integrate immigrants. It must be a viable prism through which to live out all aspects of modernity, and this definitely includes the practice of autonomous self-government. Indeed, Guy Laforest frames Quebec nationalism in precisely these terms: “Quebec’s originality in North America is related to the fact that it is the only society aspiring to embody modernity in all its dimensions principally in French.”40 This matters because, while Kymlicka’s framework certainly leaves ample room for the exercise of self-government by national minorities, it seems unable to accommodate the desire that other facets of the national culture survive across generations.41 Yet fundamental policy planks of modern Quebec nationalism have been built around the goal of la survivance as defined above. The restriction of access to publicly funded English-language education under Bill 101 is primarily defensible in these terms. Only if we adopt Carens’s framework and stop “trying to torture everything we hold dear out of the single canonical principle” of neutrality, can we admit the reasonableness of certain policies designed to sustain a national identity across generations.42 Survival, even in this thick sense, is not necessarily enough, however. Taylor also argues that the dignity of a culture must be respected –

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which is not quite interchangeable with the previous point. A community may, after all, function quite effectively as a receiving society for immigrants and as a distinctive economic, social, and political order, without finding that distinctiveness formally affirmed by a given interlocutor (e.g., the Canadian state). In various writings, Taylor has identified the demand for recognition, the formal acknowledgment of the substantive worth of a culture or identity, as one of the fundamental pillars of multicultural politics, extending back to Rousseaunian notions of authenticity. And his reflections on Canada’s constitutional imbroglio firmly endorse the idea that the Canadian state ought constitutionally to affirm Quebec’s distinctiveness – as much as a matter of symbolic recognition as the radical reordering of the division of powers typically demanded by Quebec nationalists.43 Something like the “distinct society” clause of the Meech Lake Accord, for instance, satisfied this requirement for Taylor, even though it did not necessarily entail massive jursidictional transformation. In a similar vein, Margalit and Raz emphasize the relationship between cultural and individual self-respect. “It may be no more than a brute fact that people’s sense of their own identity is bound up with their sense of belonging to encompassing groups and that their selfrespect is affected by the esteem in which these groups are held. But these facts, too, have consequences. They mean that individual dignity and self-respect require that groups, membership in which contributes to one’s sense of identity, be generally respected and not made a subject of ridicule, hatred, discrimination, or persecution.” In short, “the dignity of the group [must] be preserved.” And it should be noted that, in cases where “the prosperity of the group and its self-respect are impossible to secure without the group’s enjoying political sovereignty over its own affairs,” the group has just cause to secede. Less drastically, this clearly is a general case for self-determination, wherever this is felt to be necessary for the “prosperity and self-respect” of an “encompassing group.”44 Thus, Margalit and Raz, along with Taylor and other Quebec nationalists such as Jocelyne Couture, Kai Nielsen, and Michel Seymour,45 suggest that the recognition of sub-national identities within a federal state is, along with meaningful powers of self-government, something approaching a right, a basic requirement of justice in multinational states. This can be read as broadly consistent with the liberal ideal of equal respect, although the inference is too much for many; even Carens expresses ambivalence about such a robust formulation, calling symbolic

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recognition “desirable” but wavering over whether it is “required as a matter of justice.”46 But his construct of even-handedness suggests a contextual way of addressing the problem. We plausibly may argue that the demand for recognition will be more compelling, and thus closer to the status of a right, insofar as such recognition would substantially help to relieve a cultural condition marked by either serious vulnerability or oppression. Otherwise put, the more threatened or devalued an identity has been, the more pressing it becomes that the wider society afford it recognition; for such recognition can play a powerful role as an authoritative re-validation of the identity in question and can offer profound assurances of support for, rather than indifference or antagonism toward, a vulnerable culture. In the case of Quebec, a formal recognition of the province’s distinctiveness would mark an explicit repudiation of the assimilationist tradition best associated with Durham and reincarnated, in the minds of many Québécois, in the form of pan-Canadian nation-building. It would also offer a historic assurance of Quebecers’ right to difference which, given the deep anxieties about collective survival that have haunted French Canadians since the Conquest, can be reasonably demanded as a sort of minimum.47 So an impressive array of theoretical arguments can be marshalled in defence of the sorts of demands associated with Quebec nationalism. Even if we remain within the confines of liberal neutrality, some meaningful accommodation of minority cultures seems to be in order, as per Kymlicka. If we argue for a broader conception of justice that remains true to the basic liberal norms of autonomy and equal respect for persons, while giving room to concerns of la survivance and recognition, then obviously an even more robust accommodation of minority cultures follows. Either way, Bercuson and Cooper’s position is exposed as untenable: blind to the impossibility of cultural neutrality, on one account, and hopelessly inadequate to the richness and complexity of our intuitions about justice, on the other. 5 a second argument from liberal purity: scowen on divestiture An alternative way of sustaining the charge that Quebec nationalism is illiberal – and hence beyond the pale of just accommodation – abandons recourse to an untenable laissez-faire liberalism. Instead, it accepts Kymlicka’s argument that some degree of cultural bias is unavoidable while emphasizing that there are more or less inclusive

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forms of cultural bias. On this account, liberal justice does not compel that all cultural matters be purged from our political structures. Instead, it requires a tolerant and inclusive attitude toward those who live under necessarily biased institutions. Although the theme is not as clearly delineated in his work as it could be, Reed Scowen seems to make a case of this kind in his popular screed Time to Say Goodbye. Scowen concedes that “[o]ur political structures are a reflection of a cultural orientation ... governments cannot avoid a cultural bias, be it explicit or implicit.”48 Yet he still thinks it unjust to accommodate Quebec nationalism. Indeed, Quebec should be “divested” of membership in the Canadian polity. He defends this through a contrast with English-speaking Canada. “Canada as a whole can entertain no hopes for an all-encompassing cultural identity ... Canada’s founding nation, the British, does not insist that its way of life be defined as the official culture of the country. There is a wide-spread belief that people of all origins should play a role in the evolution of our identity and that the English language is not a tool for collective cultural development, but rather a playing field on which more interesting aspects of each individual’s personality can flourish.”49 These conditions, he claims, do not apply in Quebec. Quebecers “are expected not only to speak the same language, but to say the same thing.”50 Indeed, “it’s when you try to get a job in Quebec that you begin to realize that a francophone is not just someone who can speak French.”51 Scowen cites some anecdotes and the massive underrepresentation of anglophones in Quebec’s civil service in support of these claims.52 His conclusion: Quebec society, unlike that of Canada, is characterized by a very thick, hence exclusionary, cultural bias. Its ruling elites favour a specific character, distributing rewards differently on the basis of ascriptive criteria. And so this society fails to be adequately neutral toward its citizens. What’s more, Quebecers “believe that, as a linguistic and ethnic community, they have a right to a constitutionally based privileged position within the country.”53 They thus seek to impose “the yoke of ethnic nationalism”54 upon Canada’s institutions. Scowen’s argument about degrees of cultural bias hinges on a de facto distinction between the structure of a culture, and its character – nowhere clearer than in his discussion of language as a “playing field” for all individuals within a community. Language is here conceived as a loose structure within which great diversity can flourish. Conversely, if we think of a societal language as the organic expression of a narrowly

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defined character – a circumscribed set of ways of thinking, feeling, being – we glide over into an exclusionary view. Since Quebec’s “distinct society” is (Scowen says) dominated by the latter vision, it ought not to be recognized in Canada’s constitutive structures. Affirming the society would amount to affirming its hegemonic, illiberal nationalism. “Divestiture,” encouraging Quebec to extirpate itself from Confederation, is a morally sounder path. Now some sort of distinction between societal “structure” and “character” is surely defensible. It has been pivotal to Canadian policies on “multiculturalism within a bilingual framework,” being all that can rebuff the reductionist charge that bilingualism must be biculturalism because language and culture are inseparable.55 The structure/character distinction also undergirds Rawls’s willingness to admit principles drawn from people’s “comprehensive doctrines” in run-of-the-mill political debate but never in constitutional discussion pertaining to the “basic structure” of polity.56 And it is indispensable to Kymlicka’s effort to reconcile liberalism with group-differentiated rights for minority cultures. Kymlicka distinguishes between “societal cultures” (or “cultural structures”; the terms are used interchangeably here57) and “culture” more narrowly drawn. The former denotes a “common culture [that is] capacious, integrating a rich array of groups,” usually featuring a common language and shared public institutions as its principal means of integration. It is a bounded but roomy framework within which diversity can flourish. The latter speaks to “shared memories or values,” or “shared vocabularies of tradition and convention,” which are clearly contingent upon thinking and feeling a certain way.58 Reductive accounts of nationalism obscure the perfectly viable possibility that many of Quebec’s demands for a distinctive constitutional status can take the form of a recognition/affirmation of a cultural structure – e.g., the status of French as the primary language of public discourse – rather than the specific “character” of la nation canadiennefrançaise, the privileging of ethnic francophones. There is, we might say, the cultural structure (e.g., French as official language, parliamentary institutions, a capitalist economic order, etc.); and then there are the individuals who occupy various roles within it. The former is an enduring framework, the latter a fluid article, its evolution open-ended and its character endlessly variable. These are categorically different kinds of concern. The charge that the constitutional accommodation of Quebec’s societal culture must be illiberal, because many of Quebec’s citizens are illiberal, thus makes an elementary category mistake.

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And advocating secession on these grounds, or “divestiture” to use Scowen’s phrase, merely seals the confusion. Constitutional change affirming Quebec’s distinctiveness would operate at the level of structure. It would concede that Canada’s structures are culturally biased, as they must be, and acknowledge that Quebec’s seek to be biased in a different way. Nothing in such an act of recognition would be inherently hostile to diversity within Quebec, any more than the entrenchment of the English language and British institutions are inherently an assault on ethno-cultural diversity in the rest of Canada. Nothing innate in the recognition states that Quebec’s societal culture cannot be “capacious,” again to use Kymlicka’s apt adjective. The people within the structure may indeed be exclusionary; they may be tolerant pluralists; they may be some dynamic blend of the two, as most societies surely are. But that’s a separate matter. Asking what a “distinct society” clause (or any other form of special status) does to Canadian liberalism is, therefore, fundamentally different from asking whether or not many of the distinct society’s inhabitants are illiberal. So this second argument from liberal purity basically rests on a bad ad hominem argument. Once its implicit distinction between cultural structure and character is understood, Scowen’s case loses its coherence, and a space is cleared for a minoritarian alternative that can make some formal accommodation of cultural difference within a state and thus a meaningful accommodation with Quebec nationalism. All this affirms Kymlicka’s view that we need different terms of discussion. Instead of clinging to the line that culture should play no part in politics, probing the deep recesses of nationalists’ souls, or insisting on inadmissibly narrow models of democratic accountability, we ought to be debating the nature of fair treatment between various kinds of communities. What, then, about another major pillar of English-speaking Canadian resistance toward the accommodation of multinational diversity, i.e., the argument for provincial equality? It is, after all, a theory about the just treatment of a particular order of political community. All provinces have equal worth, the claim runs, and hence deserve the same legal status. Demands for a Triple-E Senate have perhaps been the symbolic flagship of this way of thinking. The case for the formal equality of provinces retains some aura of “liberal purity” in its commitment to the principle of neutrality of treatment. But it shifts the locus of neutral treatment from individuals to provinces. Robert Vipond cogently argues that, underlying all this is a

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“deep analogy between federalism and liberalism. Provinces in a federal system are like individuals in the liberal state – they ought to be given the greatest freedom to act that is consistent with the public/ national good. One may object that this identification between provinces and individuals commits a ‘category error’ [but] the analogy is deeply entrenched in Canadian constitutional discourse.”59 Once we understand the nature of the analogy, however dubious, we grasp the move whereby the principle of provincial equality comes to seem like an extension of basic liberal justice. As the liberal state is supposed to respect individuals’ equality of right, so, analogously, ought it to respect equal provincial rights. Hence, having shifted the parameters of the debate in favour of questions of inter-communal justice, we confront a new argument, analogous to the arguments from liberal purity: “neutral treatment,” in the specific form of equality of right, must apply to provinces. Since Quebec demands distinctive recognition, and possibly asymmetrical powers, its nationalism is incompatible with this account of inter-communal (that is, inter-provincial) justice. “Provincial equality” is an omnipresent trope of our constitutional discourse. Even the drafters of the Calgary Declaration, who were motivated mainly by a desire to demonstrate to Quebecers the flexibility of federalism, genuflected before it.60 As scores of observers have argued, however, the mere invocation of the term fails to clarify what “equality” means.61 Rather massive streams of liberal theory would have to be jettisoned in order to cling to exclusively formal conceptions of equality. That the state ought to take individuals’ life-circumstances into account when distributing benefits, for example, is the basis of the modern welfare state; and a similar ethic of “equality of opportunity” is embedded in such entrenched practices of Canadian federalism as equalization payments. Once we accept the principle that it is fair to take the fiscal circumstances of a province into account, it is no great leap to include its cultural circumstances in our calculations of fairness. “If the principle of equality of opportunity is robust enough to support legislative initiatives on behalf of some individuals and ‘have-not’ provinces, then why may it not be used to support the claim that Quebec’s cultural vulnerability may require it to act differently from other provinces?”62 Advocating “divestiture” because Quebec will never accept “provincial equality,” then, remains an exercise in theoretical and political myopia. But this doesn’t mean that the exclusively juridical conception of equality is incoherent. The “argument from liberal purity” certainly was, but the argument for provincial equality is a tenable, internally

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consistent position that clear-headed people could endorse. But those who wish to take this line in Canada need to explain why they are often willing to defend “equality of opportunity” in the form of fiscal transfers to poorer provinces but not in matters of culture; and they need to do this without recourse to untenable ideas about cultural neutrality. While such a case could no doubt be made, it is not the task of this book to construct it.

6 conclusions Assuming that we reject both versions of the argument for secession on grounds of “liberal purity,” and granting that we remain unmoved by a doctrinaire insistence on an absolute formal equality of provinces, the question becomes what Quebec reasonably may demand as a right. Kymlicka’s argument establishes a right to a degree of security for its “cultural structure” and sufficient space in which to exercise a meaningful degree of self-government. Arguably, Quebec already has access to both. While even staunch supporters of federalism, such as Stéphane Dion and Robertson, Lenihan, and Tassé point out that these goods would be more optimally secured were Quebec to enjoy a full constitutional veto and exclusive jurisdiction over matters of culture, language, and immigration, it is probably too extreme to say that Canadian federalism actively threatens la survivance, even in Taylor’s “thick” sense, or denies Quebec a meaningful degree of autonomy.63 Taylor’s case for equal respect suggests the appropriateness of some explicit recognition of Quebec’s national identity – within Canada. A constitution that affirmed Quebec’s distinctiveness as a fundamental value, on all fours with other entrenched principles, would be more just than the present order.64 More forcefully put: the current constitution is unjust in its silence about Quebec’s central relationship to the multinational nature of the polity. A few of the implications of this injustice will be developed later on, in chapter 4. Beyond this, there is considerable room for tinkering with the formal and de facto rules of Canadian federalism, but a massive diminution of federal power hardly seems self-evidently to follow from any of the theories of group-differentiated rights canvassed here. As I said in chapter 1, this book can accommodate anything short of a radical detachment of Quebec from Canada. This chapter has established that a strong zone of institutional sharing poses no threat to the purity of Canadian liberalism.

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Much more could be said about liberal justice – the justice of the Canadian state vis-à-vis Quebec, the justice of secession itself, and so forth. A few of these issues are, again, addressed in chapter 4, in the context of an examination of the question of partition. For now, however, we must turn to the second part of our examination of liberaldemocratic arguments against Quebec-in-Canada: the arguments from democracy.

3 Democratic Critiques of Quebec-in-Canada

1 introduction: the mill/miller thesis Just as some liberals are uneasy with multiple nationalisms within a state, so are some theorists of democracy. No less a thinker than John Stuart Mill advanced the case that multinational states might be an uneasy fit for representative government. In an argument that will haunt us for the remainder of our discussion of principled affirmations, Mill explains: Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist. The influences which form opinions and decide political acts are different in the different sections of the country. An altogether different set of leaders have the confidence of one part of the country and of another. The same books, newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, do not reach them. One section does now know what opinions, or what instigations, are circulating in another. The same incidents, the same acts, the same system of government, affect them in different ways; and each fears more injury to itself from the other nationalities than from the common arbiter, the state ... it is in general a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of governments should coincide in the main with those of nationalities.1 To what extent might a thesis of this sort be thought relevant for our purposes? Unfortunately, Mill clove to a formal definition of “nationality”

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which ultimately reduced nationality to consent alone.2 Yet there is no doubting Mill’s awareness of the extent to which the sorts of differences given in Kymlicka’s concept of the “nationality-based unit” can undercut the “fellow-feeling” needed for the best workings of representative government. “In general [this solidarity] is proportionately weakened by the failure of any of the causes which contribute to it,” including “identity of language, literature, and ... of race and recollection.”3 Indeed, Mill’s Canadian readers have taken one of his major lessons to be that “fellow-feeling ... could not be taken for granted in a country made up of nationalities that spoke different languages.”4 That Mill singles out linguistic cleavages as particularly corrosive of the requisite “united public opinion” has special resonance here.5 Differences of societal culture, of the kind given in multinational states, are not a priori irreconcilable with the solidarity required for representative democracy; but Mill’s work alerts us to the dangers they pose in this regard. Solidarity – “fellow-feeling,” “united public opinion,” and what he elsewhere calls a “principle of sympathy” – is central to free institutions and to representative government. Such solidarity speaks to “a feeling of common interest among those who live under the same government ... that they set a value on the connexion; feel that ... their lot is cast together; that evil to any of their fellow-countrymen is evil to themselves.”6 Now in what sense is this feature a prerequisite for representative democracy? One aspect of the answer seems obvious: a sub-unit that ardently desires its total independence is liable to be obstructionist, keener to dismantle the political order than to contribute to it. However, we can also imagine scenarios where a state muddles through in the absence of the “principle of sympathy.” Economic interests, for instance, or a fear of the transition costs involved in secession, might keep a multinational state stitched together even where fellow-feeling across its societal cultures is lacking. Thus, David Miller argues that the non-solidarity scenario needn’t auger the destruction of democratic governance – Mill’s thesis is overblown in this regard.7 But the absence of a “principle of sympathy” is likely to undermine a state’s capacity to express the best kind of democratic form. This, Miller suggests, is deliberative democracy. Miller here deploys an important distinction between “aggregative” and “deliberative” models of democracy.8 The former understand democratic mechanisms principally in terms of a competitive struggle for resources on the part of self-interested actors and coalitions; the task

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of politics is to process demands efficiently and distribute benefits. “In the aggregative view ... political institutions are understood as more or less adequate calculating machines.”9 The well-designed institution, then, sets up an incentive structure that rewards self-seeking agents in ways that maximize the public good. In essence, this is a market model of politics. Actors are taken to enter the political arena with pre-existing desires – “preferences are firmly fixed”10 – and strategically manvoeuvre so as to maximize their own satisfaction. Whether the general welfare is thereby enhanced depends on the extent to which institutions manage to reproduce in political life the supposedly beneficent workings of capitalism’s “invisible hand.” Note, however, that there seem to be more and less desirable strains of aggregative politics. Michael Stein distinguishes between “integrative” and “distributive” bargaining. The former appears to qualify as aggregative insofar as it does not invoke any regulative criteria for the nature of arguments used in debate (see below). Nonetheless such bargaining is about maximizing utility for all the participants: it “tends to produce ‘win-win’ outcomes in which the overall utilities of the bargaining actors are greater than those achieved by maintaining the status quo.”11 The orientation is toward mutual accommodation and bridging differences. Conversely, in what he calls “distributive bargaining,” actors “are usually in fundamental disagreement,” locked into a zero-sum process yielding clear winners and losers.12 Obviously this is the darker face of aggregative politics, but we can readily envision both being at play, to varying degrees, in a democracy. Deliberative models of democracy differ from aggregative versions in that they offer critical standards against which to measure the demands made in democratic discourse. “Deliberative democrats believe that democratic practices ... should consist in the exchange of reasons rather than the simple thrusting and counter-thrusting of rival interests.”13 So “political choice, to be legitimate, must be the outcome of deliberation about ends among free, equal, and rational agents.”14 And unlike market models, “[t]he deliberative conception construes politics as aiming in part at the formation of preferences and convictions, not just at their articulation and aggregation.”15 With these elements in mind, Gutmann and Thompson propose a deliberative model built on the principles of accountability, publicity, and – most crucially for our purposes – reciprocity. This last denotes “a process of seeking, not just any reasons, but mutually justifiable reasons, and reaching a mutually binding decision on the basis of those

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reasons.”16 Of course those reasons must be public, and decisionmakers must be accountable to those whose lives they affect.17 But the point is that this discourse is not primarily about prudence, selfinterest, and mutual advantage (“deal-making, log-rolling, pork-barrelling, coalition-building, and the like”). Not, at least, when it comes to moral disagreements. The contemporary vogue for deliberation seems to owe much to Rawls, whose Political Liberalism made a case for “public reasons” – i.e., reasons that can be affirmed regardless of one’s personal interests or vision of the good life – and especially Jürgen Habermas, who has garnered much attention for his own theories of rational communication and democratic discourse.18 In the Canadian context, an influential paper by Michael Atkinson deploys March and Olsen’s concept of “integrative” processes to make a similar point. “[P]references are assumed to be in the process of formation” and “emphasis is placed ... on achieving consensus through deliberation and debate” on this integrative account.19 There is considerable diversity within the “deliberative” school but, clearly, this is no market model of input-output calculus. Rather, it advances a conception of open-minded citizens engaging in principled debate. David Miller rightly points out that the successful operation of such models requires a substantial degree of trust and mutual understanding among the participants. Reasons offered in such discourse must be “sincerely held, and not merely adopted as an expedient way of promoting sectional interests,” lest the deliberative process become a sham; and reciprocity itself rests on a premise of trust. “If I am willing to abandon some position that I feel strongly about in an effort to reach a compromise that commands widespread support, I must expect others to reciprocate either now or in the future. Otherwise every concession will be regarded as a sign of weakness, and there will be no incentive to move towards agreement.”20 Indeed, our very capacity to reciprocate “mutually justifiable reasons” depends on large zones of shared moral frameworks. There must be a wide swath of mutual intelligibility here. Interlocutors from structurally different frames of reference (cultural, linguistic, historical, etc. – the sorts of distinctions given in Kymlicka’s concept of “societal cultures”) will therefore have a harder time offering mutually intelligible reasons. But this difficulty does not trump the reciprocity requirement. “Any claim fails to respect reciprocity [if it requires us] to adopt a sectarian way of life as a condition of gaining access to the moral understanding that is essential to judging

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the validity of one’s moral claims.”21 Incorrigibility is inconsistent with justification: our positions must be explicated and defended. Meaningful, principled deliberation thus assumes a community of interlocutors consciously working toward (what each believes to be) the common good, in a framework marked by a rich array of shared understandings, despite their many disagreements over the meaning of that good.22 Miller’s remarks about trust underline the centrality of Mill’s “principle of sympathy” to this ideal form of representative democracy. And the “intelligibility” requirement, touched on in Gutmann and Thompson, casts light on his skepticism as to whether multinational states – described by Mill partly in terms of shared frameworks of communication, after all23 – can realize that ideal. To the extent that differences of “societal culture” complicate communication, trust and reciprocity will be harder to sustain. If Mill is right to suspect that fellow-feeling is difficult to nurture across societal cultures, then doubts emerge about the capacity of multinational states to realize democratic goods. “[I]n deeply divided societies, where trust is lacking ... deliberative debate tends to occur within groups rather than between them.”24 Shared institutions, under these conditions, at best remain aggregative zones – perhaps mutually beneficial zones insofar as interests overlap; but where they do not, “sectional groups [will] look upon policy-making as a zero-sum game in which they fight for financial concessions and legal privileges in competition with other groups.” Thus, “what emerges will reflect nothing more than the balance of forces on each occasion.”25 Envisioned on this account is a polity containing distinct zones of solidarity in which citizens may indeed deliberate – at least on matters of foundational importance – as members of a community, seeking its good as well as their own. But across these zones there is little fellowfeeling, and in their interactions the various constituent communities pursue their own advantages and interests, to the exclusion of any idea of a common project. This poses at least two dangers. One is paralysis. Assuming rough parity in the balance of forces between units, and incommensurable objectives, the aggregative process itself could grind to a halt. Second, again assuming incommensurable objectives, it is possible that matters of the highest importance could be decided for a community by those who feel neither affinity for it nor the slightest interest in its well-being. We can imagine a condition where the solidarity and deliberation of one

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nationality-based unit are trumped by the greater force of another, through the latter’s control of shared instruments of decision. On routine policy matters, that might be merely aggravating. But insofar as it applies to issues of vital importance for the affected community, the scenario suggests an alarming drift away from most recognizable democratic ideals.26 It’s easy to see how this could yield a moral case for secession on the grounds of a community’s capacity democratically to realize itself. Otherwise put, communities may be unable to ensure that their own deliberative practices have meaning, are given force, and are not cancelled out at decisive moments. Secession or dissociation could therefore become ways of realizing deliberative ideals of democracy.27 Note that this is an example of a consequentialist argument for secession. It claims that a unit’s participation in the multinational state is frustrating its capacity to achieve the fullest realization of a powerful moral good – in this case, a rich conception of democracy. The importance of this will grow clearer as we come to the question of whose democratic realization might be frustrated by Quebec-in-Canada.

2 “a

MODUS VIVENDI

without cordiality?”

Do the kinds of critiques suggested by Mill (albeit reworked for contemporary sensibilities by Miller and developed as above) have any purchase in Canada? The question would seem to be whether Canadians have fashioned a solidarity that cuts across the divide of our “societal cultures” such that we can, indeed, realize the richer form of democracy; or whether our multinational state is best understood as patched together largely out of the self-interests of its constituent parts and, hence, as a largely “aggregative” affair. The latter interpretation raises the possibility of the dangers cited above. Of course this is a starkly dichotomous way of putting it. “No democracy that we can envisage will ever perfectly match the deliberative ideal,”28 and “all constitutional democracies mix aggregative and integrative mechanisms.”29 The question is one of degree, but remains pertinent for all that. Many seminal texts dwell at length on the lack of a “principle of sympathy” between nationality-based units in Canada and its effects on our democracy. Some suggest that the bonds of fellow-feeling are largely absent here; others, that they are in the process of disintegrating. The

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classic analysis of Canada as a site wherein nationalities remorselessly clash is of course that of Lord Durham. As Janet Ajzenstat shows, Durham’s case for the assimiliation of the French Canadians was based on his assessment that the “war of races” in Lower Canada subverted liberal justice and his Blackstonian conception of representative institutions.30 Indeed, were we anachronistically to impose our categories on Durham, we might say that, on his view, Lower Canada failed even to meet the minimal requirements for an effective aggregative, let alone deliberative, politics. Durham’s text comes to grips with the utter paralysis and breakdown of a quasi representative form of government: the “two races” were locked in a disastrous zero-sum game that finally lapsed into violence. If Confederation was partly designed to address the failure of Durham’s solutions, which succeeded neither in assimilating the French Canadians nor in relieving the colony of deep bi-national conflict, it did not put paid to the pessimistic reading of French-English relations in Canada. Goldwin Smith doubted that even English Canadians cared much for the new country, but he was most cynical about Quebecers. “[T]ake stock of the facts,” he implored. “When one community differs from another in race, language, religion, character, spirit, social structure, aspirations, occupying also a territory apart, it is a separate nation, and is morally certain to pursue a different course” from the wider polity.31 Anything resembling what contemporary theorists would call “deliberative” precepts was, in his judgment, wholly absent from Quebec’s practice within the Dominion. “Quebec sends her representatives to the Federal Parliament. But their mission is not to take counsel with the other representatives of the nation so much as to look to the separate interests of Quebec, and above all to draw from the treasury of the Dominion all that can be drawn in aid of her empty chest.”32 Not long after Smith wrote, André Siegfried (inaptly called the “Tocqueville of Canada” by Frank Underhill33) launched an even more cogent critique of Canadian democracy, which again bore a clear, if distant, relation to the Mill/Miller “deliberative” thesis. For Siegfried, Canadian “parties exist apart from their programmes, or even without a programme at all.”34 The lack of clear programs, ideas, or commitments to principle “indisputably tends to lower the general level of political life,”35 for “in the absence of ideas or doctrines to divide the voters, there remain only questions of material interest, collective or individual.”36 Canadian politics is a sordid affair of interest-aggregation

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bereft of any principled argument or discussion of the common good. Nor was Siegfried in much doubt as to the cause of these pathologies. Canada, we know, is a country of violent oppositions. English and French, Protestant and Catholic, are jealous of each other and fear each other. The lack of ideas, programmes, convictions, is only apparent. Let a question of race or religion be raised, and you will immediately see most of the sordid preoccupations of patronage or corruption disappear below the surface. The elections will become struggles of political principle, sincere and passionate. Now this is exactly what is feared by the prudent and far-sighted men who have been given the responsibility of maintaining the national equilibrium. Aware of the sharpness of certain rivalries, they know that if these are let loose without any counter-balance, the unity of the Dominion may be endangered.37 Canadian statesmen “fear great movements of opinion, and they devote themselves to weakening such movements.”38 They consciously work, in other words, to promote a vapidly aggregative politics. This perhaps marks an advance on the spectacle of mutual paralysis that exercised both Durham and the Fathers of Confederation; at best it realizes Stein’s vision of “integrative bargaining”; but it falls radically short of the deliberative ideal. Hence Siegfried’s remark about our “modus vivendi without cordiality.” Indeed, concern over the democratic effects of the bi-national cleavage has been one of the many arrows in Quebec sovereigntists’ quiver. Indépendentistes have always emphasized the degree to which the political power of the Canadian Other, exerted over Quebec by the federal government, frustrates the democratic purposes of Quebecers.39 A classic example might be the last conscription crisis, when Quebecers found themselves dragged into war despite voting overwhelmingly against involvement. René Lévesque wrote more subtly of the “double paralysis” that he thought would ensue as a result of Quebecers’ lurch into an assertive nationalism in the 1960s. “The two majorities,” he wrote, “basically desiring the same thing – a chance to live their own lives, in their own way, according to their own needs and aspirations – will inevitably collide with one another repeatedly and with greater and greater force, causing hurts that finally would be irreparable.”40 In the rather drier terms of contemporary political science, Lévesque’s claim

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is that Canada cannot but become an increasingly polarized aggregative battleground between two maturing and incompatible communities. For that matter Lévesque, like Durham, was skeptical of the ability of the Canadian state to sustain even this aggregative form. Eventually the conflicts must grow intolerable and paralyzing. Indeed, David Miller, in applying his thesis to Canada, concludes that Canadian achievements (e.g., a cohesive national government and welfare state) are the product of a historic fellow-feeling that stands to evaporate as Quebec nationalism develops.41 Of course, because we are here dealing with arguments from consequences, it is not enough to speak vaguely of the effects of the lack of solidarity on “Canadian democracy.” Such arguments require us to be precise, to identify the targeted unit of analysis by asking consequences for whom? The focus here, of course, must be on English-speaking Canada and whether the democratic arguments suggested by Mill and Miller claim much purchase in that context. But before we tackle this, some additional remarks are in order. First, it is far from self-evident that, whatever the future may hold, Canadians and Quebecers actually lack the kind of “principle of sympathy” Mill wrote about. A majority of citizens within the two communities do wish to share a state of some sort – the opinion data have been consistent about that; and indicators exist as well of a considerable “fellowfeeling” underlying it all.42 Of course, it may be that responses to abstract survey questions do not capture the harder realities of political and electoral practice. Vague fondness for Canada might, in the end, prove a flimsy tissue against the storms of constitutional conflict, identity politics, and the opposed interests of our nationality-based units. Mass political practice is the acid test of solidarity – a test that numerous scholars think that Canadians have failed, as we shall see. Nonetheless it’s a mistake to be too cavalier about the convincing indicators of solidarity that do exist. But the principal corrective to Mill’s pessimistic thesis has come from consociational democrats.43 Consociationalists do not assume much solidarity across what we are calling “societal cultures” in a multinational state. The very point of consociational theory is to show how “deeply divided” democracies can achieve a level of stability despite these cleavages. Speaking very broadly, consociationalists would posit a pattern of brokerage among elite representatives of the various “segments” who have a stake in the maintenance of the system and in striking workable compromises as the key to sustaining the political order.

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We just saw Siegfried, for instance, describe Canadian leaders’ commitment to keeping the system together by eschewing principled arguments. The twin risks of paralysis and fragmentation were thus managed by skilful brokerage, although, on his account, the country lacked what we would call a meaningful deliberative politics.44 Yet consociational theory might be deemed at least partially compatible with deliberative conceptions of democracy – provided that the latter are not taken to require extensive mass participation.45 If the elites of the respective nationality-based units share Mill’s principle of sympathy, they could serve as the principal deliberative interlocutors. If Canada could be shown to have such solidarity at the elite level, then, it could to some degree be exempt from Mill’s critique. As Underhill wrote, “[i]f we are to achieve this something a little better [than a modus vivendi], it must come from leaders on both sides who achieve something a good deal better in their personal relations with each other, who reach a degree of cordiality and understanding that approaches brotherhood.”46 The point is not to argue over whether Canada neatly conforms to this or that model of consociational democracy. At issue, from this perspective, is whether our constitutive societal cultures produce elites who are adequately committed to “making the system work” and to doing so with an eye on the greater good as well as the parochial interests of the communities they represent. A pattern of deliberative, elite accommodation could thus – in theory at least – become Canada’s saving grace. Now, whether or not our elites ever actually conformed to anything like a deliberative ideal, there is no doubt that constitutional matters, among others, were, for most of Canadian history, understood to be the concern of executives rather than mass publics. Such patterns of elite negotiation are widely believed to be maximally conducive to reasonable compromises: if not the epitome of principled deliberation, then at least a successful kind of aggregative politics. A typical formulation has it that “elite negotiations within executive/summit federal structures encourage constitutional agreements which are overall compromises in a non-zero sum bargaining context. There is a strong thrust or dynamic towards accommodation and the reduction of conflict or competition among the bargaining units.”47 Nevertheless, elite accommodation – especially as a constitutional strategy – is nowadays about as fashionable as togas or spats. Participatory democrats scorn it, for obvious normative reasons; and transformations in Canadian political cul-

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ture have corroded its legitimacy. What is interesting is the extent to which both normative critiques and empirical discussions of the decline of elite accommodation have accepted the consociational premise that Canada is a “deeply divided” society with weak solidarities across national lines.

3 multinationality and the participatory tradition in canada Elite accommodation cannot be Canada’s “saving grace” if we assume that democracy, whether aggregative or deliberative, must be participatory. (At best, it would be our saving disgrace). Underhill’s hope that “leaders from both sides” of our national chasm could bridge their differences in a spirit of fraternity, shepherding the masses along with them, finds little appeal among those who recoil from a politics where “[t]he people sit mutely in the stalls.”48 This is not the place to expound on participatory democratic theory or its many manifestations in the Canadian context. Suffice it to say that neither the rough-and-ready populist traditions most closely associated with Western Canada nor the radically democratized political and economic order envisioned by theorists such as C.B. Macpherson and Philip Resnick can abide the elitism given in conventional models of consociational democracy. I would like to draw attention here to one Canadian facet of this complex participatory tradition. There is an element on the Canadian left – reaching back at the very least to John Porter’s classic, The Vertical Mosaic – that dismisses the moral tenability of elite accommodation, while unflinchingly conceding that our national divide is intractable. Authors of this stripe accept the consociational diagnosis of Canada as a “deeply divided” polity but massively reject the consociational prescription. This has serious implications for our understanding of Quebec’s role in Canadian democracy, and thus for the moral impact of dissociation. The leftist critique of “unity politics” is most often associated with a commitment to redistribution. But our topic is democracy, and we shall here target the democratic facet of the argument. This position crystallized in Gad Horowitz’s writings for Canadian Dimension in the 1960s.49 Horowitz makes a case for a vast expansion of popular participation under the banner of “creative politics.” The public at large must “participate in the making of the decisions which shape the basic conditions of their existence.” This demands a political system that can “challenge the power of the corporate and bureaucratic orders and replace them

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as the source of the most important social decisions.”50 The affinity with, say, the radical democracy of C.B. Macpherson is clear; Horowitz seeks to extend democratic control over capital, as well as to reduce (though not, presumably, eliminate) our dependence on representative institutions. If creative politics is to be realized, though, citizens obviously must be mobilized around “programmes for social change.”51 Like many Marxists of his era, Horowitz thinks that “class politics” is needed for this. If political discourse can be made to centre on “the allocation of values among the different classes of society,”52 people will find that it matters to them, that it speaks to their everyday concerns. Failing to focus on class, “politics can have no profound meaning for the lives of ordinary people, [who] cannot use [it] to change the conditions of their lives.”53 Once the discourse comes to centre on power – which groups have it and which do not – a dynamic will be created that could clear the way for a radically participatory society. Obviously, the vision of a multinational polity bound by conscientious elites has little appeal for Horowitz. What counts is popular empowerment. Horowitz, however, also has much to say about the Canadian obsession with unity. Far from simply invoking a vague and amorphous “people,” or assuming that class politics will magically dissolve French-English tensions, he squarely confronts our primordial rift. There are, he writes, “two arenas of class politics – an English arena and a French arena – rather than one Canadian arena.”54 Indeed, “[u]nifying class issues may arise spontaneously out of the changing nature of ‘society,’ but English and French Canada are two distinct societies. The differences between them are and will probably continue to be far greater than the difference between the most disparate regions of the United States. Even the complete urbanization of both Canadian cultures may not produce the basis for a common political life. English Canada and French Canada separately have the prerequisites for class politics ... together they may not.”55 So Horowitz doubts that the chasm separating French and English can be bridged. He supplies no sustained analysis of why the two nations form separate terrains of class struggle, but attitudinal and cultural differences seem to be the main lines of demarcation. What is clear is his belief that the “unity-discord problem ... will never be susceptible to a final solution.”56 This has significant implications for the application of Horowitz’s participatory theories in Canada. We’ll get to these shortly. The point,

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for now, is simply that Horowitz accepts the view that Canada is composed of at least two societal cultures and that this generates profound differences at the heart of Canadian politics – while insisting that elitist responses to the challenges thus posed are out of the question. Related arguments still surface. While both Reg Whitaker and Philip Resnick eschew overt reference to the rather mouldy insistence on class politics extant in Horowitz’s essays, their writings on the unity crises of the 1990s stand as contemporary exemplars of the position that concedes the gravity of our “deep divisions” while rejecting consociational prescriptions. Resnick’s Parliament vs. People (1984), for instance, explicitly targets Canada’s tradition of elite accommodation in the constitutional realm, treating this as profoundly emblematic of the larger contempt for popular participation that marks our political culture. Resnick wants a “founding democratic myth” for Canada, like those at play in France and the United States.57 The 1982 process was a “constitutional charade,” an “indignity ... inflicted on democratic practice in this country,” because driven wholly by elites rather than popular participation in the form of constituent assemblies and ratification through referenda.58 The Charter’s “democratic rights” are a Schumpeterian sham; they reinforce the parliamentary model, with its “[s]overeignty in Monarch-cum-Parliament” rather than the citizens59 and its idea that “participation begin[s] and end[s] with the ballot box.”60 Since “you cannot make history without direct participation of the people and call it democracy,”61 Resnick, like Horowitz, advocates a radical alternative: he wants to supplement representative institutions with local participatory structures, increasing our recourse to referenda (“base-line democracy”) and advancing worker-controlled enterprises (“market socialism”). Clearly, this is a long way from a consociational process in which the representatives of various social segments “deliver” their populations’ support for policies devised through elite bargaining. Resnick’s credentials as a Macpherson-style participatory democrat are impeccable. Now in a series of bracing texts from the late 1980s and early- to-mid ’90s, Resnick squarely confronts the deep cleavage that divides “the people” against itself in our multinational state.62 At the centre of his analysis is an enduring disagreement over the role of the central government, rooted in the respective nationalisms of Canada’s “two sociological nations.” Quebec nationalism, finding its primary expression in provincial institutions, tends to feel crowded by the federal government and seeks to reduce its role. English-speaking Canadians, conversely,

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find national expression in Ottawa and are therefore reluctant to dismantle federal authority. “[T]here is ... diametric opposition between what many Québécois seem to want – recognition as a distinct society along with a much weakened federal government – and what most English Canadians ... desire – a reasonably strong and cohesive central government. No poorly drafted constitutional package ... could paper over these visions or impose a shared vision of a country based on two quite different sociological realities.”63 In a more focused manner than Horowitz, Resnick identifies and concedes our deep, foundational cleavage. But any saving recourse to elite accommodation is ruled out by his prior commitment to direct democracy. Similarly, Reg Whitaker’s commitment to more participatory modes of democracy is well documented. He does not, however, deny the gravity of the national rift. Instead, he frames it as a primeval tension at the heart of Canadian democracy. Canada faces “deep antagonisms ... rooted in contradictory democratic visions”64 along the national fault line. Whitaker identifies three core questions facing any democracy: who “the people” are, what the institutional mechanisms for expressing its will are to be, and how to defend against majority tyranny without compromising popular sovereignty. And he argues that Quebec and English-speaking Canada adhere to incompatible answers to each.65 Hence, “it would be intellectually dishonest to argue that the answer to Canada’s [unity] difficulties is simply more democracy ... democracy itself is part of the problem.”66 So it must be, if the populace is profoundly cloven on such constitutive questions. Empowering the masses can only magnify these divisions, moving deep conflicts from the murky chambers of elite accommodation and into the unforgiving glare of popular politics. Nevertheless, Whitaker clearly favours more democracy. This has significant ramifications, as we’ll see in a moment.

4 toward a democratic critique: the decline of elite accommodation in canada The replacement of older models of elite accommodation by mass public engagement is not merely hypothetical. It has, to some degree, actually occurred here, at least in the constitutional realm. And the view that “more democracy” might be a problem on the constitutional front seems to be borne out by Canada’s recent experiences with more participatory modes of constitutional politics.

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It has become commonplace to acknowledge a profound shift in Canadian political culture, such that constitutional matters can no longer be resolved in a consociational fashion. Alan Cairns writes of a movement from a “governments’ constitution” primarily concerned with federalism and the division of powers, toward a “citizens’ constitution” built around the Charter of Rights;67 Peter Russell, of a lurch away from “Burkean” constitutionalism built on organic traditions, elite guidance, and cautious muddling through, toward a “Lockean” constitutional culture built on contract and popular consent;68 Atkinson, whom we have already cited, suggests that a vigorously “aggregative” conception of constitutional politics is increasingly impinging on older “integrative” traditions;69 Janet Ajzenstat submits that Canadians have come to “take it for granted that because liberal-democracies facilitate popular participation in day-to-day policies, they must as a matter of course promote popular participation in constitution-making”;70 and so forth. The turning point is sometimes thought to be the process of public consultation associated with the 1982 Constitution Act (not to mention Ottawa’s sales pitch, which framed the thing as “the people’s package”). Perhaps it is part of a larger “decline in deference” across the contemporary West.71 In any case, there is wide agreement that the Meech Lake Accord marked the dying fall of venerable patterns of executive federalism. Not only has the constitution come to be seen as an object of ongoing political contestation in Canada, but the ratification process for the doomed Charlottetown Accord (1992) established a precedent of national referenda on constitutional change. The legitimacy of future large-scale amendments will therefore be in doubt unless they follow a process of considerable public input and ratification by a popular vote. Even a largely symbolic, non-constitutional exercise like the Calgary Declaration followed a careful process of popular consultation. So Quebec-in-Canada has not proven an obstacle to participation, at least on the constitutional level.72 Yet the deeper point – the incommensurability of Quebec and Canada, Whitaker’s “contradictory democratic visions,” Resnick’s “diametric opposition” – has arguably been validated by that democratizing experience. Canada is a deeply divided society in the consociationalists’ sense, and these divisions produce radically incompatible constitutional perspectives and demands. While there are many such divisions, the gravest may indeed be the clash between the vision of “deep diversity” favoured in Quebec, which seeks

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the explicit recognition of Canada’s multinational nature and an asymmetrical status on that basis, and the ethos of juridical equality of provinces, individual rights, and (to a lesser degree) non-territorial minoritarianism prevalent in the discourse of English-speaking Canada.73 Hence, the catastrophic gap between English-speaking Canadian and Québécois perceptions of Meech; hence, the overwhelming popular rejection of the Charlottetown Accord, which tried to balance off a variety of constitutional visions. So the Mill/Miller thesis resurfaces with considerable force on this front. And it does so in two respects. First, the ethic of reciprocity – so central to both the deliberative and aggregative ideals – is commonly thought to be absent from popular engagement with the constitution. “Masses tend to be overwhelmingly interested in maximizing constitutional provisions that conform to their own [views],” Lusztig writes.74 Compromise is not on. A participatory constitutional politics in these circumstances can at best amount to the ugliest kind of aggregative process, unfolding in “an arena where the prizes go to the strongest.”75 We seem to have substituted the dream of a polity that could realize deliberative or at least integrative democracy at the elite level, if not elsewhere, in favour of some quasi-Hobbesian burlesque. Lusztig, indeed, argues that this is inherent in mass participation in constitutional affairs, when incommensurable positions are at play. The point here is not necessarily that Canadian mass publics, in the referendum over the Charlottetown Accord, or in other contexts, have behaved as unprincipled self-maximizers. As Alain Noël argues, Canadians may well have “entertained various considerations and assessed a complex proposal in light of their own conceptions of what is good and fair, for themselves and for the community.” In this sense they may have met the minimal criteria for principled deliberation. Absent, however, has been “a deeper form of deliberation, one in which prevailing understandings and existing conceptions of justice could be questioned, modified, or reconstructed.”76 Canadian voters do not seem to have shown this willingness to synthesize or modify their own visions of justice and polity in light of the claims of others. The process, for them, remains one of maximizing preferences, principled or otherwise. Lusztig concludes that this limitation is simply a fact of democratic life as we know it. And it gets worse. I noted earlier that, in a context where the constituent units in an aggregative democracy are of roughly equal weight, there is the danger of paralysis. Such is precisely the case here, where

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it is assumed that majorities both in Quebec and English-speaking Canada77 must agree on a constitutional package. The “requirement of mass input into ... constitutional bargaining”78 in Canada therefore poses a serious obstacle to constitutional change – for reasons that go beyond the general tendency of electorates to vote conservatively in referenda. The decline of elite accommodation has been accompanied by a profound sense of pessimism about Canada’s capacity to amend its constitution. In Lusztig’s words, “Canadian constitutional initiatives are doomed to fail.” At the constitutional level, at least, the issue of solidarity at the mass level can no longer be avoided. All this suggests a worrisomely snug fit between the Mill/Miller thesis and Canadian constitutional politics. That politics tends to be zero-sum and, partly as a result of the national cleavage, prone to deadlock. A detailed rendering of the multifarious democratic implications can, unsurprisingly, be drawn from the writings of our exemplary participatory democrats (Horowitz, Resnick, and Whitaker). As we saw, these thinkers can be grouped together by their shared insistence on popular participation and their refusal to deny the gravity of the divide between English-speaking Canada and Quebec. But the really troublesome aspect of these analyses is their democratic critique of Quebec-in-Canada.

5 the democratic critique, i: participatory politics That critique has many facets. The most radical casts Canada’s unity imbroglio as a historic impediment to participatory democracy. We have already reviewed Horowitz’s belief that a “creative politics,” driven by “issues which have to do with the allocation of values among the different classes of society,”79 is a prerequisite to such democracy. But creative politics, he argues, can’t arise in Canada as long as the polity itself is in doubt. “A class politics in Canada would take for granted that the nation exists and will not be dismembered. Political debate would focus on the question: ‘Who gets what, when, and how?’ Non-class politics takes it for granted that those who have the most of what there is to get will continue to get it. Political debate centres on the question of whether they will get it as one nation or several, through the provincial governments or the federal.”80 Matters of federalism and unity sidetrack the political agenda away from “the ‘personal’ troubles of ordinary people”81 and toward a set of questions which never challenge the fundamental power structure of Canadian society. Instead, the energies

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of actors within the system, and citizens themselves, are directed to the (interminable) brokerage needed for the preservation of the state. Like John Porter, Horowitz places some of the blame for this centrifugal tendency on institutional factors such as federalism (neither author gives much credit to the idea that English-speaking Canada might be an authentically federal culture).82 Canadian solidarity is corroded by numerous factors – federalism, multiculturalism – that call for endless negotiation and so distract from “creative politics.” And Horowitz argues that such fragmentation is a direct result of Canada’s efforts to incorporate Quebec, to create institutions that could satisfy Quebec’s demands for autonomy and thus defuse the prospects of rebellion or secession.83 Quebec’s distinctiveness has served as baneful template. By refusing to view Quebec as “other” – i.e., as a unique unit meriting asymmetry of treatment – English-speaking Canada has forced itself to extend its treatment of Quebec to other provinces and cultural units through federalism and multiculturalism. These practices fragment the community and distract it from questions of socio-economic power. Thus, Canada deprives itself of the solidarity it needs for democratic mobilization around constructive ends. Far better, Horowitz thinks, simply to accept that English and French Canada are separate arenas of class politics. The differences between the two societies are unbridgeable: “our persisting effort to preserve a high degree of integration of the two societies may prevent the development of a class politics in both – by perpetuating a unity-discord problem which will never be susceptible to a final solution.”84 Dissociation thus commends itself, on participatory-democratic grounds. The departure of Quebec would assuage unity tensions and make it possible for Canadians to concentrate on power relations. Since those tensions are rooted in insoluble differences, they cannot be expected to evaporate otherwise. Of course, such a thesis requires us to embrace a radically participatory conception of democracy. This is not self-evidently desirable, and its merits or demerits will not be tackled here. My task is to point out that this is a form of democratic good which plausibly can be marshalled against Quebec-in-Canada. But even assuming sympathy for this vision of democracy, “class politics” is not a priori the only way to get there. And we cannot allow that identity-based politics is somehow a distraction from “real” issues of power. The reduction of all genuine politics to class would require dismissing a prodigious mass of contemporary literature on gender, race, and other identity constructs that clearly are implicated in relations of social and political power (not to

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mention meaning for agents, which is the animating concern of this book). And the institutionalized diversity of English-speaking Canada surely reflects more than a deluded sublimation. While Whitaker occasionally lapses into this kind of reductive thinking,85 his contribution to the participatory critique is, on the whole, rather different, more attuned to the contemporary unease with reductionist Marxism. The problems posed by Canada’s “deep diversity,” he observes, historically yielded a politics of elite accommodation rather than popular engagement, especially on constitutional matters. This is rooted, again, in our “contradictory democratic visions.” “Democracy in Quebec has been viewed above all as national selfdetermination. What are certainly democratic demands have often been couched in the language of the constitutional and fiscal powers of the Quebec state. The response from English Canada has been to re-jig the terms and mechanisms of executive federalism.”86 The Quiet Revolution, and Quebec’s resultant “struggling for the symbols and instruments of political sovereignty,” soon “resolved itself into elite bargaining and bureaucratic negotiation,” which other provinces joined. So “Quebec nationalism has had the ... inadvertent but perverse effect on Canada ... of reinforcing the old political and bureaucratic elitism.”87 The underlying “deep antagonisms” generated a politics defined by executive federalism and arcane inter-governmental bargaining: the supreme expression of consociational politics. As with Horowitz’s argument, Whitaker’s cashes out in an argument for dissociation (or outright secession) on participatory grounds. The logic is straightforward. If Quebec generates a standing temptation to elite brokerage rather than direct democracy, then “the departure of Quebec could open up a more democratic political and constitutional agenda for Canada,” since “[t]he ancient pressures towards undemocratic elite accommodation as the means of resolving the differences between two peoples and two nations would largely vanish.”88 Freed of the need to paper over complex questions of unity and the accompanying temptation to elitist politics, English-speaking Canadians could address their own concerns in a more participatory style, relieved of the constant fear that the state will fly apart. Popular empowerment ceases to be a problem for unity once these especially intractable, primeval divisions over constitutive questions have been expunged. But, assuming popular participation in constitutional politics to be our primary concern, this argument is of doubtful relevance. Whitaker himself is keenly aware that the old, elitist models are increasingly mori-

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bund. “The system has been deteriorating since the 1960s – and the Meech Lake fiasco was an exclamation point loudly marking the close of this phase.”89 If so, then, their “ancient pressures” must be at a historic nadir. No matter how forcefully some might pine for the supposedly simplifying mechanisms of elite accommodation, there seems to be no reversing the public sense of constitutional proprietorship. Since viable constitutional change now demands some degree of popular consultation and ratification by referendum, the political space for a return to old consociational techniques in this context is extremely slim. Thus there is less reason than ever to advocate dissociation on the grounds of that possibility. Insofar as we want to base a case for dissociation on a participatory logic – which is not my project here – we are probably best to work with some variant of Horowitz’s claim. We might argue, perhaps, that constitutional paralysis blocks democratizing institutional reform; or that recurring questions of unity are a constant drain on a limited bundle of political energies that could be better spent renovating Canadian democracy. In any case, the democratic critique of Quebec-in-Canada can be severed from radically participatory views, and to worrisomely good effect.

6 the democratic critique, ii: aggregative and deliberative politics Other lines of democratic critique of Quebec-in-Canada can be better understood in terms of the distinction between aggregative and deliberative politics.90 Remember, our primary concern here is with the consequences of dissociation specifically for democracy in English-speaking Canada. On an aggregative critique, Quebec complicates the efficient demand-satisfaction of English-speaking Canadians; on a deliberative account, English-speaking Canada is vulnerable to the will of a community that falls outside the parameters of its deliberations, thus undercutting their effectiveness. Both critiques form the basis of arguments for dissociation in the name of its consequences for democracy in Englishspeaking Canada. An aggregative argument for dissociation merely requires us to (a) identify deep and lasting points of disagreement, (b) show that the allocation of political goods is paralyzed, or gravely distorted, as a result and (c) infer that dissociation would relieve these maladies. Such a straightforwardly aggregative view of democracy and dissociation seems given in,

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say, Resnick’s bald claim about the “diametric opposition between what many Québécois seem to want ... and what most English Canadians ... desire.” This emphasis on wants and desires suggests that the primary goal is to maximize demand satisfaction (pre-existing preferences being the basic units of aggregative politics). If so, then Resnick’s case for a “Canada-Quebec Union” along the lines of sovereignty-partnership draws from this view of democracy.91 Dissociation is advisable because it will help both Quebecers and English- speaking Canadians get more of what they want. Whitaker, likewise, has his aggregative moments. There is an English-Canadian constitutional agenda, but it has been consistently blocked or side-tracked by the Quebec-driven agenda. There is a swelling demand for a more democratic and responsive political system ... The West demands a more regionally responsive set of central institutions ... Also on the agenda is a drive for egalitarianism and individual rights, which runs headlong into Quebec’s concern for collective rights ... Similarly, the hope for an increasingly multicultural and multi-ethnic Canada collides with Quebec’s primary goal: promotion of the French language and culture. Looming over the entire debate is the question of aboriginal peoples: it will be difficult to come to terms with native self-government and sovereignty when Quebec insists on the primacy of its own sovereignty claims.92 “Such aspirations,” he goes on, “are rudely shoved aside by Quebec ... which is concerned only about the transfer of powers to [its] government.”93 As we saw, a central problem for the aggregative position is paralysis. Whitaker’s polemic, when juxtaposed with his explicit receptiveness to secession in “Quebec and the Canadian Question,” suggests that he thinks dissociation will yield greater efficiency in accommodating English Canadian constitutional demands, since bedrock disagreement in this domain paralyzes effective outputs. But again, there are some obvious problems with this. In the first place, the aggregative case seems to assume away the diversity and complexity of English-speaking Canada itself. Whitaker can grumble about Quebec’s disinterest in Senate reform, but it is not self- evident that Ontario would be any more open to such arrangements after the secession of Quebec. Such complications are obscured by the crude image

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of a fixed English-Canadian agenda frustrated by Quebec’s incompatible priorities.94 Another matter implicit here is the ubiquitous spectre of recursive secession. In an interesting essay on federalism and democratic theory, which clearly informs his reflections on Quebec and Canada, Whitaker draws attention to what he calls the “democratic paradox.” He suggests that the “theory of the sovereignty of the people must rest on a definition of the term ‘people’ ... It is a democratic paradox that the more exclusionary the definition of the people, the less heterodox, diverse and conflictual the people become, the better democracy works. The wider the definition, the fewer the exclusions, the weaker the putative community constituted by the people, the more problematic the presence of the people in the politics of the state.”95 The idea that democracy is most effective in small, homogenous communities enjoys a distinguished lineage, of course. But we must ask what it means for democracy to “work.” If we give demand-satisfaction pride of place, Whitaker’s case for dissociation would seem to flow seamlessly from his analysis of democracy. Quebec, he argues, is a source of fundamental heterodoxy, deep diversity, radical complexity: the most profound division in our polity. It stands to reason that Quebec would complicate Canada’s ability efficiently to aggregate political goods. Removing Quebec from the equation would smooth out the aggregative process. But what about the reductio ad absurdum? Whitaker’s logic here seems to dictate a flight from all diversity, a rush to smaller and smaller decision-making units, until we arrive at the best conjuncture of efficiency and preference. If preference maximization is all that counts, then why shouldn’t we disaggregate English-speaking Canada into smaller and smaller bits, until we arrive at maximal conjunctures of jurisdiction and preference? The need to avoid such conclusions explains why Whitaker’s concern with “heterodoxy” and “diversity” must, like Mill’s, be supplemented by an awareness of the importance of solidarity. Whitaker is quite right to suggest that the first question any democracy must settle is the question of “who are included, who excluded?”96 Mill’s principle of sympathy is a key determinant of whether frustrated demands will be democratically acceptable. The Mill/Miller model, it will be recalled, suggested a danger beyond sheer paralysis and inefficient demand-satisfaction: the possibility that matters of constitutive importance could be decided for a

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community by those who feel neither affinity for it nor the slightest interest in its well-being. This implies a theory of democratic legitimacy, wherein democratic citizens remain “free” even when their will is trumped by majority rule, provided that they are bound in solidarity to the community of which the majority is the greater part. Majority rule is a defensible way of arbitrating conflict (provided it respects liberal justice); but to be adequately democratic the majority must be of “us.” “What is the feature of our ‘imagined communities’ by which people accept that they are free under a democratic regime, even when their will is overridden on a number of important issues? The answer runs something like this: You, like the rest of us, are free by virtue of the fact that we are ruling ourselves in common and are not being ruled by an agency that need take no account of us.”97 The control of one democratic community by another hardly counts as the fullest democratic realization of each. So some purely aggregative account, admitting demand-satisfaction as the only relevant variable in politics, won’t do. It can neither address the reductio nor explain why secessionism does not erupt every time demands are frustrated. The aggregative polity ultimately assumes a foundational solidarity: a prior commitment to a particular, bounded community or cluster of communities that defines the borders of interest-aggregation. Indeed, this constitutive solidarity is important to aggregative democracy in at least two respects. It offers a reason to work toward compromise in states where conflict occurs along territorial lines, and, thus, helps to explain why units feel driven to negotiate instead of simply packing up and forming their own state. And in zero-sum cases, where the demands of one unit are simply trumped or overpowered, it is a major factor in determining whether or not these frustrations are consistent with the full democratic realization of that community. What grounds the aggregative critique of Quebec-in-Canada in Whitaker and Resnick, then, is a set of assumptions about how political solidarity in Canada works, or fails to work. Theirs is a tough-minded acceptance of the fact that Quebecers’ solidarity with English-speaking Canadians is either non-existent or too weak to cash itself out in a meaningful spirit of reciprocity. Those English-speaking Canadians for whom “Canada includes Quebec,” and who are moved by the solidarity and reciprocity thus implied, are sadly deluded; Quebecers, no matter how they respond to opinion surveys on this question, do not collectively act in a manner consistent with these sentiments. Clinging to such

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an unrequited solidarity, our authors seem to suggest, amounts to a political incarnation of the bathos of the abandoned lover – or just simple ignorance of the facts. Such sentimental souls are the latest versions of Eugene Forsey’s “amiable mugs ... who lie down on their backs with all four feet in the air, and urge all the rest of us to do likewise, and to join them in inviting the wildest Quebec nationalists to dance on our stomachs.”98 “It would be foolish,” Resnick writes, “for us in English Canada to appeal to Quebec on the basis of sentiment or emotion ... the time for such appeals is long past. Relations between our two nations will from now on be conducted on the basis of hard bargaining and self-interest. This is the only language that Quebec’s elites, in particular, understand and the one with which we should address them.”99 Solidarity implies reciprocity; the absence of the latter degrades the former. So Whitaker and Resnick, writing in the heat of the unity battles of the early 1990s, plump instead for a kind of negative reciprocity. They urge English-speaking Canadians to repay Quebec’s indifference, define themselves as a collective solidarity distinct from Quebec’s, and move on. “Think English Canada,” Resnick enjoins: tend to EnglishCanadian interests as such, just as Quebecers tend to their own. All this helps to recast the constitutional dilemma, transforming it from a matter of frustrated demand into an illustration of dialogical collapse – a breakdown caused as much by a lack of shared solidarity and the reciprocity that goes with it as by incompatible visions per se. Whitaker’s complaint that English-speaking Canada’s agenda is “rudely shoved aside” by Quebec, for instance, is as much a lament for absent reciprocity as a demonstration that the two societies simply have incompatible constitutional goals. The remark portrays English-speaking Canadians as frustrated interlocutors, whose interest in discussing and bargaining over a range of constitutional possibilities is quashed by an obstinate Quebec that refuses to engage any agenda beyond its own.100 Quebecers are thus revealed to be a de facto “other” in the process of aggregation, driven by a corporate interest that is wholly distinct from that of English-speaking Canadians,101 with scant regard for the consequences of their actions on their compatriots or the Canadian polity in general. Yet Quebec remains a very powerful force within Canadian institutions. This is of crucial importance, given all that I’ve said above. From the aggregative standpoint, Quebec enjoys sufficient force, due to population size and institutional conventions, to paralyze the aggregation of constitutional goods – without, crucially, evincing the solidarity and reciprocity that might enable us to overcome the difficulty. Since our

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interests are incompatible, the resulting paralysis means that the will of English-speaking Canadians is being frustrated by an “other” that has excluded them from its bonds of meaningful solidarity.102 All other things being equal, then, a case for dissociation follows – for democratic reasons, among others.103 Of course, this complaint about paralysis, and the conclusions that follow, assumes a standing demand for constitutional change in English-speaking Canada. The argument derives its force from the belief that high-priority demands are being frustrated by Quebec. Yet there is little evidence that Canadians outside Quebec are, en masse, especially agitated about their constitution. Unless they are, the urgency of satisfying their demands on that front diminishes. The aggregative critique transmutes instead into the much less impressive assertion that Quebec must go because, at some indefinite future point, English-speaking Canadians might want to change their constitution unfettered by Quebec’s distinct agenda. Even granting the urgency of constitutional demands in Englishspeaking Canada, it is not self-evident that paralysis on this front is the only relevant consideration from an aggregative standpoint. Perhaps such matters warrant a privileged place in our calculations of preference-satisfaction; they are, after all, among the profoundest citizens face; but there is another way of seeing this. Constitutional problems are of an exceptional order and may not tell us much about the ordinary, everyday functioning of the democracy. Grave divisions, even outright paralysis, on this extraordinary front need not be taken as determinate of Canada’s capacity to satisfy the demands of its citizens on a variety of equally weighty, non-constitutional issues. So, even conceding the most dichotomous reading of our constitutional situation – Resnick’s “diametric opposition” – a possible way around the aggregative critique is to treat constitutional questions as atypical outliers. Incommensurability over constitutive matters need not trump the (possibly numerous) shared interests of Quebec and Canada in other areas or the variety of overlaps between the preferences of Quebecers and those of citizens in other regions and provinces. Solidarity aside, then, who knows? Perhaps there are enough shared interests, constitutional matters excepted, to hold the polity together; questions of solidarity and reciprocity might be circumnavigated by common interest, as long as we avoid dredging up “mega-constitutional politics.” Of course, this falls well short of the vigorous moral affirmation of Quebecin-Canada that we’re looking for. But it does seem to neutralize the

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aggregative critique, suggesting that we do not need to sacrifice democratic goods to make this affirmation. Or do we? Regrettably, the ramifications of the Resnick/Whitaker/ Horowitz argument about our lack of multinational solidarity extend beyond constitutional politics. The dangers of absent solidarity turn out to be present in any debate of fundamental importance. Whenever an issue of great moment arises, English-speaking Canada’s capacity to determine its own good stands to be frustrated by a Quebec that stands outside its terms of reference, its solidarity, and the reciprocal obligations involved in it. As we’ll see in a moment, Resnick and Whitaker marshal the 1988 free-trade debate as a prime example of this ongoing danger. This example, indeed, may make the case for dissociation on democratic grounds more vivid. Note, first, that an analogous argument can be made from the perspective of deliberative democracy. We saw earlier that an authentic deliberative politics requires trust and reciprocity. The absence of fellow-feeling undercuts dialogic reciprocity (just as it undercuts the impulse to compromise) and, thus, sabotages deliberation in Gutmann and Thompson’s sense. Deliberative democracy is not just about agreement but about seeking agreement according to regulative principles, whereby we frame our demands in terms the other can make moral sense of – we engage their concerns, we reciprocate their reason-giving as citizens engaged in a common deliberative project. What counts is not whether we agree but how we frame our agreements and disagreements. The face-saving scenario envisioned above, which suggested that mutual interest might tether Quebec to Canada even in the absence of a rich spirit of solidarity and reciprocity, reduces politics across the Canada-Quebec boundary to shared interest and thus fails the deliberative test. Clearly, if we accept Resnick and Whitaker’s portrait of Canada as two incommensurable zones of solidarity, each able to exercise considerable power over the other, then we must concede a standing risk that the capacity of one community to act on its deliberations could be undermined by an Other that remains utterly indifferent to the concerns they express. Resnick and Whitaker’s analyses of the 1988 debates over free trade with the United States offer forceful proof that unacceptable democratic frustrations are indeed a standing risk for English-speaking Canada, even beyond the constitutional domain – for both aggregative and deliberative reasons. The free-trade election, they argue, was an epochal moment in Canadian history and, especially, the history of

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English Canada. “What was at issue in 1988 was the nature of Canada and its future as political community.”104 Canadian sovereignty relative to the United States, Canada’s ability to maintain a comparatively strong welfare state as well as the values such policies reflect, and English-speaking Canada’s capacity to survive as a distinctive cultural unit were all seen to be at play.105 Both authors agree, furthermore, that the importance of the issue generated a spectacular instance of democratic mobilization in English- speaking Canada. “This federal campaign saw a level of political discussion and interest at the grassroots level without parallel in recent Canadian history,” according to Resnick. “This was no ordinary election, but implicitly a referendum on Canada’s future. Free trade became the touchstone of powerful sentiments about Canadian identity, and brought to the fore in English Canada a sense of nationalism that usually lingers far below the surface. It affected Prairie farmers and BC loggers, Maritime lobster fishermen and Ontario autoworkers, Toronto literati, as well as PEI artists and Vancouver cultural activists, and environmentalists and feminists wherever they lived.”106 Or, in Whitaker’s words, “[t]he election of 1988 was the English-Canadian equivalent of the 1980 sovereignty-association referendum in Quebec.”107 It offered what should have been an exemplary moment of democratic deliberation and public engagement: a community of interlocutors coming together to determine their shared fate. The high ideal of deliberative democracy seemed manifest, at least for a moment. Even the best quantitative analysis of that campaign agrees that “1988 ... revealed the capacity of Canadian voters to deliberate, to behave like actors who rarely appear on the stage of voting research: citizens.”108 Presumably this undefined term is meant to denote something like the high-minded engagement with public good given in the deliberative vision. Of course the Progressive Conservatives won a convincing majority in the House and forged ahead with free trade. What is critical here is the decisive impact of the Quebec vote. “[W]ith a more even distribution of votes and seats among the three political parties in Quebec, the Conservatives would have been held to a minority or razor-thin majority, insufficient to foist the trade deal on the country.”109 Neither Resnick nor Whitaker discount other factors – e.g., Canada’s single-memberplurality electoral structure and the massive corporate electoral spending in favour of the F.T.A. – but both underline the importance of Quebec’s bloc vote, which, they believe, trumped what might have been a majority or near-majority vote in English-speaking Canada

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against the trade deal. Quebec played a decisive role in this most primordial of existential moments for English-speaking Canadians. Well, so what? As Resnick and Whitaker would have it, a great deal. But there are two ways of reading their argument here. One would suggest that Quebec frustrated the capacity of English-speaking Canada to satisfy its preferences on a matter of epochal importance. This is unacceptable because Quebec and Canada constitute communities with insufficient overlapping solidarity to justify the frustration of the will of one by the other. There is also a deliberative implication, concerned less with results than process. Resnick and Whitaker argue that the Québécois discourse was oblivious to the profound implications of Quebecers’ decision for English-speaking Canada – and frankly uninterested in those consequences. Instead, Quebecers debated the 1988 campaign in largely self- contained, self-referential, and ultimately self-serving terms. “[Y]ou voted in this election with supreme indifference to the issues of both Canadian identity and appropriate models of society so clearly posed in the rest of Canada,” Resnick accuses his apocryphal “Québécois friend.” “What mattered to your political elites ... were the gains (real or hypothetical) Quebec stood to make from the deal ... towards our national identity ... your attitude bespoke a sacred egoism bordering on contempt.”110 In like fashion, Whitaker praises the 1988 debate as “Canadian nationalism’s finest hour” but also asserts that “Quebec stood entirely outside the passions [it] generated.”111 Nonetheless Quebecers’ votes “made the difference.” The outcome of a pivotal moment of democratic decision for English Canadians was determined, in effect, by a community that did not share its concerns and (more importantly for the deliberative argument) did not even attempt to incorporate those concerns into its collective deliberation. Resnick, indeed, chooses to take the 1988 campaign as a symptom of a deeper indifference. “Where are your experts on English Canadian political life, on Canadian, as opposed to Quebec, history, on our literary or cultural evolution? How much space is given to Canadian, as opposed to Quebec, themes in your elementary or secondary school texts? How many of your academics have spent any time in English Canadian universities or paid much attention to our debates? How much coverage is there in Le Devoir or La Presse of developments in English Canada, except when they directly impinge on you?”112 Recall Mill: “The same books, newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, do not reach them ... ”

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Resnick here offers a compelling illustration of the dangers of multinational democracy as Mill and Miller describe them. Where the deliberative requirements of solidarity and reciprocity are lacking, consequences such as those that Resnick and Whitaker attribute to Quebec’s role in 1988 are always a danger.113 If it is true that fellow-feeling and reciprocity are absent in Quebecers’ attitudes to English-speaking Canada, then Quebec’s presence in the polity has adverse implications, not just for constitutional politics but, potentially, for any moment of crucial democratic decision for English-speaking Canada. What we have here, then, are scholars who purport squarely to face the “fact” that Quebecers’ own allegiances do not meaningfully include Canada. There is a defensive or reactive quality to their reflections on these matters; once we see what is actually going on in Quebec, they seem to say, and once we observe how Quebecers actually behave in Canadian politics, we English-speaking Canadians will shed the illusion that Quebecers are meaningfully “of us.” For they do not behave as if we were “of them.” We must recognize them, finally, as other – just as the nationalistes have long demanded. Indeed, some such recognition may be an indispensable step to the just treatment of Quebec within Canadian institutions, as I suggested in chapter 2.114 But here the upshot is that this “other” cannot continue to exercise its self-serving will over us. That is inconsistent with our own best democratic realization. It is worth emphasizing the contrast with a more traditional and unity-driven perspective. Samuel LaSelva, in his admirable defence of Quebec-in-Canada, claims that “[t]he great danger of Canadian democracy is that citizens will deny each other mutual recognition and destroy the country.”115 But from the perspective at play here, the real danger is that the quest for reconciliation will impede the realization of richer forms of democracy. Unity is not a self-justifying end on this democratic account, a value to be balanced off against other goods; it is, rather, a good to be pursued only insofar as it is compatible with the best realization of various democratic ideals. If Quebec distracts from these, or actively undercuts them, English-speaking Canada is better off without it. Such are among the possible consequences of the position I explored earlier, which refuses recourse to Underhill’s vision of enlightened elites but accepts the pessimistic account of Canada as a “deeply divided” society that justified such recourse. Also given in the position is a monism about political values: democracy, on this view, is the one great end of politics. Other goods (such as unity) cannot legitimately make claims on it.

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7 conclusions: deep diversity, weak democracy? Our quest for a principled defence of Quebec-in-Canada seems to have foundered, even at this early stage, on a multifaceted democratic critique. Among its ingredients: (a) Quebec’s presence has offered a historically significant argument in favour of elitist brands of politics, thus helping to retard the development of a participatory constitutional politics in Canada (or, if we believe Horowitz, radical democracy writ large). (b) Quebec has consistently directed Canadian discourse toward questions of federalism and constitution and, therefore, if we assume a limited bundle of political “energies,” distracted from other more “normal” issues, such as social justice, economic planning, or alternative institutional reforms. (c) Quebec has made it harder for English-speaking Canadians to build the kind of polity that a majority of them might want because its divergent agenda helps to paralyze reform. (d) Quebec, being a democratic community onto itself, is a standing threat to the prospects for deliberative democracy in Englishspeaking Canada. Democratic deliberation in our multinational state is not informed by the crucial requirements of solidarity and reciprocity. If, all told, these claims do not constitute an open-and-shut case for dissociation on democratic grounds, they certainly load the dice against the sort of resounding affirmation of Quebec-in-Canada that we seek. They seem to show that democratic goods cannot be the source of this affirmation. If anything, such goods are impoverished by our multinational diversity. Can we salvage the situation? Insofar as Whitaker et al. paint an accurate picture, probably not. A multinational polity without solidarity, and hence no reciprocity across national lines, is a dismal candidate for statecraft. But it’s far from obvious that matters are this bleak. Our English-Canadian dissociationists tend to take deep and sustained disagreement as proof of absent solidarity. And so they neglect other possible explanations for that disagreement. The Horowitz/Whitaker/Resnick position acquires some of its force through an elision of two concerns. In the introductory discussion of deliberative democracy (subsection 1, above), I distinguished between

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the requirements of solidarity, or reciprocity, and mutual intelligibility. These are distinct categories of problem. But our three dissociationist authors tend to infer the lack of the former from the absence of the latter. They are keenly aware of the solidarity/reciprocity problem; but they also take for granted that we can never “square the circle” and reconcile the seemingly contradictory substantive positions that divide Quebec from English-speaking Canada. Indeed, they assume that what might be failures of understanding are indicators of weak solidarity, as manifest through irreconcilable disagreement. It is as if Englishspeaking Canada and Quebec have communicated with perfect clarity and, following deep reflection and working from the fullest possible understanding, have each rejected the position of the other. But that can’t be taken as given. That a distressing percentage of English-speaking Canadians flinch from any meaningful recognition of Quebec’s distinctive identity, for instance, is not necessarily an indication of a lack of meaningful fellow-feeling for their Québécois compatriots. It might instead be symptomatic of a failure to understand just where Quebec is coming from when it makes this demand – a failed leap of empathy, for instance. It might be a misinterpretation of intentions – a sense that all Quebec nationalists really are separatists playing Canadians for fools or just want to grab a disproportionate share of the federal pie. Or it could be rooted in incoherent notions of liberal justice, as per Bercuson and Cooper or Scowen; and so on. Similarly, Quebecers’ apparent insensitivity to the agonies of Englishspeaking Canada over issues such as free trade might be based less on indifference than a simple misreading of the signals from what is, after all, a different and perhaps subtly inscrutable societal culture. “Most Quebecers,” claims Daniel Latouche in his fierce reply to Resnick, were “convinced that free trade was a federal initiative supported by the English Canadian community.”116 Latouche admits here that Quebecers may have been confused about English-speaking Canada but denies that they were totally indifferent to it. For that matter, even Quebecers’ tendency to advocate a radically asymmetrical federalism may indicate a failure to think through the ramifications for Quebec’s representation in Canadian institutions117 as much as hostility or apathy toward Canada. Probably it is some combination, but conceding this destroys the straightforward argument from absent solidarity. There is some evidence that the circle can be squared, that the unity dossier can be, not settled, but considerably tidied up. The Meech Lake Accord exemplifies a moderate proposal that would have assuaged

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Quebec’s most important concerns while still leaving a basis for shared community in Canada (although some would dispute that, of course). And that Canadians outside Quebec by and large rejected Meech proves nothing about the status of fellow-feeling across our societal cultures. The extent of the elision between the two categories of problem – solidarity/reciprocity and mutual comprehension – can be shown if we return, at greater length, to Whitaker’s discussion of the “democratic paradox.” He writes that “[t]he theory of the sovereignty of the people must rest on a definition of the term ‘people’ ... the very notion of a sovereign people is that of a community of people capable of exercising collective political choice.” Community is logically prior to democracy; solidarity is the issue. So far, so good. But then Whitaker adds that “the more exclusionary the definition of the people, the less heterodox, diverse and conflictual the people become, the better democracy works.” Additional ingredients have appeared: heterodoxy, diversity, conflict – in a word, complexity. Part of Whitaker’s point seems to be that complexity engenders conflict, and conflict in turn makes it harder to sustain the solidarity necessary for a democracy that “works.” We thus return to Mill’s caveat, which risks being forgotten by too exclusive an emphasis on solidarity (as if this were some inexplicable quality, with no objective foundations at all). Fellow-feeling, wrote Mill, “is proportionately weakened by the [absence of] identity of language, literature ... and of race and recollection.” Multinational diversity, the presence of distinct societal cultures within a state, thus complicates democracy because the shared ground can never be taken for granted. It must continually be worked through, grappled with, framed in mutually accessible languages. Less can be assumed, and more must be negotiated; democratic dialogue must occur within each constitutive nationality and across them. The challenges of mutual intelligibility and mutual justifiability are aggravated by this deep, structural kind of cultural pluralism. But that these are demanding goals does not make them unattainable. Nor does even a long period of disagreement prove that solidarity is an illusion. Insofar as our authors infer a lack of solidarity from the existence of incommensurable visions of the polity, then, they merely repackage the untenable aggregative argument for dissociation (that extant preferences would be maximized thereby). They just assert that because citizens view their positions as incommensurable, it must be so. No real allowance is made for the possibility of a revision of these attitudes, informed by deeper public reflection and debate.

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So if there is neither solidarity nor reciprocity across the borders of Quebec and English-speaking Canada, an argument for dissociation indeed follows. But there is reason to believe that some degree of meaningful fellow-feeling exists here. And some scholars have offered hope for the problem of mutual comprehension and justification, in light of the involvement of mass publics in constitutional politics.118 Matthew Mendelsohn points out that the insolubility thesis – i.e., that constitutional paralysis is the inevitable outcome of incompatible demands – neglects the ways in which institutions help to structure the nature of behaviour. Pessimistic scholars such as Ajzenstat and Lusztig “took the state of public opinion as immutable, without recognizing that a different kind of integrative public process could have mobilized opinion in a different way.”119 If mass publics have seemed to incarnate the worst kind of aggregative behaviours in constitutional politics, that might be because their involvement has been largely restricted to referenda – a form of participation that lends itself to this. Noël looks to the process of “mini constituent assemblies” that preceded the negotiations over the Charlottetown Accord, in which a representative array of “ordinary” citizens proved able to modify their previous positions in light of mutual dialogue, as clues to a more effective process.120 Mendelsohn expands on this idea, suggesting that a range of experiments in “public brokerage,” such as constituent assemblies, community-based discussion groups, study circles, citizen juries, and so on, might offer clues as to how mass publics can be trained in the more deliberative democratic arts. Now (as he is at pains to stress), this is a long way from a constitutional panacea. But it does help to illustrate the contingency of our current dilemma. There may yet be ways of steering Canada toward richer models of democracy despite the undeniably profound issues dividing us; Mendelsohn’s point is that we will not be able to say just how deep the divide is until we make mass publics truly integral to the constitutional process. This would still be a gamble, of course; and a very long-term gamble at that. It would take considerable labour to reach a point where we can say, with some confidence, that English-speaking Canadians and Quebecers have finally understood one another and truly determined the extent to which they are divided by irreconcilable moral differences. Most fundamentally, Mendelsohn’s project still fails to offer principled reasons why trying is preferable to giving up.121 The dissociationists of English-speaking Canada, working in a tradition that I associated with Mill, give some rather potent democratic reasons for

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choosing the latter course. Mendelsohn shows that their more participatory vision might ultimately prove compatible with Quebec-inCanada, and this at least blunts the edge of their critique. But we want more than this. We want a ringing principled endorsement of our multinational state. Such an endorsement could take two forms, relative to the democratic critique just canvassed. One would involve asserting that democracy is only one of many political values worthy of our allegiance. It would argue, contra the absolute preference for democratic principles as the only admissible criteria of justification, that the best realization of democracy can legitimately be traded off against the realization of other goods. For instance, if we could find morally compelling reasons for Quebec-in-Canada rooted not in democratic ideals, but in some other cluster of values – say, liberal values – then we might possess a moral counterweight to what amounts to an argument for democratic purity. Democracy is a high value, but so is liberalism; if Quebec-inCanada represents gains in the latter field, that might excuse some losses in the former. The second approach would be less willing to surrender the democratic ground. It would argue that the positions hitherto explored work from impoverished or partial understandings of democratic possibility and that Quebec-in-Canada is important to the realization of those possibilities. The chapters to follow argue that we can make the endorsement at issue, and in both these ways. We can identify compelling goods besides democracy that help us to affirm Quebec-in-Canada. And we can ground our polity in a richer conception of democracy than those discussed here – a conception implicit in Mendelsohn’s thesis and, indeed, vibrantly at play in the thought of Mill himself. But this last claim must wait. I want first to consider whether secession might be incompatible with justice; a possibility that evokes debates over the moral requirement that partition be part of the secession of Quebec and also sparks the question of how, or if, Quebec-in-Canada facilitates the best realization of Canadian liberalism. Beyond these concerns with justice beckons a further horizon of principled affirmations – which includes Canada’s duty to exemplify certain values, complex fraternity, and, finally, the richer, dialogical vision of democracy hinted at above.

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section two Affirming Quebec-in-Canada: Justice and Liberalism

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4 Just Secession? Partition Reconsidered

1 introduction The challenge is set. We need to uncover principled affirmations that could defeat, or at least deflect, the democratic critique of Quebec-inCanada explored above. And there is no better example of an antisecessionist argument from intrinsic consequences than the claim that the secession of Quebec, at least as envisaged by most sovereigntists, would unjustly deny to federalist minorities the same right that Quebec claims for itself – namely, the right to redraw the territorial boundaries of their polity. Partitionists thus argue that the territorial division of Quebec should be a sine qua non of Quebec’s accession to independence. Such arguments, of course, defend Quebec-in-Canada by default, purporting to expose the moral turpitude of any secession undertaken without extravagant territorial costs for Quebec. Given the focus of this book on English-speaking Canada, our main interest here is in resolving whether a remainder Canada would be obliged to defend the partition principle (as, say, a condition for successful negotiations over sovereignty) or else be implicated in injustice. Partitionism draws from diverse sources. Partly animated by a prophylactic desire to defuse the threat of sovereignty by raising its costs, it also argues, prudentially, for the commercial necessity of establishing Canadian territorial corridors through a sovereign Quebec.1 But the morally interesting partitionist arguments revolve around three distinct, if sometimes overlapping, principles: (a) rule of law, (b) a “primary right” of citizens or national minorities to be self-determining and thus to decide for themselves the boundaries of their state, and

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(c) a “remedial right” of partition generated by injustices imputed to Quebec sovereignty. (A) is somewhat brusquely dealt with below. Many legal objections to secession can be avoided by the expedient of good-faith constitutional negotiations over the terms of independence; and beyond this, Canadian law, being something less than unarguably just in relation to Quebec, can’t be thought entirely self-justifying. Indeed, as we’ll eventually see, this chapter insists only that the rule of law poses a (nearly) intractable moral problem for secession at one key point – namely, the Aboriginal treaty rights entrenched in the Canadian constitution under section 35. (B) and (c) receive more sustained attention here. In discussing (b) we find that, although many sovereigntists have been tempted to frame secession as a “primary right,” this puts them in a predictably difficult position vis-à-vis partition and also gives English-speaking Canada some reason to support the partition principle in negotiations over secession. Indépendentistes are on safer ground framing secession as a “remedial” right. But I shall argue that even this formulation, unless accompanied by a right of partition for Aboriginal nations within Quebec, leaves Quebec in the position of violating important treaty obligations and Canada in the position of either insisting upon partition or violating the same obligations. The latter course would seem to collide not only with rule of law but also with our immediate common-sense intuitions about justice; nonetheless I shall argue that, on this scenario, secession should trump partition. If we take the remedial argument for secession seriously, then we ought not to use the specific treaty rights at issue to deny Quebec the remedy it seeks – as long as the pursuit of that remedy is qualified in appropriate ways. Secession without partition can, with care, be justified: it need not be intrinsically unjust.

2 partitionist arguments from the rule of law One of Allen Buchanan’s major arguments against secession is what he calls “preventing wrongful taking,” which has two facets: the “lost investment” argument and the “theft of territory” argument.2 The former applies when a seceding region proposes simply to seize investments made in the region by the wider state. For instance, the secession of Quebec would require the new state to take possession of a wide array of federal infrastructure on its territory. This would be theft. However, as Buchanan notes, the moral force of this claim can be defused

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by issuing compensation for these seizures. The level of compensation must, furthermore, take into account “whatever effects of discriminatory redistribution”3 the seceding unit has suffered at the hands of the state. Whether or not Quebec can reasonably claim to have endured such discriminatory redistribution, the “lost investment” argument would hold only if a sovereign Quebec refused to brook any good-faith efforts at determining a fair rate of compensation. The “stolen territory” argument is more difficult. Buchanan observes that secession requires “establishing that the [existing] state does not have sovereignty over the territory, and establishing that the secessionists do or should have sovereignty over it.”4 Since most states owe their origins to some “conquest, genocide, or fraud,”5 secessionists can typically pass the first test, but have a harder time with the second. A seceding unit may have no prior legal claim to the territory in question; or its historical claims may themselves rest on genocide or conquest. Under such conditions, Buchanan suggests, extant legal claims ought to trump the newly concocted pretensions of the secessionists. In lieu of some powerful, overriding moral consideration that would trump territorial titles, then, secession entails an inherent wrong. The seizure of territory to which secessionists have no valid title could only be excused on grounds of remedial justice – as a necessary part of the process of correcting or escaping some greater evil. Applied to Canada, the “stolen territory” argument proposes that a secession encompassing all of Quebec’s present-day territory would necessitate the seizure of lands to which a sovereign Quebec has no valid claim.6 This emphasis on valid title, of course, is a manifestation of the deeper principle of rule of law. Some supporters of partition, including Albert and Shaw, David Varty, Bruce Hodgins, and Peter W. Hogg, essentially apply the “stolen territory” argument to Quebec’s claims to its northern regions, including the James Bay and Ungava territories, over which the province assumed (partial) jurisdiction by virtue of concurrent legislation of the governments of Canada and Quebec in 1898 and 1912.7 Varty, for instance, advances the legal argument that these lands were given to Quebec as a province and that “[t]here was an implied condition that the Province of Quebec was going to remain part of Canada.”8 Secession would violate the conditions under which Quebec holds these lands in trust for the Crown. They would, therefore, revert to the trustee that delegated them to Quebec in the first place, i.e., the Canadian state. Albert and Shaw supplement this basic insight with a series

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of doubtful historical claims about the original borders of New France – the territory of which is all that they are prepared to concede to a sovereign Quebec (!). Whatever the technical merits of these claims, which are best arbitrated in forums more befitting these highly baroque aspects of Canadian law, the whole “stolen territory” thesis risks being undercut by its assumption that secession must unfold according to what Monahan calls a scenario of “legal discontinuity”: a unilateral accession to independence, amounting to a seizure of territory.9 Such was, in fact, the operative scenario of sovereigntists for most of the 1990s. The Parti Québécois built its strategy, prior to 1995, on the premise that, were negotiations with Canada to fail after one year, Quebec would unilaterally declare its independence, quickly win international recognition, and present a hapless Canada with a fait accompli, its borders protected by the international principles of uti possidetis juris and “effectivity.” The former favours the integrity of borders of newly independent states, while the latter accords de jure recognition of a territorial claim on the basis of sustained de facto control of the territory.10 A unilateral declaration of independence (U.D.I.) would be a prototypical target for the charge of “stolen territory.” Of course, even this raises peculiar paradoxes, since international recognition would seem to bestow on a sovereign Quebec precisely that aura of legal legitimacy assumed away by the “stolen territory” argument. But, granting the accuracy of legal analyses such as those of Varty, the above scenario would entail an act of theft under Canadian law until such time as Canada recognized a sovereign Quebec; and, if Buchanan is right (and it is not self-evident that he is right), it would remain morally indefensible until that moment.11 Two points must be made about this. One is that a scenario of legal continuity is also possible and – given sovereigntists’ need to legitimize their project before global opinion – rather more likely.12 In the Secession Reference (1998), the Supreme Court established a basic framework whereby a province may legitimately secede. Secession, it declared, must unfold in a fashion consistent with the rule of law, democracy, constitutionalism, federalism, and respect for minorities. It therefore requires a constitutional amendment, which in turn demands negotiations with the other provinces and Ottawa, as well as “other participants” (presumably, those minorities whose protection, the Reference informs us, is an “underlying constitutional principle”).13

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Under this scenario of “legal continuity,” the boundaries of a sovereign Quebec would be determined by a negotiated settlement with the state of Canada, the other provinces, and “other participants,” including affected Aboriginal peoples.14 Assuming such a settlement, it follows that whatever territory falls to a sovereign Quebec would not be “wrongfully taken.” By definition, it would accrue to the new state under the rule of law and the consent of possible rival claimants (unless, perhaps, a republican-minded independent Quebec proceeded to repudiate its relationship to the Crown, which retains ultimate legal title over what Varty calls the “Ungava” territory. But this is a rather unlikely and, in any case, downright Byzantine legal scenario).15 The Reference does not specify what would happen in the event of failed negotiations. The most plausible interpretation is that, having been unable to secure the necessary constitutional amendment, Quebec would remain a province of Canada; in which case a determinedly secessionist Quebec conceivably could fall back on a U.D.I. Yet – and now we come to the second point – despite the faith of some sovereigntists in the efficacy of uti possidetis juris and the effectivity principle, Canada would retain substantial leverage in such an event.16 In the first place, the international community might prove leery of according recognition to a putative country created in defiance of the path-breaking legal regime developed in the Reference.17 But more to the mark, “[i]n order to resist effective control by a seceding Quebec, Canadian authorities [would] not have to resort to the use of force. Rather, within Quebec they can continue to apply Canadian laws and exercise jurisdiction, e.g., by maintaining Canadian airports and seaports and customs at U.S.-Canada border crossings, and providing programs and services to indigenous peoples who refuse to recognize an illegal and illegitimate secession.”18 Canada, in other words, has at its disposal a range of techniques to checkmate Quebec in the effectivity game, to the extent that “the future of two-thirds of the province may be put into question.”19 It might not be in Canada’s interest to deploy these measures; but then, justice might demand precisely this, enjoining Canada to enforce the rule of law against an illegal secession that seeks to deprive large numbers of recalcitrants of their citizenship. I shall argue later that rule of law is not the only value worth considering; political philosophy exists in part to offer a critical standard by which we can evaluate a given legal and constitutional order. If secession could be shown to be necessary on grounds of remedial justice, the

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“stolen territory” argument would lose at least some of its force, even given a U.D.I. For now, I want to take seriously the vastly preferable possibility of a negotiated settlement leading to a constitutional amendment that allows Quebec to extricate itself from the Canadian order. Doing so requires that we go beyond legalistic arguments about whether secession would constitute theft and consider the nature of Canada’s moral obligations in such negotiations, e.g., which parts of Quebec territory Canada could turn over against the will of significant numbers of its inhabitants, in good conscience.20 Assuming, then, the legal process given in the Secession Reference, we must turn from rule of law to some consideration of alternative justifications for partition, namely, arguments from primary and remedial rights.21

3 partition as a moral right The most sweeping defence of partition argues that citizens possess a “primary right” to redraw the borders of their state and, thus, that they ought to be free both to secede and to opt out of secession by partitioning the territory of the seceding state. Secession and partition are, therefore, taken to be different expressions of the same principle. The James Bay Crees seem to imply some normative distinction between the two but do not offer any reasons as to why this might be, and in the absence of such reasons, we may take that assumption as broadly valid.22 There is a lot of debate around the ethics of secession. Much of it turns on the question of whether secession is a “primary right” – a legitimate choice accruing to particular units (peoples, nations, or other forms of political association) – or a “remedial-right only,” permissible only as an escape from, or remedy to, serious injustices.23 Assuming, for the moment, that secession and/or partition is a primary right, we further can distinguish between theories that extend this right to associative groups and those that restrict it to units defined by more ascriptive criteria such as national identity.24 Associative-group versions of the primary right theory argue that partition should be available to any territorially concentrated cluster of citizens within a jurisdiction, subject to conditions of viability: for instance, the unit must be capable of ensuring its inhabitants of the continued enjoyment of just and at least minimally efficient government. These theories generally proceed from such principles as con-

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sent of the governed and the right of political association. Thus, Richard Jandra launches a Rousseaunian contractual argument as the basis of his version of the primary right, while Scott Reid builds such a case from the principle of “individual and local- majority choice,”25 or what he calls “local self-determination,”26 nominating electoral polls as the optimal unit of partition – i.e., the most likely to ensure that the largest number of citizens wind up in their desired country. Political philosophers who support a primary right of secession, for their part, often acknowledge that it must be extended to sub-units within the seceding community. Margaret Moore, for example, combines a highly subjective definition of nationality with a consent theory of political obligation to argue that, if a seceding unit contains “concentrated minorities” of its own, it cannot guarantee the sanctity of its own borders.27 A more restrictive approach limits a primary right of secession and/ or partition to groups fulfilling a given set of ascriptive criteria. In the Quebec context, the James Bay Crees claim a right of partition based on the principle of national self-determination; and, depending on how the term “nation” is defined, such a precept would not necessarily be available to such entities as municipalities, regions, or anglophone and ethno-cultural minorities within Quebec. This is not to deny the considerable difficulties involved in determining which communities qualify as nations, or in explaining why a right of self-determination should extend only to nations and not to other groups. It merely identifies the potentially restrictive nature of the right given in the argument.28 The Grand Council of the Crees (Eeyou Istchee) explains that “[t]here is no Cree independence movement, and we are not looking to secede in the present context ... [w]e do, however, reserve our right to secede if we are forced into a secessionist Québec. In that case, we demand that the principle of self-determination will be equally applied to Aboriginal peoples in Québec without discrimination.”29 It is worth noting that the Grand Council does not here assert that a primary right of secession is implicated in the principle of national selfdetermination.30 Rather, it insists on consistency. If Quebec, as a selfdefined nationality, claims for itself a primary right of secession, it cannot deny an analogous right of partition to the national minorities within its own territory. This demand for consistency is, of course, a rhetorical favourite. “If Canada is divisible, then Quebec must also be divisible,” write Monahan, Bryant, and Coté, striking the familiar chord. “Quebec must

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accord to minorities within the province the same rights and privileges that it asserts on its own behalf against Canada.”31 Like the James Bay Crees, Monahan et al. do not concede the validity of a primary right of secession; they do, however, take for granted that the sovereignty movement claims such a right for Quebec and that it cannot, therefore, deny comparable rights to assorted (and unspecified) units within the province. The implications for English-speaking Canadians seem clear: were we simply to ignore this requirement of consistency in our negotiations over secession, we would risk being guilty of what Hodgins calls “cowardly connivance” in a serious act of hypocrisy.32 We would be complicit in the bad faith of those who deny to others what they claim for themselves and, more to the point, we would be abandoning partitionist minorities to what their own erstwhile government would define as a fundamental injustice. Common sense seems to be right about this. The consistency requirement poses insuperable difficulties for any sovereigntist argument that seeks both to maintain the territorial integrity of Quebec and to justify secession on the basis of a primary right – such as, say, Quebec’s “right to national self-determination.” Under such circumstances, the burden of consistency would suggest that Canada has weighty reasons to support credible demands for partition and certainly places a compelling moral obligation on Quebec to accede to those demands. Obviously, an associative-group argument for secession would open the door to largescale partitioning of the territory of Quebec by a number of recalcitrant communities. If Quebecers are entitled to secede simply because they comprise an aggregation of individuals wishing to do so, then any association of individuals within Quebec must have a comparable right to choose otherwise. While the argument from national selfdetermination might help to restrict the number of potential units of partition, it remains the case that the homelands of eleven Aboriginal peoples – whom it is difficult to disqualify as nations33 – overlap with Quebec territory. These peoples would be completely justified in emulating Quebec and exercising their right of self-determination by redrawing the borders of the state that contains them. And, except where such a project would create intolerable logistical problems, or injustices, Canada would be morally reasonable in doing what it could to support them.34 But it is also possible for sovereigntists to build their case entirely from a remedial right of secession. Given the multi-faceted definition of justice offered in chapter 2, we may emulate Buchanan in pinpointing

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the following as legitimate bases for a claim to a remedial right of secession: violations of “(1) individual rights (including the basic civil and political rights as well as equality of opportunity) but also (2) states’ rights in federal systems (more accurately, constitutional powers for subordinate administrative units), and (3) what Kymlicka calls minority group rights.”35 Gross attacks on any of these three principles can undermine the legitimacy of the regime, corrode bonds of political obligation, and thus justify secession or revolution.36 We can, controversially, include under (3) the argument from equal respect derived from Taylor and Margalit and Raz, according to which the constituent units of a multinational polity have a right to some formal recognition and accommodation of their distinctive identities. The first and third of these principles will receive no extensive additional elaboration here (which is not to deny that they are sites of dispute). I would like to say more about the second of these, however, concerning states’ rights. This position builds on the sanctity of contracts. The moral power of a genuine, historical (as opposed to apocryphal) contract rests on the insight that “promising is surely as close to being an indisputable ground of moral requirement as anything is.”37 It is important, for our purposes, to remember that “[t]he traditional liberal-democratic theory of revolution, stemming especially from Locke, insists that the bonds of political obligation are broken, and the political union dissolved, when the government violates the fundamental terms of political authority.”38 As noted, these might include specifically contractually established group or individual rights. “To accommodate federal systems, we can supplement the traditional liberal theory of individual rights with constitutionally designated states’ rights ... If the central government violates basic individual rights or states’ rights, it may be resisted with force.”39 This seems a plausible enough rendering of the Lockean tradition of remedial theory. “Terms of political authority” need not be explicit. Canada’s original constitution was (as Wheare put it, in a much over-used and abused phrase) “quasi-federal,” designed with a certain centralist bias. Such was the document to which the representatives of Canada East agreed in 1867. Considerable documentation attests to the subsequent turn toward “provincial rights.”40 The continually shifting grounds of the practical (as opposed to purely formal) terms of union, coupled with the inevitable contestability of constitutional interpretation and the availability of arguments from intention rather than legal letter, offer

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plenty of ammunition for those like Daniel Latouche who claim that Canada was founded on an implicit contract, according to which Quebec’s distinctive “national” identity was both reflected in, and upheld by, the sanctity of provincial autonomy.41 Similar arguments flow from a long tradition of thought in Quebec, which reaches back to the Confederation debates. “[Lower Canada] wanted to be separated as much as possible from the other provinces, to have an autonomous FrenchCanadian country under the control of French Canadians. Conservative propaganda made Confederation attractive by stressing, and even exaggerating, the powers which the provinces would have, and by minimizing those of the federal government. It emphasized the separateness and sovereignty of the provinces.”42 So the specifically FrenchCanadian reading of the “federal contract” reaches back to 1867 itself. It is not primarily based on legal formalism but on implicit understanding: the spirit of a contract rather than its legal essence. In Quebec, then, secessionist arguments (2) – from contract and states’ rights – and (3) – from culture – tend to run together, connected by the old saw that the province of Quebec bears a particular relationship to the French Canadian people. Quebec is the primary expression of the francophone half of a de facto, bi-national compact. Recognition, or at least ambiguity on this score, was part of the federal bargain.43 The Lockean argument about the “fundamental terms of political authority” would therefore apply to any violation of this compact. In a series of important writings, Guy Laforest has gathered these threads, expounding on the constitutive injustices that the constitutional order visits upon Quebec and weaving a sustained and powerful case for the destruction of that order, or else Quebec’s extrication from it, on remedial grounds.44 Laforest’s most famous argument applies Lockean contract theory to the substance and process of the 1982 Constitution Act and argues that the imposition of that Act over the objections of the Quebec legislature constituted a serious breach of trust that undermined the moral legitimacy of the federal government and dissolved the bonds of obligation between the Quebec people and the Canadian state. The new constitution restricts Quebec’s movement in crucial areas of jurisdiction, such as education, while depriving it of its historic veto in favour of a cumbersome amending formula the net effect of which has been to shelter the constitutional order from future, Quebec-friendly amendments.45 “A constitutional reform modifying Quebec’s legislative powers to such an extent, without the explicit con-

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sent of the people, is profoundly illegitimate ... [f]rom Locke’s point of view, pure and simple dissolution of the government responsible should have been the immediate consequence of the reform. In a way, there has not been a federal government worthy of the name in Quebec since ... 1982.”46 Nor is remedy imminent. The heated public debates over the Meech Lake Accord revealed, he explains, that the Charter has contributed to a remarkable reconstruction of the anglo-Canadian identity. EnglishCanadian political culture now revolves around individual rights, the legal equality of provinces, and multiculturalism.47 A distinctive constitutional status for Quebec is widely assumed to contradict the first three values; as far as the rest of Canada is concerned, Quebec must remain, constitutionally, a province like the others. The Charter “has become the cornerstone, the founding myth, of Canadian nationalism,”48 which can tolerate no special arrangements for Quebec. Now the stringent amending formula – which requires the unanimous approval of all provinces for changes on the scale of Meech Lake – is barrier enough to Quebec’s ambitions. When this is added to a consensus outside Quebec that confuses a denial of Quebec’s “national fact” with liberal justice, the Charter emerges as an “impregnable fortress” buttressed by a combination of procedural and political-cultural defences. The latter have grown even more formidable in the wake of the Charlottetown Accord process, where the populations of each province were asked to vote on the Accord, establishing a precedent which should prove hard to break in future amendments. “Henceforth, the system appears incapable of openly accepting the specificity of Quebec, of welcoming the principle of duality into its institutions,” he claims.49 Thus, “[a]u Québéc, la fédération n’existe déjà plus.”50 Given that “la constitution est mort moralement au qc,” he concludes that “to extirpate Quebec from the claws of a negative and unjust constitution ... [should be] the first of [Quebec’s] priorities.”51 No wonder, then, that Laforest entitled one of his collections De l’urgence. Given his premises, Quebec is in an intolerable situation, hemmed in by a quasi-despotic constitutional order. That Quebecers rejected sovereignty-partnership in the 1995 referendum and have continued to participate in the federal order thereafter, clearly invalidates Laforest’s empirical assumption that the Meech Lake/Charlottetown fiascos exhausted their trust in the system. His analysis is faulty in other ways that can only be enumerated here: it massively overstates the substantive harms inflicted upon Quebec by

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the constitution of 1982; suffers from a constant slippage between questions relating to recognition and to la survivance; and favours the needlessly dichotomous, radical language of Locke over more moderate approaches.52 At the same time, many aspects of his critique of the constitutional order continue to resonate. Quebecers have not formally endorsed the substance or process of 1982, which did alter the terms of federal union. And this endorsement is no more likely or imminent than constitutional changes designed to address Quebec’s longrunning demands for “special status,” or even to assuage the new grievances introduced in 1982. Furthermore, although the constitution unquestionably gives Quebec a substantial zone of autonomy in which to exercise self-government and uphold its distinctive identity and shared purposes, it remains largely silent on its unique identity as a nationality-based unit. Given our (admittedly generous) criteria for a remedial right of secession, all of this coalesces into the proposition that, whether or not Quebecers choose to secede, they justly could do so, by virtue of Canada’s implacable resistance to a constitutional accommodation of their distinctive identity. Michel Seymour, Denis Monière, Jocelyne Couture, and Kai Nielsen are among those sovereigntists who justify independence using these kinds of arguments.53 Such arguments do not necessarily imply any blanket right of partition for recalcitrant communities within the province-cum-country. Consistency demands only that Quebec afford to its own national minorities the kind of constitutional accommodation it has demanded of Canada. Michel Seymour makes a case of this kind in La nation en question. “Les nations,” he argues, “peuvent dans des cas trés graves recourir à des mesures qui entraînent la violation de l’intégrité territoriale. Mais il faut pour ce faire des raisons morales très solides. Du point de vue des souverainistes québécois, le peuple québécois a de telles raisons. Le Canada refuse de lui reconnaître le statut de nation depuis toujours.”54 This is strictly a remedial stance. Indeed, Seymour strenuously defends the principle of territorial integrity against any putative primary right of secession. “[O]n ne peut accepter l’exercise d’un droit de secession qui serait fondé seulement sur une volonté arbitraire d’être rattaché à l’État de son choix” because such a right “se traduit par la violation de l’intégrité territoriale de l’Étate englobant.”55 Here we come to a crucial matter. If we accept the position that secession is a remedial right only, then, by extension, the right of partition becomes similarly restricted. It is significant, therefore, that important

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currents of secession theory do favour a remedial-right only approach to secession. Buchanan is again a key figure on this front, arguing for a restrictive position on the grounds that territorial integrity serves important moral purposes, including individuals’ “interest in the protection of individual security, rights, and expectations, and the interest in the integrity of political participation.”56 An internationally recognized primary right of secession,57 he claims, would undercut the former by creating a permanent risk of instability and weaken the latter by promoting “exit-based” rather than inclusive or “voice-based” politics. Such a primary right, if tied to the principle of national self-determination, could also generate perverse incentives by encouraging states to seek to assimilate and demobilize, rather than accommodate, national minorities.58 And as Wayne Norman points out, a theory of secession as a primary right, enforced under international law, would provide impetus for “opportunistic secessionist movements” which might not exist “in the absence of the currency and enforcement of the choice theory itself.”59 So remedial-right only theorists maintain that a more generous interpretation of the right of secession risks undercutting the stability that is one prerequisite for optimal liberal-democratic politics. This book makes no effort to settle the dispute between more and less restrictive theories of secession. But the above at least shows that Seymour is not tilting at windmills when he defends a remedial-right only stance. He works from premises consistent with major work in secession theory. Of course, Buchanan himself does not accept the argument that secession justly may follow from a denial of recognition (although he does concede that the violation of states’ rights, in federal systems, is a valid basis for remedial secession). But chapter 2 showed that at least a credible case can be made for recognition as something approaching a right in multinational states. Now it is not surprising to find Seymour arguing (a) that the Canadian state is unjust in its refusal to recognize the distinctive national identity of Quebec, (b) that such injustice warrants remedy in the form of secession, and (c) that secession is only defensible as a remedial right. For defeating the logic of partition requires that sovereigntists deny the existence of such a right and ground secession on the case for remedy. If secession is justified mainly on remedial grounds, the right of partition ceases to follow as a logical inference; it implies only a remedial right of partition. Once we establish that the Canadian constitution is sufficiently unjust vis-à-vis Quebec to validate a remedial secession, recalcitrant Quebecers are required to prove that partition is a necessary remedy for substantive

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injustices flowing from secession. They can no longer argue that, simply because Quebec may secede from Canada, they must, a priori, be permitted to secede from, or partition, a sovereign Quebec. On such a remedial-right only account, consistency would demand a right of partition for Aboriginal peoples only if Quebec refused to accord them the rights of recognition and autonomy that it demands from Canada. Accordingly, Seymour outlines a range of provisions for the equitable treatment of Aboriginal peoples within a sovereign Quebec. These include explicit recognition of their status as nations; respect for Aboriginals’ ancestral and treaty rights, as well as territory; full assumption by Quebec of the fiduciary obligations of the Canadian state; and constitutional entrenchment of a distinct Aboriginal order of government – federalism, in other words – complete with a veto over constitutional changes.60 Were Quebec to extend all this to its Aboriginal nations, the equivalent of which it has long demanded of the Canadian state on its own behalf, those nations would, Seymour argues, lose any legitimate grounds for a remedial right of secession and/or partition. Secession on purely remedial grounds would also neutralize the moral power of any sweeping claims to the territory of Quebec by the Canadian state. If English-speaking Canada cannot find the wherewithal to affirm Quebec’s identity as a nationality-based unit, it would seem to be morally obliged, at the very least, to allow Quebec to pursue this recognition outside the parameters of Confederation as painlessly as possible.61 While this condition need not rule out some degree of negotiation over borders, it certainly creates a prima facie case against supporting any large-scale partition of Quebec’s present territory, whether this be the northern territories claimed by various Aboriginal peoples or the western half of the island of Montreal (which is surely among the most economically and psychologically pivotal acreage in the province). Such, at least, are reasonable inferences from a recognition-based remedial argument for the secession of Quebec. But Seymour overlooks a key point. He states that a sovereign Quebec would be morally compelled to respect the substance of section 35 of the Canadian constitution, which protects the “existing” treaty rights of Aboriginals; and he specifies that Quebec must also assume Canada’s fiduciary obligations to its native peoples.62 This, he thinks, is necessary in order to ensure that the secession of Quebec implies no diminution of the justice afforded to Aboriginal peoples. What Seymour fails to consider is

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that Quebec’s accession to sovereignty may require violating both treaty rights and fiduciary duties. If so, then the process of secession itself would run afoul of Seymour’s own strictures for the just treatment of Aboriginal nations. By violating the legal rights of Aboriginal peoples, it would generate a remedial right of partition. Injustice, then, may be inherent in the very act of Quebec secession. As this is of critical importance to the question of whether partitionism can be defeated, let’s tackle the issues of treaties and fiduciary duties in turn.

4 trumping a remedial right? treaty rights and fiduciary duties On the question of treaty rights, Russell explains that [m]uch of northern Quebec is covered by the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement (1975) and the Northeastern Quebec Agreement (1978), comprehensive agreements entered into by Quebec, Canada, and the Cree, Inuit, and Naskapi peoples. These agreements include terms stating that they cannot be changed without the agreement of the signatories. Since the provisions of these treaties are constitutionally protected by section 35(1) [of the Constitution Act], it follows that, as long as section 35 remains in force in its present form, changes necessitated by Quebec sovereignty would have to be negotiated and agreed to by all parties.63 The crucial issue for our purposes is not, pace Kent McNeil, that secession would negate important treaties whereby Quebec has solidified its legal claim to assorted territories, thus nullifying its title to those lands and reverting them, by default, to the suzerainty of the original inhabitants.64 If the James Bay treaty were annulled, it is at least plausible to suppose that the affected peoples would return to the status of non-treaty Indians elsewhere in Canada, none of whom are thought necessarily to have a right of secession (or partition) by virtue of the absence of treaties. The issue, rather, is that the treaties in question explicitly and repeatedly name Canada as one of their principals. Removing Canada from the equation would require altering the text. “The [James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement] provides for both federal and Quebec obligations to continue in perpetuity in favour of the James Bay Cree and Inuit. In an independent Quebec, federal obligations would no longer be able to be carried out. Therefore, Quebec

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secession is incompatible with the legal and constitutional arrangements under JBNQA as agreed to by the Quebec government and approved by the Quebec National Assembly.”65 Section 35 implies that treaties may not unilaterally be annulled by governments. And this suggests not simply that Quebec’s borders will be a constitutionally mandated topic of negotiation in secession talks66 but that the specified Native peoples enjoy a constitutional right of veto over any attempt by Quebec secessionists to claim these territories for their desired new state. Less provocatively put, all the signatories would have to consent to such a change. “Even the presence of an agreement between the federal and Quebec government over the terms of secession would not be ... sufficient nor would an aboriginalQuebec entente so long as the third party was omitted.”67 The implication for our purposes seems to be that, insofar as Canada has a moral (as well as legal) duty to uphold Aboriginal treaty rights, it could not condone a secession process which omitted partition – at least not if the Aboriginal signatories to those treaties refuse to assent to Quebec’s claims on their land. Sovereigntists sometimes argue that, by virtue of the extinguishment clauses contained in the agreements, these nations have surrendered their claims over the lands in question and thus could not veto Quebec secession.68 Yet – setting aside the serious debate around the merits of extinguishment clauses themselves – abolishing federal obligations to the Cree, Inuit, and Naskapi peoples would mark a change to these agreements, which explicitly prohibit unilateral changes. Secession risks annulling the agreements that extinguish those claims. In any case, as we saw, governments can neither annul nor change treaties unilaterally.69 A related problem for Seymour’s thesis concerns the scope of Canada’s fiduciary duties toward indigenous peoples in the event of secession. Sovereigntists assume that Quebec would take up Canada’s share of those duties upon independence, but they may not be legally transferable without Aboriginal consent. In the view of Peter Hogg, “that [fiduciary] duty cannot be severed, or transferred to a new state, without the consent of the Aboriginal peoples to whom the duty is owed.”70 Of course, one can always offer competing interpretations of Canadian law. It is far from obvious that Hogg’s opinion is the last word on the transferability of fiduciary duties; Young, citing the Sparrow decision, argues that Aboriginals have a right to be consulted about actions affecting them, but that “[t]he fiduciary relationship, by its nature, does not oblige the crown to act in accord with Aboriginal peoples’

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views.” There is only a requirement to ascertain these via consultation.71 And a major study of the matter, commissioned for the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, concludes likewise. “[I]n the event that secession threatens to remove particular Aboriginal peoples, in whole or in part, from their current affiliation within a state, then their right of self-determination ... requires their consent to any change, or, absent such consent, a successfully negotiated adaptation to a new political framework.”72 So there is some uncertainty around the fiduciary issue. And perhaps even the treaty problem could be circumnavigated through ingenious legal reasoning. But either way, a stronger argument can be made in Seymour’s defence. Imposing punitive costs upon the exercise of a remedial right is ethically dubious. The whole point of remedy is to remove unjust, externally imposed costs. Using the rule of law to levy additional and weighty costs as a condition of remedy would undermine the concept of remedy itself. So insisting that Quebecers can only achieve justice for themselves by absorbing potentially massive losses of resources and territory contravenes the remedial principle. Citing the legal rights of Aboriginals as a barrier to Quebec’s exercise of a remedial right turns out to be problematic from the standpoint of justice. Of course, treaty obligations also imply powerful moral duties. At first glance, then, it seems that Quebec’s remedial right to recognition is simply in collision with the moral obligations Canada owes its Aboriginal partners. The temptation is to assume a moral saw-off. But I want to suggest that, granting Seymour’s premise that recognition is a right, the moral balance rests with the secessionists over the partitionists, in this case. The decisive question here is whether the treaty violations, seemingly inherent in secession, threaten any substantive good accruing to Aboriginals by virtue of those treaties. Otherwise, the objection becomes purely procedural. Procedures are, of course, very important. But it is not clear that they ought to be allowed to trump moral rights – in this case, the right of recognition that falls to Quebec in virtue of its identity as a nationality-based unit. Moral calculus, surely, can’t stop at mere procedure; it has to ask which substantive goods those procedures help to uphold and which they serve to undermine. Thus, weighty substantive goods may sometimes outweigh the moral force of legal proceduralism. What is being contemplated, on Seymour’s account, is a singular treaty violation that would allow Quebec to remedy the injustice of

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non-recognition. This should not be confused with a comprehensive and sustained assault on the rule of law in general or Aboriginal rights in particular. Rather it would amount to an extraordinary deviation required for the establishment of a new constitutional order, superior in justice (at least in this respect) to the one being remedied. Provided that Quebec assumes, fully and in good faith, all of Canada’s treaty and fiduciary obligations, and extends to Aboriginals credible guarantees of treatment as just or more just than that afforded to these nations by the Canadian state, trying to sabotage secession by harping on the strict letter of treaties would amount to a morally desiccated and largely punitive proceduralism. Secession under these terms would undercut none of the substantive benefits given in the treaties, while rectifying important injustices of the Canadian order. Admittedly, the James Bay Crees argue that Canadian federalism offers them a substantive good not realizable in a sovereign Quebec – namely, the ability to play off one order of government against the other, or to enjoy multiple avenues of institutional voice and redress.73 It does seem that a sovereign Quebec, even if it entrenched a distinct order of government for Aboriginal nations, would have no way of reproducing this dynamic. Of course, it is far from clear whether Aboriginals sensibly may claim a right to continue to enjoy whatever benefits accrue from playing two levels of government against each other. Furthermore, we must be mindful of the conditions under which a sovereign Quebec would generate a remedial right of partition for its Aboriginal nations. If the constitution of a remainder Canada could be shown to be more just in its disposition toward First Nations than the constitution of a sovereign Quebec, then it would be perfectly reasonable of Quebec’s Aboriginal peoples to argue for re-entry into the Canadian order on grounds of remedial justice. At no point after secession, then, must Quebec’s First Nations find themselves in a less just position than they would have enjoyed had Quebec remained in Canada. Otherwise the substance of Seymour’s argument – namely, that secession will rectify Canada’s injustices vis-à-vis Quebec while costing Aboriginals nothing, and quite possibly benefiting them in objective terms – would evaporate. Thus, while secession would indeed deprive the James Bay Crees of whatever benefits can be identified in Canada’s federal-provincial dynamics, it would not obviate the basic principle of using one jurisdiction as leverage against the other. Canada’s approach to its Aboriginal peoples would remain a decisive point of comparison; and the imperative of avoiding any pretext of a remedial right of partition would per-

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haps serve as a strong incentive for the Quebec state to deal justly and generously with its First Nations.74 Of course, none of this would negate Canada’s duty to secure convincing guarantees that all existing Aboriginal rights would be upheld by a sovereign Quebec. A similar reasoning can be applied to the argument of Monahan et al. that “it would be immoral and discriminatory to override the rights of racial or linguistic minorities, including their right to the protection of the Canadian Constitution and the Charter of Rights, in order to satisfy the desires of the majority.”75 Insofar as a sovereign Quebec deprives these communities of substantive rights they enjoyed under the Canadian constitution, it would generate a post facto remedial right of partition. But because secession is a justifiable remedial measure, the merely formal fact that the Canadian constitution enshrines those rights at present is insufficient to establish a right of partition. On balance, then, Seymour’s remedial argument outweighs the case from rule of law in moral terms (always assuming that recognition is a right, of course). And from this perspective, Canada is not morally obliged to insist on partition, only to secure binding guarantees of minority rights as a condition of secession. It should be emphasized, however, that a great deal hinges here on the nature of the arguments made by the Quebec government in the process of seeking independence. The greater its reliance upon the rhetoric of Quebecers’ “right to determine their own future” – arguments from self-determination, in other words – the closer Quebec comes to asserting a primary right of secession as the basis of its claim, and the tighter it is squeezed by the vise of the requirement for consistency, which would force it to concede the principle of partition. Quebec can only circumnavigate partition by explicitly rejecting a primary right of secession. While respect for rule of law enjoins Quebec to do its utmost to adhere to the secession process described in the Secession Reference, its case (insofar as it is partition-proof) must ultimately rest upon a remedial right that trumps the strict rule of Canadian law and allows Quebec to proceed unilaterally should negotiations bog down or impose weighty costs upon it. By the same premises, the Canadian state would not be obliged to insist on partition as a condition of successful secession negotiations. Indeed, any insistence that Quebec make such costly concessions would be decidedly unjust. Granting, then, (a) a remedial-right only theory of secession/partition, (b) that nationality-based units have a right to the constitutional recognition and accommodation of their distinctive identities

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in multinational states, and (c) that Quebec has been denied this right by the Canadian constitutional order, thus making it a legitimate candidate for the exercise of a remedial right of secession, the case for partition turns out to be far more problematic than common-sense arguments from “consistency” would suggest. Of course, none of these premises is uncontroversial. (C) is probably the most entrenched – an impressive array of scholars agrees that Canada’s accommodation of Quebec nationalism has been inadequate – but nothing resembling general agreement can be found on (a) and (b). This is not the place to settle these debates. My claim is that, while there are credible grounds for thinking that secession without partition would be unjust, there are also forceful arguments for thinking precisely the reverse: that partition would unfairly levy extreme costs on the exercise of a remedial right, and that Canada, challenged to support the principle of partition in negotiations over terms of secession, could, subject to the limitations explained above, justly decline. If we wish to make a principled argument against the secession of Quebec, invoking the logical necessity of partition is not enough.

5 Liberal Affirmations of Quebec-in-Canada

1 introduction There are, fortunately, other, more positive ways of defending Quebecin-Canada. Quite apart from the possibility that secession might be unjust in the absence of partition, Quebec’s participation in shared institutions can be considered an asset to Canada’s capacity to realize assorted “principled affirmations.” This chapter engages those surprisingly rich currents of thought that interpret Quebec’s membership as advantageous to the liberalism of the Canadian polity. Consistent with earlier practice, I will continue here to use liberalism in a highly general manner, as a theory of fair terms of co-operation among citizens who adhere to very different ideas about the good life. The “basic structure” of the state ought scrupulously to uphold the principles of autonomy and equal respect in its institutions and ought not to be a space wherein other goods or “comprehensive doctrines” – visions of the good life – are promulgated or enforced. As noted in chapter 2, this approach often extends into arguments for the neutrality of the state vis-à-vis its citizens’ ideas about the good. Also accepted here, as before, is Kymlicka’s modification of liberal theory, such that substantive ascriptive identities – cultural, national, ethnic, and so on – are viewed as aspects or equivalents of comprehensive doctrines and ought not to be intentionally and systematically favoured by the state. Far from implying a “difference-blind” state, however, this line of reasoning leads Kymlicka to advocate groupdifferentiated rights for national minorities and “fair terms of integration” for ethnocultural communities originating in immigration (“fair terms” meaning those that do not impose unnecessary burdens on the

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basis of cultural identity). Thus, Kymlicka moves from a concern for equal respect and neutrality to complex theories of justice in societies marked by polyethnic and multinational pluralism. And this book’s operative account of justice in multinational states has been extended further, to accommodate Taylor’s case for recognition and la survivance. All this suggests a certain way of looking at dissociation. It invites the question: what might be the ramifications of dissociation for our capacity maximally to realize liberal justice, understood as an umbrella concept that, following Rawls, includes the traditional bundle of core individual liberties and the related principle of equal respect for persons?1 If dissociation can be shown to adversely affect these values, it will fall prey to a liberal critique. And asking how dissociation might affect liberal justice is tantamount to inquiring whether multinationality in general, or Quebec-in-Canada in particular, might be thought a useful part of the preconditions for its realization. Recall, as well, our categorical distinction between anti-secessionist arguments from intrinsic and extrinsic consequences, otherwise known as inherency and contingency arguments. The former propose that it is inconceivable that secession could occur without committing wrongs; injustice is built into the exercise. The latter concede the theoretical possibility that secession could unfold without moral harm but express doubt as to whether its consequences are in fact likely to be benign. David Chennells deploys such a distinction when he writes that “liberalism can have virtually nothing in its own right to say about initiatives to redraw the borders of states. The exception, of course, would be where this redrawing is proposed so that, as a second step, the polity can embrace exclusive nationalism as official policy (or otherwise employ the state in illiberal fashion).”2 In other words, there is nothing inherently illiberal about secession, although it may spawn illiberal consequences in some cases. Kymlicka, an important guide on questions of liberal justice and minority rights, agrees.3 Prima facie, this makes sense. Liberalism is an abstraction, an ideal type: as such, it can be deployed practically anywhere that circumstances permit. Thus, “Canada is a contingent location for [liberal] principles,”4 and there seems to be no logical reason why a remainder Canada or an independent Quebec could not commit to liberal justice, basic rights, respect for minorities, and so forth in at least as proactive a fashion as the current constitutional order. The dice must therefore be loaded against a defence of Quebec-in-Canada on the grounds that the

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intrinsic consequences of radical rupture would undermine liberal ideals. Such a defence would assume that something inherent in our current arrangement of political borders facilitates the best realization of liberalism. Given that liberalism is universalistic and universalizable, it cannot hinge on a particular organization of borders. It must be, in principle, realizable anywhere, even if empirical contingencies intervene in particular contexts. But this concedes too much. Arguments from intrinsic consequences remain viable. We have already considered the possibility that the act of secession might itself involve some injustice: for instance, the arbitrary seizure of territory by the new state or the violation of treaty rights. A second, and important point – one not always appreciated by liberal defenders of the principle of secession – is this: the assertion that any state can, in theory, realize liberalism, and that secession can unfold without requiring unjust acts, does not in itself disprove the possibility that multinationality might be one of a number of independent variables furthering a polity’s capacity to best realize liberal values. Otherwise put, it is one thing to argue that liberal nationalism or secessionism are possible and another to dismiss the idea that there might be any interesting connection between multinationality and the optimal realization of liberalism. Even if multinationality is in no way necessary to a polity’s capacity optimally to realize liberal values, it might still be peculiarly advantageous to it. We can’t understand Canadian resistance to secession without examining the latter view. Indeed, one purpose of the present chapter is to demonstrate that it has been a fundamental part of important currents defending Quebec-in-Canada. This is not to claim that it is above critique. But it does entail a richer set of insights than the dismissals of Chennells and Kymlicka might suggest. It deserves our sustained attention. Arguments against Quebec secession on the grounds of contingent probabilities are equally significant. Chennells, as we saw above, alerts us to the possibility that secessionists might intend to use their project to undermine justice within their jurisdiction. Quite apart from sovereigntists’ schemes, secession might also entail damaging unintended consequences for our capacity to realize liberal values. Plausible arguments to this effect can be made, as we’ll see. Their weakness is that, being wholly predictive, they hinge on contestable assumptions about how events will unfold. This is debatable ground for a conservative defence of Quebec-in-Canada.

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The outlook for this chapter, then, is somewhat equivocal. On the one hand, it attempts to recover the linkage between liberalism and multinationality, which has been unfairly dismissed in the contemporary reconciliation of liberalism and nationalism. On the other hand, it also concedes that the linkage, while genuine and interesting, is a flawed one, too frail a reed to support our wider project on its own.5 I want to pursue this ambivalent position, first, by attempting to specify, in a rather more precise way than is usually done among defenders of liberal nationalism, both the insights and limitations of the arguments against secession on the grounds that multinationality has intrinsic advantages for liberal purposes. This will take us through some familiar terrain – viz., the matrix of thought inspired by Lord Acton, including the work of Pierre Trudeau, and some additional variations. We shall then proceed to consequentialist arguments from liberal values, uncovering viable, if imperfect, grounds to criticize secession on that basis.

2 the ongoing relevance of lord acton Lord Acton’s great essay “Nationality” must mark ground zero for any investigation of the idea that multinational states are inherently advantageous to the realization of liberal values. Acton’s is the most famous such argument, and its influence looms large in Canadian thought. W.P.M. Kennedy, Vincent Massey, Donald Smiley, John Holmes, Alexander Brady, W.L. Morton, Ramsay Cook, and (most fatefully) Pierre Trudeau are among those who borrow from Acton in their accounts of the merits of the Canadian order.6 The scope of Acton’s impact becomes even more impressive when Trudeau’s many admirers are factored in. “If John Locke has become ... ‘America’s Philosopher,’” argues Allen Smith, “Lord Acton has become Canada’s.”7 But Acton’s relevance to the problem of Quebec-in-Canada turns out to be far from self-evident. One difficulty concerns ambiguities over the definition of a multinational state. While I’ve been using the term to denote a state in which nationality-based units play a constitutive role, it is often understood to mean a loose association of peoples with only a minimal degree of shared institutional space. Such is the preferred usage of Kenneth McRoberts, for instance;8 and this practice is consistent with Acton’s essay, which was written in the context of multinational empire.9 Samuel LaSelva further complicates matters by arguing that “[i]n Canada the federalist challenge acquires special importance because of the deep tensions between French and English; yet the challenge is

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obscured rather than resolved by appealing to Lord Acton.”10 First, LaSelva explains, “missing from Acton’s essay is a clear understanding of the distinction between a multinational state and a federal state.” That is, Acton offered no guidance on the practical difficulties of developing a sense of shared membership across the nationalities that constitute the multinational state. His essay fails to explicate the need for federalism as a device combining the retention of distinctive national identities with “a new sense of common nationality.” Instead, it “takes unity for granted and assumes the existence of a spontaneous harmony among divergent groups or nationalities.”11 Second, Acton “ignored the understanding of nationalism that bases itself on the possession of a distinctive identity or an admired way of life or fraternal bond among citizens.”12 He could not really address what we could loosely call the “communitarian” argument for national identity and belonging, being wholly preoccupied with English liberty and (as will be shown later on) a Victorian notion of “progress,” which meant, essentially, European models of civilization. Nationality was a brute fact for Acton, something to be accommodated, but valuable only insofar as it furthers these ends. Since Acton did not contemplate the overriding challenge facing Canada – that of reconciling the desire of nationality-based units to live together, as well as apart – and offered no resources for understanding the moral force of the nationalist position, LaSelva makes a plausible case that his work is more dead-end than starting-point. But this is overstated. It’s not federalism qua federalism that interests us here, but rather a federal political order that specifically includes Quebec (i.e., a multinational federalism and, indeed, a particular kind of multinational federalism in which the national minority is a powerful actor in shared institutions). So while I share LaSelva’s interest in the distinction between multinational and federal states, I want to place special emphasis on the former element and take federalism more-or- less for granted, thus inverting LaSelva’s approach. We’ll see in chapter 7 that LaSelva’s own project insists on Canadian federalism as the expression of a special sort of fraternity – particularly, fraternity across distinctive ways of life; and he is wholly correct to argue that Acton’s essay sheds no real light on that ideal. But this ought not to foreclose discussion of other ideals, including liberal ideals, which move Canadians and which multinational polities might be peculiarly well positioned to realize. Insofar as Acton’s argument is effective on this level, it has to be included in any account of why secession might matter for us.

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Indeed, from a perspective that asks whether multinationality might affect a state’s capacity to incarnate ideals other than fraternity, the absence of any coherent federalist theory in Acton is not necessarily a serious problem.13 For Acton’s argument for the union of peoples within one state can be modified to include jurisdictional divisions of the Canadian sort.14 Such an adjustment would in no way diminish whatever force resides in his arguments for combining nationalities within a state. Since we are here taking federalism for granted, but not the kind of multinational experience implied by Quebec’s membership in Canada, and since we are open to considering a range of ideals in which Quebec-in-Canada might be implicated, not simply LaSelva’s fraternity, we have good reason to attend to Acton’s thesis. But LaSelva’s objections raise another point. Acton and his Canadian followers are associated with a strong liberal anti-nationalism that cavils at any sustained elision of state and nation. Indeed, the whole point of this tradition is that multiplying nationalities within a political order fosters liberal ends. Many Actonians have thus concluded that the state must renounce any formal accommodation of cultural nationalism, including the nationalism that insists on the constitutional affirmation of Quebec’s specificity as a nationality-based jurisdiction. And this refusal falls afoul of contemporary arguments about the viability of liberal nationalism, the capacity of liberal theory to accommodate “groupdifferentiated citizenship,” the impossibility of truly culture-neutral institutions, and indeed the whole push to take nations and communities seriously in moral terms. LaSelva is, once again, largely correct to associate Acton with an “uncompromising liberalism” that neglects richer understandings of the inherent value of national belonging.15 But I hope to show that core Actonian insights can be rescued from their association with this kind of unfashionable difference-blind liberalism. Instead of dismissing those insights as obsolete, then, we ought to ask whether, suitably modified in light of more sophisticated conceptions of nationalism, they can still tell us something useful about multinational states. This is not to prejudge the answer but to show that the ongoing salience of Acton’s thought remains an open question. Indeed, the Actonian tradition, as we will see, fans out in some intriguing directions and offers some provocative general speculations that warrant the attention of students of Canada. This is required reading, certainly, if we want adequately to map out resistance to a radical rupture with Quebec. Nonetheless, these variations on Acton do remain flawed; they suffer from methodological limitations and an

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unfortunate dimension of built-in redundancy. More fruitful, as we’ll see later on, are Acton’s arguments from progress. But since these go beyond justice to invoke substantive notions of the good, they exceed the boundaries of liberalism as defined here (the theme of “progress” is struck again in chapter 8). The task now is to explore the strictly liberal dimensions of this Actonian inheritance.

3 some variations on nationality: acton and his successors Acton’s essay defines nation as “an ideal unit founded on race,”16 and nationalism as “the complete and consistent theory, that the State and the nation must be co-extensive.”17 It attacks this doctrine on numerous grounds but gives particular weight to liberty and progress.18 Again, we are, for the moment, interested only in the former, since ideals of social or cultural progress imply “comprehensive doctrines” about the best human life. Using such doctrines to justify the state violates the liberal precept of equal respect, such that, insofar as Acton’s thesis rests on “progress” (understood in terms other than the advance of liberal justice, at least) it is incompatible with the version of liberalism that informs this aspect of my project. But Acton’s conception of liberty clearly involved a limited state, tolerant of diverse ends, which bears at least a broad family resemblance to the later liberalism of Rawls and his contemporaries.19 Seeking to extract from Acton a defence of the multinational state that could make sense on the preferred terms of contemporary liberals, it makes sense, therefore, to pursue his argument from liberty. Acton asserts that the fusion of state and nation must undercut liberty because it creates a monolithic identity with a formidable coercive power which “overrules the rights and wishes of the inhabitants, absorbing their divergent interests in a fictitious unity.”20 “Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the state,” he explains, “be it the advantage of a class, the safety or power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute.” And similarly: “[b]y making the State and the nation commensurate [nationalism] reduces practically to a subject condition all other nationalities that may be within its boundary. It cannot admit them to equality ... because the State would then cease to be national, which would be a [c]ontradiction of its existence.”21

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Acton’s target here is the claim of John Stuart Mill – whose skepticism about multinational states posed a major challenge in chapter 3 – that the cohabitation of nations within a state would, in addition to undermining representative government, corrode liberty itself.22 Acton insists that the nationalist state is the real threat to liberty. Nationalism would subordinate the state to one overweening end, such as national greatness or unity, and sacrifice all other values in its name, breeding fanaticism in the process, and privileging one ethnic identity to the detriment of the rest. All this necessarily imperils liberty, which of course presumes diverse ends and toleration. These are familiar tropes to anyone acquainted with the broad liberal consensus that marked the latter half of the twentieth century in the West. Slightly less familiar is Acton’s insistence that multinational coexistence offers structural support for diverse purposes and, thus, liberty. “The presence of different nations under the same sovereignty is similar in its effect to the independence of the Church in the State. It provides against the servility which flourishes under the shadow of a single authority, by balancing interests, multiplying associations, and giving to the subject the restraint and support of a combined opinion ... [t]hat intolerance of social freedom which is natural to absolutism is sure to find a corrective in the national diversities, which no other force could so efficiently provide.”23 The suggestion here seems to be that multinational diversity within the same institutional framework offers a structural barrier to the excessive aggregation of state power. Like churches, nations are powerful alternative loci of mobilization and identification that make it harder for a state to become absolute. “This diversity in the same state is a firm barrier against the intrusion of the government beyond the political sphere which is common to all into the social department which escapes legislation and is ruled by spontaneous laws.”24 Richard Vernon perceptively remarks that Acton’s essay does more than simply argue, as Madison might have done, for the multiplication of interests within a state. It is also propounding the “advantage of separating kinds of interests.”25 Acton’s analogy with the separation of church and state underscores the point that national loyalties are of a special order, more akin to religious allegiances than, say, mere policy preferences or economic interests. They have a deeper existential force and, for this reason, are particularly prone to fanaticism and intolerance. “To fuse the state and the nation ... is [thus] to overload politics with aspirations and passions which appropriately belong elsewhere,”

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Vernon explains. “Acton wants to protect a certain style of politics by excluding from politics those obsessive and redemptive passions which churches, but not states, can sustain.”26 In essence, Acton ranks nationality with religion as a passion against which the liberal state must be shielded. Multiplying national identities within a state makes it harder for any one of those identities to monopolize political power and then, driven by that totalizing tendency that is especially prominent in national (and religious) allegiance, destroy liberty. We can readily grasp the appeal of Acton for those who have sought to justify Canada in light of some wider normative theory, especially those writing in the wake of the Second World War and its associated horrors. “Canadians may well note Acton’s words,” suggested W.L. Morton, because “[t]he Canadian state cannot be devoted to absolute nationalism, the focus of a homogeneous popular will. The two nationalities and the four regions of Canada forbid it. The state in Canada must promote liberty of persons and communities, and justice, which is the essence of liberty.”27 By far the most important development and amplification of Acton’s insight has been that of Pierre Trudeau. Trudeau’s most famous essays echo Acton at every turn, from their understanding of nationalism as a necessary glue given the revolutionary ideology that based legitimacy on consent,28 to their analyses of its historical role as instigator of war and atrocity,29 and their conclusion that nationalism is necessarily intolerant and illiberal. Like Acton, Trudeau simultaneously condemns nationalism and takes it for granted as a fundamental organizing principle of modern politics. Indeed, federalism recommends itself to Trudeau partly because it allows national identities to flourish within a contained jurisdictional context (the province), while also carving out an order of government that is immune to nationalist passions.30 This emphasis on federalism marks one point of difference between Trudeau’s work and “Nationality.” Where Acton discusses multinationality at some length, mentioning federalism only incidentally, Trudeau positions himself as a federalist above all. Indeed, federalism and multinationality seem largely interchangeable in Trudeau’s thought: the one implies the other.31 And this makes some sense. Quebec-in-Canada is only conceivable in federal or confederal terms, and Trudeau assumes that a just binational Canadian state would also be a federal state (“refusing to close the borders is not the same as abolishing them. Cité libre has never been ... centralist”).32 Furthermore, federalism has an independent value for

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Trudeau, quite apart from considerations of multinational diversity. He endorses federal systems on the traditional grounds that they “divide the exercise of sovereignty between the various levels of government, and give none of them power over the citizen.”33 They serve his famous injunction to “create counterweights.” Yet it remains important to distinguish between a federal multinational state and a federal state that is built primarily around other divisions, such as region or territory. We want to know whether the Actonian current, and Trudeau’s thought in particular, can offer normative reasons as to why the rest of Canada should care if Quebec secedes. This requires some clarity about what exactly it is that Quebecin-Canada signifies. If Canada is primarily understood to be a multinational state and Quebec a fundamental part of what makes it so, then a secessionist challenge to the merits of the current order implies questions about the merits of such states. But if we instead define Canada primarily as a federal community, then challenges to the integrity of the state invite debates about the desirability of federalism as a system of political organization, full stop. And this won’t do. Secession is not, from the perspective of non-Quebecers, the obverse of federalism. It does not necessarily imply a unitary English-Canadian state. Secession does, of course, often seem to entail a unitary Quebec state. Thus, defending Canada to Québécois audiences has traditionally taken the form of defending federalism itself – a perfectly valid practice, in that context. However, reducing Quebec-in-Canada to federalism per se is unhelpful if we want to understand the normative implications of secession for English-speaking Canada, for the simple reason that a remainder Canada is highly likely to organize itself as a federal system.34 Assuming this to be the case, the secession of Quebec poses no threat to federalism qua federalism, no threat to the ability of English-speaking Canadians to continue to enjoy whatever benefits flow from a federal order. What we require in the English-speaking Canadian context, then, is less a defence of federalism proper than of multinationality and, indeed, of the specific kind of multinational experience given in Quebec-in-Canada.35 If, therefore, Trudeau’s case for Canada turns mainly on the merits of federal structures as such, it will be of little use here. We need to know whether Trudeau’s ideas can speak to the virtues of multinationality as well as those of federalism. Trudeau does marshal many other criticisms of secession apart from his theoretical defence of federal forms of government. The question is

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whether these prove more applicable outside Quebec than does his federalist argument. His most important such charge is that nationalists are illiberal by definition. “In attaching such importance to the idea of nation, [nationalists] are surely led to a definition of the common good as a function of an ethnic group, rather than of all the people, regardless of characteristics. That is why a nationalist government is by nature intolerant, discriminatory, and, when all is said and done, totalitarian.”36 Others of Trudeau’s favourite arguments are that secession would retard Quebec’s cultural, social, and economic progress and would also open up Quebec to its own partitionist challenges. Once again, these claims, whatever their weaknesses, obviously speak to the Quebec context: independence would represent a flight from the liberal gains of the Quiet Revolution, a collapse into injustice within Quebec, and a threat to the foundations of Quebec society. Yet these propositions seem to collide with the same problem. None offer much clarification as to why English-speaking Canada should care, in moral terms, if Quebec secedes. Clarifying this would demand another layer of argument. It would need to show, for instance, that – since a remainder Canada will be a federal state – (a) federalism per se is an inadequate firewall against nationalism, and that (b) English-speaking Canada itself is a viable candidate for the kinds of nationalism that undermine liberalism. It must demonstrate that a federal state remains more vulnerable to illiberal nationalism than a multinational one. Since Quebec’s hypothetical secession entails no necessary assumptions about the existence or absence of a parallel (illiberal) nationalism in English-speaking Canada, it needs also to show that such nationalism exists there. Can Trudeau’s writings make good this gap? As it happens, they can. Trudeau’s summaries of Canadian history satisfy both conditions: they show that Canadian federalism has failed to shelter the polity from illiberal nationalisms and that the nationalism in question has most often been English-Canadian. “Anglo-Canadian nationalism,” via its historic abuses of French Canadians’ political and economic rights, “produced, inevitably, French-Canadian nationalism.”37 We reasonably may conclude that – at least at the time of his writing38 – Trudeau’s arguments in favour of the multinational state could apply equally well to Canada outside Quebec as to Quebec itself. Canadian history, according to Trudeau, shows that mere federalism, even regionalism, is not enough to contain the force of anglophone nationalism.39 Therefore, nationalism must check nationalism. A

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Canada deprived of the counterweight of Quebec nationalism would have lost an important bulwark for its own liberalism; its anglophone nationalism would have less cause for restraint. Trudeau’s application of the Actonian insight, then, seems to run as follows. Canadian liberalism is supported against the contamination of a necessarily illiberal and intolerant nationalism by the participation in its institutions of two large nations, neither of which can dominate the federal state. But Trudeau’s use of the historical record to make this case risks sabotaging his own argument. If the simple presence of multiple nations within a state is somehow a bulwark for justice, what can explain the fact – amply referenced in Trudeau’s own analyses of Canadian history – that French Canadians have repeatedly suffered at the hands of illiberal, nationalist majorities? Should not such patterns of abuse be ruled out of court by the very logic of the Actonian hypothesis, i.e., that multiple nations just do work to check abuses of state power? In fact, that hypothesis makes more sense as an abstract theory about the structural logic of multinational states than as an empirical claim about their actual operations. A case can be made that Trudeau did not assume that the presence of multiple nations per se automatically shields liberty against totalizing nationalisms. His writings express the belief that such states possess some sort of inherent logic that tells against illiberalism; but this should not be equated with the claim that state actors do, as a matter of historical record, perceive or act upon that logic. Two more conditions must be satisfied if the beneficent logic of the multinational state is to be realized. These are (a) rational state managers and (b) a credible threat of secession. Fully rational and self-interested state managers would, Trudeau suggests, respond to the threat of secession by undertaking a politics of equal respect between the constituent nationalities of the state, thereby satisfying both the requirements of liberal neutrality and the self-interests of nationalists. In the real world, of course, such rational action is often in short supply. Trudeau’s technocratic rationalism, his belief that state managers should be (but may sometimes fail to be) “coldly intelligent” problem-solvers, thus combines with his somewhat Hobbesian understanding of politics as a struggle for power by self-interested actors to supply the missing pieces of the Acton hypothesis, explaining why multinational states often fail to deliver the superior liberalism that the theory promises. Unpacking all this demands a closer look at Trudeau’s ideas, however.

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In “Federalism, Nationalism, and Reason,” Trudeau argues that the structural imperatives of multinational states impel them to resist any formal elision of nation and state and zealously to guard against any incursion of particularistic nationalism into their institutions and policies. Interestingly, this flows from the fact that they originate in, and are sustained by, their constituent nations’ pursuit of their own interests. Nations embrace multinational federalism because “in many cases ... distinct statehood [is] unattractive or unattainable” and because the federal structure recognizes the principle of national self-determination by ensuring them considerable autonomy.40 They do not do so out of high-minded ideals such as justice or fraternity. As Whitaker points out, such hard-headed “realism” about motivations in politics held great appeal for Trudeau.41 He could not bring himself to imagine states originating in anything higher than the vested interests of the constitutive actors. Unfortunately, the logic of self-determination, once conceded, makes total independence an ongoing alternative, according to Trudeau. So federal multinational states are “rather unstable.” “The only way out of the dilemma is to render what is logically defensible actually undesirable. The advantages to the minority group of staying integrated in the whole must on balance be greater than the gain to be reaped from separating.”42 Trudeau’s famous conclusion – “in the last resort the mainspring of federalism cannot be emotion but must be reason”43 – seems to refer to reason as instrumental calculus, in this case, the calculi of self-seeking national groups. “For Trudeau, federalism is based upon ‘reason’ but this reason itself serves ‘will’ as expressed or constituted by the many ‘nations’ within the federal state.”44 There is an echo here of Mandeville’s attempts to manufacture public benefits from private vice, or Kant’s belief that a heaven could be constructed out of a population of devils. Trudeau’s claim is that the best protection for a just polity can be forged out of self-serving nationalisms. The lynchpin of the argument is that national minorities that find themselves discriminated against, or marginalized in affairs of state, will begin to contemplate the extension of the principle of self-determination into full-blown independence. This would represent ultimate failure for the rational managers of the federal/multinational state, who are (consistent with Trudeau’s “realism”) naturally committed to the success of that state, not to mention their own careers. These managers are, therefore, compelled to respect, rather than exclude or expunge,

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those diversities that are powerful enough to “break the country.”45 State managers have structural incentives to work toward a polity built on the principle of equal respect – equal, at least, in terms of the more important national identities it contains (and this qualifier is important).46 Even if the federal state tries to secure its own stability through a program of patriotic “emotional sop” at the federal level, the resulting effusions would still have to be inclusive: “a national consensus will be developed in this way only if the nationalism is emotionally acceptable to all important groups.”47 Instead of succumbing to the elision of state and nationality – which, on any Actonian thesis, is inherently undesirable – the multinational polity is driven systematically to resist the incursion of exclusionary nationalisms into what Rawls would call its “basic structure.” The state is driven by the logic of its composition and judicious statecraft to be just vis-à-vis its most important diversities. This is no guarantee that the state will be just, of course. It takes intelligent, rational managers, capable of apprehending this logic, for that. Rather surprisingly, then, the threat of secession seems positively to be encouraged on Trudeau’s account.48 What Trudeau’s theory demands is not that francophones acquiesce in the injustices of Canada but rather that they ratchet up the costs that such iniquities levy on the state. And it requires that these challenges be met, at the federal level, by leaders with the good sense to understand the structural imperatives of governing a state in which national minorities have the power to “break the country.” This structural logic, combined with intelligent management, inoculates the federal multinational state against exclusionary nationalism. At least one level of government, then – the central government – is vaccinated against the nationalist contagion, and a basic prerequisite for liberal justice is preserved. This theory marks a profitable extension of Acton’s original hypothesis. But it’s worth underlining the extent to which it accepts nationalism and nationalist frames of reference – such that the federal state is ultimately justified, for the actors involved, in terms of its instrumental value for the national unit. “[T]he good political order continues to be defined by the linguistic or ethnic identities that coincide with that order.”49 For the theorist, or the enlightened defender of liberal justice, however, that state serves the higher purpose of creating a polity that transcends nationalism and thus becomes safe terrain for liberalism. Mathie is correct to read Trudeau as “an effort to develop a kind of synthesis of nationalism and liberalism.”50 Nationalism is

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turned to the service of justice, regardless of the intentions of the nationalists themselves. Of course, Trudeau’s work, like that of Acton, suggests much more than this. The multinational state paves the way for a post-national cosmopolitan future and (less fancifully) serves as an important model for global progress and harmony in diversity. I want to revisit some of these themes in chapter 6. The point, for now, is that the high ends that animate Trudeau’s theory are not purported to be part of what motivates the actors whose behaviour it theorizes – at least not in the early stages of the evolution of the federal multinational system. This odd bifurcation between nationalist self-interest and disinterested justice intensifies the ambiguities in Trudeau’s use of the term “reason.” In writing of the “glue” that binds the multinational/federal state, Trudeau seems to have had instrumental reason in mind; and the tough-minded realist in Trudeau – the image his writings frequently project – declined to assume that state actors or citizens are driven by such highfalutin concerns as justice or human progress. “[F]ederalism has all along been a product of reason in politics. It was born of a decision by pragmatic politicians to face facts as they are, particularly the heterogeneity of the world’s population.”51 Yet reason in something like a Kantian sense, reason as that which determines our ends, is integral to the arguments of his celebrated essays.52 In fact, the enduring power of Trudeau’s vision may actually reside in the latter element. Yet that element is fundamentally distinct from the more Rawlsian emphasis on justice. Such, in any case, will be one claim of the next chapter. All this begins to carry us far afield of liberal justice, about which there is more to say. Note, for instance, the very limited nature of Trudeau’s claim for the supposedly liberal bias of multinational states. The argument is not that multinational states are structurally bound to pursue a comprehensive program of liberal justice; only that they are unlikely to become captured by a single, overweening nationalism that would then pose risks to liberty and justice. There are no guarantees against majoritarian abuses at the provincial level, although some political autonomy for the state’s composite national units is taken as both given and desirable in the theory. Even at the federal level, there are incentives to offer fair treatment only to those national groups with the power to “break the country.” All that this theory tells us is that, after secession, both Canada and Quebec will become open fields for monolithic nationalisms that tend to attack liberty.53 Quebec-in-Canada thus neu-

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tralizes the greatest danger to justice in the modern era but offers no assurances of a positive and comprehensive pursuit of justice per se.54

4 the actonian current: a preliminary assessment This modest perspective can certainly be extended into something more ambitious. But two problems must be dispatched first. I noted earlier that most Actonians express distaste for any institutional accommodation of “cultural nationalism” per se. They are not opposed to the existence of distinct national consciousnesses within a state; indeed, Acton and his most faithful followers, especially Trudeau and Ramsay Cook, take nationality as an irreducible premise of political analysis. A strict disciple of Acton cannot be a full-blown cosmopolitan. Her insight must be, rather, that state institutions should never be reducible to such national identities because that would put grave pressures on the ethical duties of citizenship. Multinationality is an important instrument for securing these. Thus, although it accepts that the presence of many nations helps a state to foster liberal purposes, the Actonian school stringently resists demands for recognition and institutional differentiation along national lines for two main reasons. First, any formal institutional relationship between state and ascriptive identity is assumed to entail injustices. Acton writes of the nationalist state becoming “inevitably absolute,” Cook consistently reminds us that nationalism bears the taint of intolerance and violence,55 and Trudeau assails nationalists as ethnocentric reactionaries.56 Second, such concessions mark a slippery slope to further fragmentation and the eventual collapse of the multinational state. This reflects Trudeau’s agreement with the “neo- institutionalist” premise, made famous in Canada by Smiley and Cairns, that institutions act as an independent variable moulding citizen and society. “Those federalists who seek a distinct society for Quebec, by stripping powers from Ottawa, are making a mistake,” Trudeau insists. “If they succeed, Ottawa will no longer hold any appeal for francophones. We would perhaps be strong in our own province, but we would no longer be relevant in Ottawa. In that case, we might as well separate! Is that what we want?”57 As for the first point: we have already seen that Quebec nationalist demands are not inherently unjust. Claims to the contrary are sitting ducks for contemporary, culturally sensitive models of liberalism. No

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state can be neutral as to culture; so all states are nationality-based in some sense. Therefore, there is nothing a priori wrong about using a national identity as the basis for an inclusive polity. That this book advocates some moderate accommodation of Quebec’s distinctiveness reflects the belief that, far from being a slippery slope, a degree of formal recognition, and perhaps decentralization and asymmetry, actually may be prerequisites for long-term stability.58 This places it at odds with Cook and Trudeau. Indeed, the prestige of contemporary scholarly arguments in favour of some moderate accommodation of nationalism makes the Actonian current look hopelessly passé. But I would argue that we can rescue the basic Actonian insight that multinationality is an asset to liberalism from such objections. In the first place, a determined (or dogmatic) Actonian could forge ahead with the charge that nationalists are illiberal by recasting this alleged illiberalism as an empirical fact instead of an inherent attribute. Even though nationalism is not inherently or necessarily illiberal, this revised argument would run, in actual practice it always is. Trudeau made such a move when he conceded the theoretical possibility of a progressive nationalism, only to dismiss it as “drain[ing] two centuries of history out of a definition.” This liberal argument against secession, instead of emphasizing the inherent intolerance of nationalism, would turn on a demonstration that the substantive aims of secessionists are unjust. Only by examining their programs and blueprints for a sovereign Quebec could we confirm the charge that indépendentisme is illiberal. In any case, that isn’t my mandate here. Of greater interest is a third critique of nationalism. We freely can deny that the nationalist state is a priori illiberal; we can also deny that a specific nationalist state (e.g., Quebec) violates liberal precepts in any systematic fashion. But we can still argue that such moderation represents an achievement given the explosive nature of nationalism. “Nationalism, here as everywhere, has its dangers; it can lead to excess and loss of control. For nationalism to be a positive force, it needs managing,”59 writes Alain Dubuc. And the presence of multiple nations may help to manage it. Quebec is “politically divided, which provides us with watchdogs: federalist Quebecers who keep a close eye on sovereigntist excesses; English Canadians, always extremely vigilant where Quebec is concerned; and even the self-discipline of principled or image-conscious sovereigntists.”60 A position like this, rather than focusing on Acton’s overstated reduction of nationalism into absolutism, would

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take its cue from the analogy he draws between nationalism and religion. Both may be identified as special orders of commitment that historically have been especially prone to illiberal excess. This is not to condemn nationalism or religion – only to warn of their combustibility when mixed with institutions of state. The very centrality of national belonging in the modern era, then, makes it dangerous material for institution-building. Thus, it is not surprising to find Trudeau arguing that national identity is the “guardian” of all that “at this juncture in history, go[es] to make a man what he is,”61 and that, for this very reason, it has also been the source of war and unspeakable barbarism.62 Benedict Anderson, pondering the fact that innumerable moderns have freely given their lives for “imagined communities,” suggests that the nation offers a profound source of historical continuity and meaning in the existential “modern darkness.”63 The nation is one of the great modern replies to the “eternal silence of infinite spaces” that terrified Pascal. It is precisely this power that makes it inherently hazardous. By speaking to our hunger for meaning, it stirs up passions whose ramifications may not always be contained within the bounds of liberal justice. “Nationalism, as an emotional stimulus directed at an entire people, can indeed let loose unforeseen powers.”64 It is not, therefore, inherently illiberal; it may even be a necessary facet of modern politics; but like religion, it remains inherently dangerous when entangled with the coercive power of the state. Illiberal excesses are always a relevant possibility in nationalist politics, regardless of the liberal or illiberal dispositions of a given group of nationalists. Such assumptions about nationalism, if they have any credibility at all, suggest that we can’t dispose of an Actonian perspective simply by referring to fashionable theories that reconcile liberalism and nationalism. We don’t need to show that a given group of nationalists is running amok, or that all nationalism necessarily is unjust, to conclude that it might be a good idea to build into a political order certain structural checks on the fusion of nationality and state. We can happily relinquish the traditional Actonian preference for difference-blindness without surrendering the core thesis about the value of multinationality for the best realization of liberalism. So, moderate variations on the Acton thesis may still be worth thinking about. One such variation might go like this. As a flight from multinational cohabitation, Quebec sovereignty would not necessarily undermine liberal values, but it would eliminate a useful defence against the nation-

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alist threat to liberal justice. It would remove one barrier to the possible conquest of the political field by a single, overweening, and potentially illiberal nationalism – whether Québécois, in a sovereign Quebec, or English-Canadian, in a remainder Canada. Balancing off these attachments helps to produce a more moderate, hence liberal, politics. A different line of critique comes from those who suggest that Acton’s whole premise – that multinationality is causally significant in the creation of a liberal polity – is empirically dubious at worst, and at best impossible to verify. David Cameron explains: [t]he record of history appears to contain at least as much evidence to undermine as to sustain the thesis that the multi-national state is a buttress and the main buttress of liberty. The homogenous community of the Netherlands is certainly not less liberal and humane than its binational neighbour, Belgium. Switzerland has indeed provided an impressive example of the cohabitation of liberalism and cultural pluralism, but the multinational state of South Africa has not. The origins of the Spanish parliamentary system are as ancient as those of Great Britain, and the Catalan and Basque nationalities are as distinctive as the Scottish and the Welsh, but the constitutional history of the two countries has been very different indeed.65 Cameron is quite right: it would be crazy to argue for multinationality as “the main buttress of liberty.” The causal preconditions for a liberal society are legion. Nevertheless, the presence of more than one nationality within a state might still be a relevant variable in the construction of a liberal polity (albeit neither a necessary nor sufficient condition). This is a possibility, and if we take seriously the question of how liberal political cultures and institutions come to be and to endure, we should not lightly dismiss it. Cameron does make the important point, however, that Acton’s premise admits of no satisfactory empirical demonstration. Indeed, his objection exposes a very serious limitation of the whole Actonian approach, showing that it fails to offer an empirically testable historical hypothesis, but offers instead merely provocative speculation. The extent to which such speculation remains academically legitimate depends, of course, on our view of the discipline. Do we insist on empirical demonstrability or prefer to allow some space for well-argued conjecture of this kind? A case can certainly be made for the latter, but not

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for according to intriguing abstract speculations the same weight we give to solid, empirically testable working hypotheses. Remember, though, that Trudeau’s work purports only to have identified the strictures of instrumental reason in such polities; it does not claim that state managers (or citizens) within such states really do adhere to them. In this sense, Trudeau’s argument remains undisturbed by Cameron’s empirical critique because it freely grants that state managers, in the real world, may not be fully rational, and hence may be unjust.66 All the same, there remains a highly speculative quality to the argument, and this limits its force to some degree. With this in mind, I propose now to explore two, more ambitious extensions of Trudeau’s theory. One I will call the “institutional” argument; the other, the “political-cultural” argument. The latter is more interesting, even if neither is fully adequate to the purposes of this book.

5 an institutional argument: the charter as a product of quebec-in-canada The “institutional” position holds that a rationally managed multinational state will tend to produce specific institutions that help to maximize liberal values. Now the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is the most obvious institutional bulwark for liberal values in Canada.67 And there can be no serious doubt that it owes its existence, in part, to Canada’s multinational nature, having been conceived as a counter-strike against Quebec nationalism. Trudeau wanted the Charter to cultivate a “national spirit,” on the grounds that “there must be, in relation to one’s country and its people, a greater loyalty than the sum of the loyalties towards the provinces.”68 The Charter would offer guarantees of basic liberal justice and language rights, and in so doing “test ... and hopefully establish the unity of Canada.”69 Trudeau’s actions on this front can be recast in terms of his argument in “Federalism, Nationalism and Reason.” Recall that, for Trudeau, federal multinational states are peculiarly fragile and that the fair treatment of constituent nations is necessary as a defensive measure against their fragmentary dynamic of self-determination. The Charter may be interpreted as a radical extension of the hypothesis. It serves to overcome the “dependence of the federal order for its survival upon the will of its parts,”70 which was the foundation of his earlier argument, by repositioning the institutions of the central government as ultimate

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guarantors of citizens’ rights. Thus, it permanently satisfies their best interests, quite apart from their national allegiance. It also serves as the federation’s “sticky paste” by “help[ing] Canadians to realize that they share with all other Canadians, throughout the country, the same set of fundamental values.”71 Abstractly put, state managers at the federal level have special incentives to cast around for universally acceptable legitimating devices. No such devices are more effective than guarantees of individual (and, in Canada’s case, linguistic) rights; these in turn translate into a secure and comprehensive program of liberal justice. Once such a program has been entrenched, the unstable tendencies of multinational federations, which assumed such weight in Trudeau’s academic work, will be decisively overcome. This, then, is part of the underlying logic of a multinational federation and part of the reason why such polities are inherently favourable to liberalism. Unfortunately, this particular extension of the Acton thesis requires too great a suspension of disbelief. First, it seems to amount to the (outrageous) proposal that we take Trudeau’s actions as prime minister as independent evidence of the merits of political theories he himself developed in advance of assuming the office. Insofar as Trudeau’s behaviour in office is telegraphed by his writings (and, admittedly, he had outlined his project of entrenching language rights well before taking up residence at 24 Sussex Drive), his career can be read as an exercise in self-fulfilling prophecy. The Charter thus proves less about the inherent logic of a multinational state than about Trudeau’s own fixations and (in)consistencies. If this does not necessarily debunk Trudeau’s “institutional” argument for multinationality, it does underscore the difficulty in marshalling Canadian political experience, over which Trudeau wielded formidable influence, as evidence in support of that case. The “institutional” thesis is deeply problematic even on its own terms. It amounts to saying that multinational states have special incentives to seek out bills of rights. Thus, any state possessed of an effective bill of rights, without also containing national minorities powerful enough to “break the country” (e.g., the United States), would challenge the theory by reminding us that the possession of such minorities is not a necessary condition for guarantees of entrenched rights.72 Of course, as I argued earlier, the fact that a given condition is neither necessary nor sufficient does not deprive it of theoretical interest. The possible correlation between national minorities and bills of rights surely is worth considering. This thesis, like many other offshoots of Acton’s

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original theory, remains provocative. But it also remains highly speculative and exceedingly hard to cash out in empirical terms. Trudeau’s success in implementing the Charter carries the additional cost of making the argument of “Federalism, Nationalism and Reason” largely redundant. Let’s suppose that a bill of rights does, indeed, help to bring about a superior realization of liberal justice. And let’s further concede that Canada, at least, never would have entrenched a charter of rights had it not been for the pressures placed on the constitution by a powerful national minority, represented by the government of Quebec. Allow even that such measures are embedded in the “logic” of a rationally managed multinational state. The upshot will be an effective process of rights- based judicial review, which serves as a substantial barrier to any legislative expression of illiberal nationalist passions. With these barriers in place, the urgency of the original Actonian vision – multiple nationalisms working as mutual counterweights in defence of liberty – diminishes. Now that we have the Charter to protect us from abuses of state power, why do we need Quebec to act as a counterweight against our own worst instincts? This rhetorical question does not make the original thesis wholly obsolete. Wise liberal statecraft might well seek to build multiple supports for justice, including multinational diversity, into a system. But multinationality does decline in importance as additional supports are structured in; and as its significance recedes, so must the inherent importance of Quebec to Canada’s ongoing capacity to realize a liberal society. The normative significance of Quebec secession from a liberal perspective is likewise undercut. Even if Quebec did play a crucial historical role in refining the liberalism of Canadian institutions, that would not explain why Canadians should care if Quebec secedes – provided those institutions can be expected to survive largely intact. And although nothing should be taken for granted on this front, it is surely doubtful whether a Canada without Quebec would scrap the Charter of Rights.73

6 political-cultural arguments: quebec-in-canada as a template for liberal toleration A second and rather more fruitful extension of the Actonian thesis would place less emphasis on the calculations of state managers and more on the question of how membership in a multinational state affects the practices and political attitudes of the peoples who consti-

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tute it. We have seen that, on Trudeau’s account, a multinational federation creates a class of state managers who, driven by the exigencies of their own institutional interests, cultivate a strict neutrality vis-à-vis the “important” constituent nationalities. What wants attention here is the possibility that the discipline of the multinational state could help to promote a more just political culture by placing equal respect at the very centre of viable statecraft. Intimations of what we might call this “liberal-pedagogical” value of multinational states can, indeed, be read back into Acton’s essay. We are told there that a properly civic (as opposed to nationalist) patriotism “consists in the development of the instinct of self-preservation into a moral duty which may involve self-sacrifice.”74 Nationalism ultimately rests on a “selfish and instinctive basis”: being an extension of family, the nation is a clannish impulse, not a principled, ethical one.75 The multinational state, being immune to all-consuming nationalism, represents a culmination in human political development, one in which we learn to undertake principled mutual obligations and thereby acquire our liberty. If Acton’s Burkean references are slightly surprising in this context, his citations of Rousseau are entirely apt. What matters, in any case, is that Acton seems to take the view that the multinational state, by embedding its citizens in a state that cannot be reduced to their own “primitive” nationalist sentiments, develops their capacity to appreciate and uphold liberal justice. Such states do not simply protect liberty and justice as a matter of instrumental necessity. Ultimately, they fashion better liberal citizens, who learn to uphold justice as a matter of right, rather than mere nationalist calculus. Trudeau likewise argued that “the history of civilization is a chronicle of the subordination of tribal ‘nationalism’ to wider interests.” This “civilization” implies a robust definition of progress – perhaps too robust to be harmonized with liberal neutrality, especially when we factor in his occasional musings about the eventuality of a cosmopolitan, world state. But it is clear that an aspect of what Trudeau had in mind is the development of a sense of liberal justice within the culture. Kevin J. Christiano, H.D. Forbes, and Christian and Campbell all read Trudeau as implying this.76 Indeed, a significant way of thinking about Canada defines this polity in terms of the absence of an overweening nationalism; and many believe that this is causally related to Canada’s superior realization of liberal tolerance and pluralism. A further connection, admittedly less common, explains this supposedly superior realization at least partly in terms

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of the moderating influence of Quebec. Thus, Canada’s multinational nature has been conceived as causally tied to its capacity to realize the richest kind of liberalism. This is a major extension of the Actonian defence of Quebec-in-Canada and warrants a more detailed analysis.

A prominent theme in Canadian thought concerns our supposed lack of shared narratives, myths, and identity. “Canadian nationalism ... is in fact a non-nationalism, as Canada is a non-nation,” writes Allan Smith.77 For John Ralston Saul, “the typical nation-state asserts that it is the product of a natural and completed experiment,” while in Canada, “the acceptance of complexity has meant the acceptance of a perpetually incomplete experiment.”78 Despite the efforts of mid-century historians to construct a “master narrative” for the Dominion, J.M. Careless’s famous argument that Canada is best conceived in terms of “limited identities” speaks for the pre-eminent paradigm.79 Regardless of whether Canada really is more divided or ephemeral in the minds of its citizens than most modern states, its lack of a coherent national consciousness amounts to a traditional default position in analysis of Canadian identity. This has, of course, played a large part in the famous Canadian propensity for self-flagellation. “We face the future uncertain of our past and with a fragmented national consciousness,” keens David Bell.80 Observers often invoke Canadians’ “insecurity,” “identity crisis,” their “uncertainty ... as a people,” and so forth. But an alternative (and increasingly influential) current celebrates our supposed absence of monolithism. Indeed, even the melancholy Bell portrays one facet of Canadian political culture as marked by “accommodation, compromise, partnership and friendship” across regions and peoples.81 B.W. Powe’s A Canada of Light agrees that ours is “the anti-nation,” “the pluralistic country without a single identity,”82 but goes on to argue that “our eclectic mosaic culture, this condition of being seemingly disparate and separate ... may be our strength, our promising path, our myth, an original form of harmony.”83 And Saul describes Canada as a “refusal of the conforming, monolithic nineteenth-century nation-state model.” Rather, it rests on a “tripartite foundation” – Aboriginal, anglophone, and francophone. Canada is a multinational state in its very bones; that is its “strength.”84 Of course, there remains some difficulty in specifying precisely what is gained by this absence of overarching narratives. Another complication lies in determining the degree to which these gains are actually

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realized, or whether they are better understood as potentialities inherent in the Canadian condition. Some, like Smith, Reid Gilbert, Richard Gwyn, Augie Fleras and J.L. Elliott, and Robert Fulford, address the former question by describing Canada as a “post-modern dominion,”85 noteworthy for its absence of “absolute signifiers”86 – implying that, to the extent that postmodernism serves or incarnates some positive values, Canada expresses them. It is unclear whether these values are fundamentally at odds with liberalism, represent an extension of liberal ideals of individual autonomy, or are distinct from liberalism but compatible with it. “Postmodernity” is, appropriately enough, a highly mercurial construct. Lyotard famously defines the condition as one of “incredulity towards metanarratives,” the project of which is to “activate differences,” and to “play in peace” with language games, where none are seen as absolute.87 Presumably, the definition of Canada as a “postmodern” entity suggests that Canada’s fluid nature leaves more openings for this free play of differences than do more defined political spaces.88 “As a good post-modern state we recognize the ‘indeterminacy’ ... of our history and utterly reject, as all good post-modernists do, one agreed-upon ‘master narrative’ that would enslave us all to a single vision.”89 In a related vein, Powe’s “lightness” appears to refer to an existential condition in which the individual is not called upon to subsume herself under authoritative narratives of political history and value. Rather, she is empowered, or liberated,90 by the knowledge that her “Canadianness” is a category explicable only in terms of its openness, flexibility, and diversity. “Canada’s erratic styles and forms, its elusiveness, even its invisibility, make it a light space. That rootlessness could be a form of liberty; the unhoused quality, the sense of being freed from tribal membership, can be an imaginative release.”91 Here we find a dream of Canada as a site of liminality, an “open space ‘whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise.’”92 The descriptive accuracy of such assertions is certainly debatable. Such light and ecstatic existential travelling is hardly what one associates with traditional touchstones of Canadian studies (such as the searching gravitas of Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, or Alistair MacLeod, Frye’s “garrison mentality,” the slightly otherworldly landscapes of the Group of Seven, or even the anxiety that runs through so many discussions of the possibility of Quebec secession, including that of Powe).93 In fairness, though, Powe is not arguing that we are this way, only that we have the preconditions for being so. Nor does he pretend

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that we or any other country could choose to realize this ideal de novo, as if we were choosing toothpaste. Rather, he seems to find in the notion of “lightness” the idealized emanation or extrapolation of our specific condition; it is a “hidden destiny.”94 Canadians have only partially, barely, grasped it. But it is the path that is implicit in our existence and needs teasing out. Whatever we make of such accounts, they generally acknowledge the importance of Canada’s constitutive diversities – multicultural, regional, and national – in laying the groundwork for “a pluralist country without a single identity” and whatever desirable qualities are associated with it. In Smith’s view, “Canada ... was held from the beginning to consist of two societies ... [t]he creation of an ideal national type in which all Canadians could see something of themselves, and which they could all strive to emulate, was impossible.”95 Canada’s “yoking together of unlikely people, the French and English, and those who settled the coasts and interiors” is fundamental to the pragmatic, uncodified nature of Confederation, claims Powe.96 Saul is quite firm: the complexity he celebrates “has been constructed upon three deeplyrooted pillars, three experiences – the aboriginal, the francophone and the anglophone ... [these] set out the principal defining lines of the Canadian experience which – unlike those of most countries – permit an inclusive rather than an exclusive mythology.”97 Multinationality is presented as the primordial independent variable that has made possible Canada’s laudably open and flexible spirit. By invoking an “inclusive, rather than exclusive” ideal of citizenship, Saul echoes another normative inference from the idea of Canada as a country that “eschew[s] the notion of the absolute, refusing to privilege particular ways of linguistic, cultural, and racial being, and making no single mode of existence the measure against which Canadians should be judged.”98 This is the long-standing belief in Canada as a privileged site of toleration. “‘Toleration’ is celebrated as a core feature of the Canadian national identity which is a source of both national pride and international recognition.”99 Here, we are back on unambiguously liberal ground. Indeed, this rough connection between “toleration” and the absence of a monolithic national identity is eminently compatible with the themes favoured by Acton and his followers. A tolerant political community is less likely to support or produce an oppressive state; and if we accept that the French-Canadian presence has been an important factor in fashioning such a community, then we have a political-cultural argu-

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ment of a decidedly Actonian stripe. Canada’s supposed disinclination to “codify” itself, and the failure of any overriding impulse toward the construction of a monolithic national identity, thus becomes an important causal variable in the development of a desirably liberal political culture. This is a rather more expansive claim than Trudeau’s narrow arguments about the instrumental calculus that grounds the federal multinational state.100 Thomas Berger makes the connection between this tolerance and the complexity of our origins nicely explicit. We are a plural, not a monolithic nation ... It is our good fortune not to be one of common descent, not to speak one language only. We are not cursed with a triumphant ideology; we are not given to mindless patriotism. For these reasons Canada is a difficult country to govern; there is never an easy consensus. Yet, our diversity shouldn’t terrify us: it should be our strength, not our weakness. Along every seam in the Canadian mosaic unravelled by conflict, a binding thread of tolerance can be seen. I speak of tolerance not as mere indifference, but in its most positive aspect, as the expression of a profound belief in the virtues of tolerance and in the right to dissent.101 Note the implicit causal connection between this primordial diversity – especially linguistic – and Canada’s supposed exemption from “mindless patriotism” (which in turn suggests Acton’s fear of all-consuming nationalist passions). Of course, Berger has the good sense to frame the “regime of tolerance” as a potentiality rather than a vision wholly fulfilled. But his point is that this vision – according to which we learn “to regard diversity not with suspicion, but as a cause for celebration”102 – is a great theme given in Canadian history, informing both the victories and defeats of assorted minorities. And the strength of this current has a significant relationship to Canada’s foundational complexity. What to make of this? Toleration most readily implies a certain laissez-faire, particularly where the state is concerned. On an obvious Actonian reading, it would mean that basic rights and liberties are better respected, or are under less pressure from exclusionary nationalisms, than elsewhere. Presumably, though, if the familiar celebration of Canadian tolerance is to mean anything interesting, it must denote more than just a respect for civil rights. States such as France or

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the United States, which are generally offered up as examples of the kind of “monolithic” or “melting pot” nationality that Canada supposedly eschews, have clearly done a passable job of securing basic rights and liberties. We saw David Cameron make this point earlier. It may help to reformulate the problem as one of equal respect. A fullblooded commitment to equal respect, as understood here, goes beyond the traditional array of liberal rights (to life, liberty, expression, civic participation, and so forth). It pays attention to the allocation of symbolic resources and invites much more nuanced inquiry into the requirements of the fullest realization of liberal justice. If there is one public policy and/or ideological domain in which the absence of a “thick” Canadian meta-narrative combines with an ideal of tolerance to produce a tangible outcome, it must be that of multiculturalism. We need to move into the ambit of this thorny issue in order to grasp the full scope of the Actonian legacy in Canada. “Multiculturalism” has many meanings. It serves as a descriptive term for certain kinds of societies (as when we say that “Canada is a multicultural country,” meaning that it is ethnically very diverse); it denotes a variety of ideological positions ranging from Kymlicka’s theory of liberal inclusion to visions of radical structural differentiation along ethnocultural lines as advocated by Evelyn Kallen and, in his earlier work, Bhikhu Parekh; or a species of critical discourse currently fashionable, especially in the Anglo-American academies;103 or a specific cluster of government policies, evolving from the early 1970s to the present; or certain kinds of ethnoculturally sensitive political and social practices.104 The term is used here in something like Kymlicka’s sense, i.e., meaning a broad approach to ethnocultural diversity informed by an underlying view of liberal justice in polyethnic societies. Kymlicka persuasively argues that Canadian-style multicultural policies are necessary for the best realization of the liberal principle of equal respect.105 They serve an ideal of “fair terms of integration” for newcomers, whereby the state seeks to remove unnecessary cultural biases that pose obstacles to the full participation of immigrants and ethnocultural communities in political and economic structures. No one, on this view, should be forced to sacrifice essential facets of their “comprehensive doctrines” in order to participate in public institutions, unless of course those doctrines are radically incompatible with core liberal- democratic values. Thus, to take a somewhat shopworn case, members of the R.C.M.P. who are also Sikh ought to be able to have turbans incorporated into their uniforms. Demanding otherwise imposes costs on them – forcing them to betray a fundamental

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obligation of their religious faith and identity – that are neither imposed on other participating Canadians nor related in any plausible way to other defensible considerations, such as job performance. Similarly, the under- representation of assorted ethnocultural minorities in shared institutions must be scrutinized in light of the inherent or contingent biases of the latter. Kymlicka believes that some such policy represents the best sort of liberalism. Only thus can states refrain from unnecessarily penalizing citizens on the basis of their particular “comprehensive doctrines.” An ongoing and determined reassessment of Canadian institutions and practices, consistent with the demands of equal respect, is part and parcel of a robust realization of liberal values.106 Nor is this a marginal position. Even Bhikhu Parekh, who seems to consider himself something other than a “liberal,” and who wholly disagrees with Kymlicka’s ontology of culture, affirms the broad outline of this program, the principal normative difference between them being the greater weight that Parekh accords to dialogue across cultures.107 The possibility now before us is that Quebec’s presence in the polity might contribute to the ideological climate needed to sustain such a culturally sensitive liberal politics. And many have thought that it does. That “the history of French-English relations is a source of a Canadian tradition of intergroup accommodation ... that affects the treatment of other groups such as immigrant minorities” is, after all, put forward by Reitz and Breton as part of the “popular thinking” about diversity in Canada.108 Indeed, these connections go back a long way. Richard Day finds Charles McCullough arguing something along these lines as early as 1911.109 Others trace it all the way back to the Quebec Act itself.110 We glimpsed a perverse application of this notion in chapter 3, when we explored Gad Horowitz’s case for dissociation. Horowitz, writing before official multiculturalism, argued that Canada has misguidedly tried to apply the same standards of justice to ethnocultural groups as it has to national minorities, with the result that English-speaking Canada is Balkanized into a series of ethnic enclaves. English-speaking Canada, Horowitz maintains, has been conditioned by Quebec to accommodate cultural difference and is therefore afraid to assert itself as a unified identity for fear of seeming unjust or intolerant. That Horowitz understands Canadian attitudes toward ethnocultural minorities to be causally linked to the Quebec problem reflects a belief that our engagement with a large and powerful national minority has somehow conditioned our response to other diversities; that he condemns the effects

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of the link as wholly pernicious merely indicates that he does not accept multicultural interpretations of liberal justice. The same applies, roughly, to John Porter, as well as contemporary critics such as Neil Bissoondath.111 But if we take the view that liberalism demands considerable scope for the symbolic and substantive accommodation of ethnocultural identities, then we can invert Horowitz’s argument. The reluctance to assert a monolithic identity becomes a good thing from a liberal perspective; and insofar as this reluctance can be explained, to any significant extent, by the presence of a large and permanent national minority, multinationality and the best realization of liberal ideals must be convincingly interlocked. Indeed, at least three distinct positions seem available here: a) We can disavow any causal connection between Canadian attitudes and policies toward multinational diversity and other categories of difference. So, for instance, we may insist that French-English relations in Canada have not meaningfully informed political strategies, or the political culture writ large, toward other diversities. Such a position would not necessarily deny that (say) the Trudeau government launched official multiculturalism partly as a tactical move in its campaign against Quebec sovereigntists; but it would insist that this had more to do with the political exigencies of the moment than with any theoretically interesting relation between multinational and ethnocultural diversity. b) We can concede the causal linkage, and denounce it. This is Horowitz’s position. On such an account, Quebec-in-Canada prevents English-speaking Canada from efficiently assimilating newcomers, leaving it weak and fragmented. Here, the well-known line of critique condemning multiculturalism as corrosive to the project of Canadian nation-building becomes transmuted into a lament for the baneful influence of Quebec in Canadian institutions and political culture. The next step, of outright support for dissociation from an English-speaking Canadian perspective, is obvious. c) We can both accept the importance of the causal connection and celebrate it. And that is the position of interest here: that multinational diversity has functioned as a kind of liberal pedagogy, forging a more open, tolerant, and pluralistic polity. Is c) at all a realistic interpretation of the Canadian situation? The first step in demonstrating this would require us to establish causal ties

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between multinational diversity and multicultural justice. No one disputes the complexity of the historical relationship between the policy of official multiculturalism and the “Quebec problem.” The policy does seem to have partly been conceived, originally, as a tactical manoeuvre to circumvent the “bicultural” vision of Canada given by Quebec nationalists and by the original mandate of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism.112 It is partly for this reason that Quebec nationalists have tended to be wary about official multiculturalism.113 Conversely, Quebec, with its historic invocations of “two founding peoples” and its traditional unease with official multiculturalism, has often been viewed as an active obstacle to the fair accommodation of ethnocultural diversity in Canada. A zero-sum game between multinational and multicultural politics seems to have been widely accepted in our constitutional crises of the early 1990s, for instance.114 But Kymlicka shows that there need be nothing wildly implausible about admitting both that a country contains more than one nationalitybased unit, and that it seeks “fair terms of integration” for newcomers, of the sort given in Canadian multiculturalism. Deux nations (or indeed, plusieurs nations) are compatible with this vision of liberal justice. At worst, then, the political tensions between Quebec nationalism and the institutional recognition and accommodation of ethnocultural difference are merely contingent, not inherent.115 At best (and this is the more interesting possibility, from our present position) the one might actually enrich the other. This particular version of the Canadian myth of tolerance points to more than just a felicitous confluence of political circumstances and, indeed, more than just the policy of multiculturalism itself. Multiculturalism instead is seen as emblematic of the kind of advanced liberal pluralism that our primordial diversity has helped to make possible. Although no admirer of official multiculturalism, Claude Ryan made a de facto case of this sort. He insisted that Quebec’s presence makes Canada a bicultural community, sociologically if not officially, but also that “biculturalism is the most solid and most durable basis of an acceptance policy towards other cultural values” because “we accept from the start a policy of fundamental diversity.”116 This takes us toward the insight of interest here – namely, that the presence of the huge and unassimilable francophone population in Quebec is a key obstacle to the development of any notion of Canada as a homogenizing meltingpot. And this, in turn, opens up more space for the assertion of other categories of identity and culture: a deeper receptiveness to pluralism,

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now celebrated as a great value. This is an exact inversion of Horowitz’s argument. An exemplary articulation of this logic is offered by Stéphane Dion. Indeed, Dion draws the conclusion that completes the argument for my purposes. “The cohabitation of our two linguistic communities has helped us to welcome with greater tolerance and openness our fellow citizens from all continents ... that is why it would be so regrettable for Canada to break up because of its linguistic aspect, when it is that very aspect that has helped it so much to become a model of openness celebrated throughout the world.”117 Secession, by eliminating multinational diversity – at least, of the specific type represented by Quebec – would remove the historical pivot of Canada’s celebrated tolerance. Multinational diversity, Dion implies, therefore plays a significant role in fostering a broader political culture of equal respect. It is in negotiating a wide swath of shared institutional space between nations that the Canadian polity has absorbed the lessons of respect, of the just treatment of cultural difference. The outcome is a much more comprehensive realization of liberal justice than was given in Trudeau’s original argument.118 According to Trudeau’s rationalist federalism, such structural diversity impels state actors to pursue a politics of equal respect as a matter of institutional interest. On the “political-cultural” extension of this line of argument, multinational diversity serves as a proving ground for the development of richer modes of tolerance on the part of citizen and state. More than simply being the beneficiary of, or testament to, a liberal culture, such structural diversity serves as a liberal pedagogy of sorts. This variant on Acton thus accords to multinational diversity – and hence, Quebec-in-Canada – a constitutive role in the construction of a better liberal state.

7 political-cultural arguments: an assessment Let’s suppose, then, that multinational diversity has indeed served as a useful template informing Canada’s experience with other orders of diversity. This still does not automatically imply a critique of Quebec secession. In fact, no necessary connection exists between the variables that helped to fashion a tolerant political community and those required for its indefinite continuation. Conditions of origin and conditions of perpetuation are not necessarily interchangeable. Arguing

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otherwise conflates historical explanation and advocacy. If we accept the premise that Canadian multiculturalism reflects an unusually deep, or distinctively “Canadian,” spirit of accommodation and tolerance, and the further premise that our primordial complexity – most crucially, our engagement with la nation québécoise or canadienne-française – was vital in laying down the cultural and institutional foundations for this, we are still free to conclude that, once these have been achieved, the multinational state has done its work and instilled the appropriate patterns of liberal thought and practice. And at that point Quebec can secede without its departure posing any threat to the values thus created. On the other hand, the opposite might be true. Multinationality might indeed remain a dynamic independent variable, perpetuating Canada’s capacity to realize this vision of liberal justice. If we cleave to a certain Burkean caution about the complexity and inscrutability of such institutional relationships, we have some grounds to proceed gingerly here, taking seriously the possibility that secession would remove one foundation stone of multicultural justice in Canada: a foundation of historical and ongoing significance. Dion has a point. But this thesis still faces the question of empirical verifiability that bedevilled our earlier variations on Acton. Its pivotal assumption is that there is, empirically speaking, something exceptional about the tolerance of Canadian political culture. Regrettably, at least some publicopinion data seem to suggest that Canadians are no more open to ethnocultural diversity than the United States (which is frequently taken as the antithesis of the ideal of Canada’s “multicultural mosaic”).119 What remains, then, of the premise that Quebec’s presence is somehow central to the best realization of liberal justice, as expressed in multiculturalism? The basic insight could be saved by placing less emphasis on political culture in a diffuse sense and more on what Ronald Manzer calls a “public philosophy” – such that policies such as official multiculturalism are to be analysed in terms of “the political ideals and beliefs that appear to be implicit in them.”120 Indeed, reframing Canada’s supposedly superior tolerance as a matter of “public philosophy” rather than simply mass attitudes helps to bolster the case that the French-Canadian national minority was historically crucial to it. After all, it would perhaps be a bit much to claim that Quebec’s presence has taught the arts of tolerance to Canadians en masse; but we might still entertain the

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possibility that significant elements of Canada’s governing elites have been schooled in the finer points of equal respect partly as a result of the tactical need to broker French-English differences. That elites in divided states often show greater tolerance than the populations they govern is a familiar position in the literature.121 And it is important to recognize that, in fashioning policies informed by this pedagogy of tolerance, elites create public structures (policies, discourses) that citizens may then use to define their collective identity, quite apart from their personal attitudes on related questions. Thus, the citation of public-opinion data cannot in itself debunk the myth of Canadian tolerance. Policies and public philosophies rooted in, or justified only in light of, an authentic commitment to tolerance may still play a distinctive role in the collective self-understanding of Canadians. These may in turn provide a legitimizing discourse upon which projects and ideals such as multiculturalism can ground themselves in public consciousness. But this modification still assumes that Canadian policy (which we must now take as emanations of a “public philosophy”) is especially refined in its commitment to the best realization of liberalism. If Canada’s multicultural policies, upon examination, are found to be largely identical to those of other countries, then it becomes much harder to sustain arguments about the exceptional tolerance of Canada’s public philosophy. And it plausibly can be argued that policies vis-à-vis ethnocultural diversity in certain other countries, especially Australia, have not markedly been distinct from those grouped under the rubric of Canadian multiculturalism. Yet here again there is room to manoeuvre. For, whatever the current similarities – and some observers insist that “[n]o country has done more to recognize the diversity of morals/manners than Canada”122 – the Canadian state has been somewhat path-breaking on this front. Australia, in particular, developed its own version of multiculturalism partly in emulation of the Canadian model. “Canada invented multiculturalism as a national policy ... and Australia borrowed the idea soon afterwards.”123 More generally, Kas Mazurek writes that “in the international community, Canada is looked to as a model nation of tolerance and respect for minority groups.”124 There is no a priori reason to deny that its experience as a multinational state might have played an important role in positioning Canada on the leading edge of the experiment with this richest variety of liberalism.

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A last challenge is the charge of redundancy. If we agree that states without comparably powerful national minorities are able to undertake and sustain support for policies akin to those given in Canadian multiculturalism, then this shows that such multinational diversity is not required to sustain this most desirable form of public philosophy. Otherwise, we are again confusing conditions of origin with conditions of perpetuation. Even granting that Quebec-in-Canada has played some definitive role in carving out a political community that is maximally congenial to these liberal values, we do not need to take the further step of arguing that Quebec’s ongoing participation is essential to sustaining such a philosophy. And, therefore, we need not agree that secession would pose an inherent threat to the capacity of English-speaking Canada to maximally realize liberal ideals. At most, we can reprise our early conclusions about the original Acton/Trudeau position: secession would deprive Canada of what is, possibly, one among many causal variables that help to sustain a desirable public philosophy. This seems to be about as far as any argument from intrinsic consequences, or inherency, can go. The current of thought that draws on Lord Acton is indispensable to any understanding of how Canadians have articulated resistance to Quebec secession. I hope to have shown this, if nothing else. Yet each of our variations on the core Actonian premise – that a multinational state carries innate advantages from a liberal perspective – suffers problems of verifiability and redundancy. What survives are speculations that, if true, might be sufficient to give pause to proponents of dissociation but still fall short of a really resounding liberal case for Quebec-in-Canada. This discussion has sought partially to rehabilitate these speculations, but it does seem clear that they mark relatively modest gains in defence of Canada as a multinational state. Let us turn, then, to arguments from contingency. Perhaps they can do better.

8 the illiberal consequences of secession: intended or otherwise? Establishing that secession would undercut liberal values as a matter of intended consequences requires strong evidence that the substantive aims of Quebec’s radical nationalists are unjust.125 The argument (as I have repeatedly remarked) cannot be that any correlation of nationality and

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state is a priori unjust. But if Quebec sovereigntists can be shown to weave illiberal ends into their designs, this would be a presumptive argument against secession – from a perspective concerned with Quebec’s capacity to realize liberal values, at least.126 This qualifier reveals an immense limitation of the argument for my purposes. I am here interested in the implications of dissociation for the liberalism of English-speaking Canada. But it is wildly implausible to argue that advocates of dissociation intend that it should yield a net loss for liberalism in the rest of Canada. Quebec nationalists do not generally frame their project in terms of its effects on the rest of Canada at all. Those English-speaking Canadians who support Quebec’s radical demands do so for several reasons, none having to do with the idea that Quebec makes our politics too just. Such Canadians, we have seen, tend rather to believe that our current levels of integration are undermining Canada’s capacity to realize itself as a liberal society – i.e., the case from liberal purity; or that Quebec is stifling the national consciousness of English Canadians; or, finally, because they agree with the Quebec nationalist critique of Canada. It makes little sense to say that the advocates of dissociation intend that it should yield illiberal outcomes in English-speaking Canada. Should this argument from intended consequences succeed, then, it would still tell us nothing about why English-speaking Canadians should care if Quebec leaves. And even on its own terms, the argument cannot take us very far. The charge that sovereigntists are less tolerant or liberal than members of other political movements is suspect on several grounds, not least of which its obvious convenience as the necessary counterpoint for selfcongratulatory narratives about English-speaking Canada’s supposedly exemplary tolerance.127 To the extent that nationalist demands centre on recognition, they are in no sense illiberal; we saw this earlier. Efforts to accommodate them, such as the Meech Lake Accord, do not entail any obvious or systematic assault on liberal ideals. If we deny that la survivance is a legitimate objective, then we may be in a position to condemn aspects of Quebec nationalist policy.128 But the issue is not whether this or that facet of Quebec policy is unjust; it is whether sovereigntists intend to implement additional illiberal policies in the event of secession.129 The simple fact that the movement as a whole stands by the project of sustaining a predominantly but not exclusively French-language society is no proof of its chronic illiberalism. Indeed, in broad terms, contemporary Quebec nationalist discourse arguably is marked by a deep engagement with the challenges posed by diversity;

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and many nationalists and sovereigntists are firmly wedded to broadening their understanding of that diversity in a way that makes it constitutive of the Quebec experience.130 Better, perhaps, to say that the precise boundaries of liberalism are open to contestation and that Quebec nationalism is actively and reasonably engaged with the highly complex issues that emerge from its pluralism. As for more extravagant manifestations of Quebec nationalism: there can be no doubting the presence of reactionaries in the ranks of the sovereignty movement (as in many other political parties and movements). But the fact remains that much sovereigntist literature is forthright in its support for the rights of anglophones, Aboriginals, and other minorities in an independent Quebec.131 So are the official statements of the Parti Québécois. If we wish to accuse mainstream secessionists of illiberal intentions, we will find little support in their official programs or in their blueprints for a sovereign Quebec. Should we persist, nevertheless, in doubting the liberalism of Quebec nationalists, we still must recognize that the ongoing engagement of Quebec nationalists with the diverse nature of their society suggests that the evolution of the movement will take increasingly pluralist, broadly liberal directions.132 And that raises another weakness of an exclusive reliance on this argument as a defence of Quebec-in-Canada. It stands to grow less and less relevant as liberal nationalism in Quebec marches on. Once we allow, after all, that liberal nationalism is possible, we must allow that Quebec could embrace this form. If this is all that liberalism can offer us in defence of Quebec-in-Canada, then it’s a poor bet.

9 on the unintended consequences of secession More compelling than any argument about the inherent attributes of nationalism, and certainly more credible than some fanciful claim from intended consequences, is the position that the unintended consequences of dissociation will be such as to corrode the capacity of Canada to maximize liberal justice. This position’s first weakness is that it can address only secession and so needs support from other arguments if it is to help us to justify rich institutional sharing between Quebec and Canada. Its second infirmity afflicts all consequentialist argument: a necessary reliance on endlessly debatable hypotheticals – what Maureen Covell, perhaps uncharitably, calls “exercises in

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political science fiction.”133 Nonetheless, they are convincing enough to take seriously. Jean-Pierre Derriennic shows how such a position might unfold, albeit in the Quebec context. “Le nationalisme québécois d’aujourd’hui est devenu civique pour la majorité de ses adeptes,”134 he happily grants, eschewing all recourse to arguments about the innate or contingent intolerance of sovereigntists. “La difficulté [from a liberal perspective] n’est pas d’être indépendant, mais de le devenir.”135 So there is no principled reason why a sovereign Quebec could not incarnate the liberaldemocratic ideals associated with “le nationalisme civique.” But as an empirical matter, he claims, the process of achieving independence is likely to be so divisive as to corrode liberal tolerance. “[D]ans un Québec indépendant, comme dans le Quebec fédéré que nous connaissons, le nationalisme pourrait être civique, mais que pour séparer le Québec du Canada on ne pourra pas se passer des arguments du nationalisme identitaire.”136 Derriennic raises the spectre of civil strife and violence, although much of his argument rests on the absence of a legal structure whereby secession can unfold constitutionally, concerns that have arguably been eased by the Secession Reference and (more debatably) the federal government’s Bill C-20, the so-called “Clarity Act.” Both go some way toward domesticating secession to the rule of law. But Stéphane Dion pursues the argument in a useful way. “It is because my sovereigntist friends share [liberal-democratic] values that we need to dialogue [sic] with them and explain that secession would jeopardize the kind of open society that they prize. The reason I oppose secession is that its very dynamic would destroy, for a long time, the spirit of compromise in Quebec society and would damage that spirit in the rest of Canada. Secession is the type of divisive issue that can plunge even the most tolerant of populations into intolerance.”137 The difficulty with secession, then, is not that Quebec nationalists are illiberal. Rather it is that the project of sovereignty, if not de jure exclusionary, is de facto the project of Quebec francophones almost exclusively. For most non-francophones, it signifies a narrowing of options at best and, at worst, the loss of country. Secession is an ethnically polarizing scenario, hardly the optimal conditions for flourishing liberal tolerance in Quebec. Rocher and Gagnon try to invert the argument from unintended consequences in their seminal defence of indépendentisme. They propose both that the movement for Quebec sovereignty is committed to mainstream liberal values – which merely reiterates the shopworn assertion

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that liberal nationalism is possible – and, more iconoclastically, that sovereignty would enhance the liberalism of Quebecers.138 “[L]’acquisition de la souveraineté est la condition obligée pour garantir la transition du nationalisme ethnique vers le nationalisme civique.”139 Sovereignty will remove the need for any elision of state and ethnos by expunging the federal context that tempts Quebecers defensively to do this. “[C]e saut politique contribuerait à atténuer la nécessité pour la majorité des Québecois de s’identifier en fonction de leur appartenance à la ‘nation’ ... au profit d’une definition se constituant davantage en fonction de leur participation à la vie du ‘pays’ à titre de citoyen.”140 This is an ingenious argument. But Jeremy Webber is right to call it “little more than a pious hope.”141 He elaborates with what is probably the best expression of the liberal argument against secession from unintended consequences. “[C]onflict during the transition [to independence] would ... be intense and strongly associated with ethnic cleavages,” but not because sovereigntists are exclusionary. Even once Quebec became independent, it would be difficult for the new government to be generous to cultural minorities. The anglophone constituency would be eroded by departures. The same level of services and institutions could not be justified for a substantially smaller community. There would undoubtedly be a period of insecurity, both economic and social, as Quebec attempted to establish its place in the world. Insecurity provides a poor foundation on which to build cultural accommodation. Anglophones’ history of fierce opposition to independence, combined with the economic cost of their exodus, would further undermine any tendency toward generosity.142 Such analyses rely on sets of empirical assumptions about how secession will unfold. Relevant variables include the restricted appeal of the sovereignty option among non-francophones, which lends credence to the idea that the legitimacy of the new state will vary massively by ascriptive identity; the fractious majority-minority conflicts which are likely to ensue; and the dangerous effects of the socio-economic insecurities which secession will generate, regardless of the state of ethnic relations in the polity (majorities being prone to intolerance during periods of intense upheaval and stress). This emphasis on unintended consequences is naturally attractive for an avowedly conservative argument like my own. The idea that estab-

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lished institutions and practices cannot be radically altered without unknowable, and probably undesirable, ramifications is one of the few consistent themes in conservative thought since Hume.143 And from what we know of the Quebec context, it is at least reasonable to imagine scenarios actively damaging to liberalism. This is fairly credible stuff for “political science fiction.” All three variables mentioned above will indeed be at play in Quebec after a oui victory: the appeal of the sovereignty option is largely restricted to Quebec francophones; and it is at least credible to imagine a substantial exodus by many non-francophones and considerable bitterness among those remaining (not to speak of Aboriginal nations such as the James Bay Crees, who have tended to approach Quebec sovereignty as anathema). The extent of economic turmoil post-secession is a matter of much debate, and the long-term effects are even murkier, but “most analyses find that transition costs will be substantial.”144 Webber, then, is eminently sensible to posit a francophone majority under stress. When we factor in the likelihood of radically fractious minorities, this does indeed seem barren ground for a calm and generous liberalism. Nonetheless, before we bind our defence of Quebec-in-Canada too tightly to this argument, we have to recall the distinction between the structure of a state and the character of its inhabitants. There are likely to be weighty incentives for a sovereign Quebec to implement institutional structures that respect the rights of anglophone and other minorities. Such matters may well emerge as areas of negotiation in both the ascension to independence and the working out of institutional ties between Quebec and a remainder Canada. The Quebec state will want to retain as many of these citizens as possible and thus will have a positive incentive to offer them meaningful guarantees. The need to defuse Aboriginal claims to self-determination – including sovereign control over large tracts of Quebec territory – may, as I suggested in the discussion of partition, prompt Quebec to offer considerable autonomy to those nations, in the hope of enhancing its legitimacy to outsiders and of making sovereignty more palatable to Aboriginals. Finally, the benefits of projecting a reassuringly liberal-democratic image for investors and the international community will be hard to overstate. These are likely among the reasons that sovereigntists generally include robust minority-rights provisions in their scenarios for state-building. Quebec’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms would presumably become the basis for possibly entrenched rights in a sovereign Quebec. If so, rightsbased judicial review within that jurisdiction would persist.145

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So the pessimistic scenario must be softened by the possibility that a Quebec state might be at least as structurally committed to liberal values as the province is at present. The argument from unintended consequences is most convincing as an anticipation of attitudes and political culture after secession; and even these might be blunted by the adroit statecraft of perspicacious elites. Of course, whether that statecraft could itself precede, or escape, the anticipated illiberal turn in popular culture is another matter. Here we collide with the necessary limits of consequentialist argument. It might seem, furthermore, that this position fails to clarify the value of Quebec-in-Canada for English-speaking Canadian liberalism, which is our primary interest here. What does a net degeneration in Quebec’s liberal tolerance have to do with the capacity of a remainder Canada to realize liberal values? Logically speaking: nothing. But Webber’s premise, that political crisis contributes to an atmosphere of uncertainty and economic turmoil and that this tends to undermine liberal tolerance, would apply equally to a remainder Canada as to a sovereign Quebec. And there is reason to believe – despite Bercuson and Cooper’s bizarre assertion that “[f]or most Canadians the independence of Quebec poses no threat to anything”146 – that English-speaking Canadians will indeed constitute a “majority under stress” after secession. Many of those who speculate on the psychology of a jilted remainder Canada anticipate some degree of anger, even a viscerally punitive attitude, toward a sovereign Quebec.147 Less canvassed is the prospect that such ressentiment might rebound upon minority cultures in Englishspeaking Canada. Without going so far as to imagine some systematic assault on basic rights, some absolute retreat from liberalism, it’s still possible to speculate that the best kind of liberal politics could, in the wake of secession, sink under rhetoric of homogenizing unity and an atomistic “difference-blindness.” To see why, we need first to establish the traumatic effects secession is liable to have on a remainder Canada and then to clarify how this is most likely to threaten liberalism. Alan Cairns anticipates “panic, fear, and insecurity after a ‘yes’ vote.” “Canadians in the roc would be ignorant about the future, not just in the sense of their normal inability to predict tomorrow’s events in detail, but about the very shape of their society,” he asserts. “The old order would be in the process of breaking up, habit and routine shattered, and everyday constraints on behaviour slackened.”148 Indeed, “[m]edia headlines and the questions on the minds of citizens would

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be scary: How far will the unravelling go? Will my savings, my pensions, my property, my children’s future, and my job be safe? Most important for non-Quebecers, will I still be a Canadian citizen and, if so, under what circumstances?”149 Not only would Canadians “undergo collective psychological disorientation,”150 but we would enjoy no easy assurances about which political institutions would step into the breach. The Secession Reference’s vision of an orderly constitutional process lends a bit of light to the “dark, unknowable abyss” – explicitly mandating a negotiating framework including Ottawa, the provinces, and other actors – but it cannot address the political dynamics that would be wrought upon Englishspeaking Canada by a “yes” vote. “Pessimists are convinced that the departure of Quebec would unleash deep divisions among the regions remaining within Canada and that no stable equilibrium will emerge.”151 Quebec, on this view, has been too central to Canadians’ conception of their polity and too “essential [a] component in coalitions that have built up over time and that sustain the existing distribution of economic and political power” for Canada to sustain itself after a oui.152 A “centrifugal bias,” fragmentary and possibly conflictual dynamics, would follow. Canada might not survive this in any recognizable fashion. My point is not to endorse the accuracy of such grim scenarios. They are, however, liable to influence the political culture after secession. Seriously confronting the prospect of total break-up, English-speaking Canadians might well launch into a “frantic search for security”153 which could place a “tremendous drive towards solidarity in roc.”154 If the “one central question” after secession will be whether “Canadians, without Quebec, [can] survive as one people,”155 then unity will be an overriding concern. And “the uncertainty, the erosion of confidence as we adapt to a world we formerly viewed as friendly, and the ambiguity of who we are and who we might become would leave us prey to unpredictable passions.”156 It scarcely needs saying that the rhetoric of unity and solidarity can lurch over into hostility toward the just accommodation of difference. Citizens of a remainder Canadian state, traumatized by secession, might feel driven to assert a compensatory, monolithic identity, at a cost to alternative poles of identity, such as other national or polyethnic identities. Indeed, since a certain kind of cultural pluralism will have been the cause of the trauma, it is at least fair to speculate about a keen backlash against any satisfactory accommodation of other cultural

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diversities within a Canadian remainder state. French Canadians outside Quebec would make the most obvious target; and these might, or might not, receive special protections as a quid pro quo for guarantees for Quebec’s anglophone population.157 But official language minorities are not the only possible victims of an English-speaking Canadian backlash against cultural accommodation. First, and most obviously, a correlation can be drawn between Quebec and Aboriginal nationalisms. Both have followed a pattern of demanding greater autonomy and a distinctive status within Canadian federalism on the basis of their status as what Kymlicka calls “nationalitybased units.” While my position here is that Quebec secession, if it occurs, will owe much to Canada’s inadequacies in coping with moderate nationalist demands for recognition, it is all too easy to imagine secession being construed politically as the result of too much accommodation. Secession could well usher in a revitalized commitment to a thoroughly antinationalist, difference-blind liberalism in a remainder Canada. The courts might provide a considerable buffer against such pressures, but that does not mean that whatever political space exists for a robust accommodation of Aboriginal autonomy would remain intact. Less immediately evident, perhaps, is that ideals gathered under the general banner of “multiculturalism,” whether understood as a public policy or as a loose ethos of respect for cultural diversity within Canada, could also be caught up in resentments more appropriately directed against Quebec. Roger Gibbins has argued something of the kind, viz., that “the new [post-secession] political culture would be less supportive of official multiculturalism” (although of course Canada would still be very diverse).158 “French-English duality ... provided the umbrella under which official multiculturalism has flourished, and when that duality is removed by the departure of Quebec, there will be less support for the maintenance of official multiculturalism.”159 For Gibbins, then, the possible demise of multiculturalism as state policy is less a matter of distressed majorities placing a harsh premium on solidarity than Quebec’s role as a structural support for multiculturalism in the present context of Canadian politics. The removal of this support would strengthen the individualistic aspects of political culture in English-speaking Canada, relative to its minoritarian currents.160 This, incidentally, offers further support for the argument that Quebec’s presence is somehow a causal variable in sustaining a more generous liberal culture.

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Gibbins may be downplaying the negative effects of political shocks on liberal tolerance. What wants emphasis here is the extent to which official multiculturalism can be thought essential to the fullest realization of liberal justice. Kymlicka defends Canadian policies of multiculturalism in light of an ideal of “fair integration” that is, in fact, a prerequisite of justice, as we touched upon earlier. The process of removing unnecessary cultural biases must be driven by an ongoing critical dialogue between newcomers, existing ethnocultural minorities, and other members of the polity. The negotiation of fair terms requires that the majority be open to cultural difference, perpetually willing to re-evaluate its structures in light of such concerns. Secession risks undermining these prerequisites for justice by placing hegemonic populations under great stress. A “premium on solidarity” may come to trump the well-meaning quest for the fair accommodation of difference.161 Nor might this simply be the result of subtracting Quebec’s effects on the balance of power among various ideologies and coalitions within English-speaking Canada, as Gibbins suggests. It may be egged on by the additional ingredient of a majoritarian preoccupation with unity in the face of a sense of impending disintegration. Reinforcing this speculation is the fact that Kymlicka’s operative distinction between “polyethnic” and “national” pluralism probably remains unclear to, or disputed by, many Canadians even now. Kymlicka claims that different categories of cultural minority tend to make very different demands (ethnocultural groups seeking fair terms of integration, and national minorities increased autonomy). He is at pains to argue that the sensitivity to difference given in the former in no way entails the exit-based politics typically associated with national minorities. If anything, fair terms of integration help to ward off the creation of newly aggrieved, autonomist minorities. But as Kymlicka concedes, many opponents of multiculturalism (as a policy or a broad ethos) misinterpret arguments for fair terms as a kind of incipient separatism.162 Indeed, multiculturalism has been under a general attack since its heyday in the 1970s, partly on grounds that it is divisive, that it fragments the polity against itself. Against this backdrop of conceptual confusion, controversy, and misinterpretation, we can readily imagine Quebec secession being portrayed as the result of too generous an attitude to cultural difference writ large. Secession could become framed as the logical outcome of group rights and cultural accommodation. In such a case, the operative lesson would be that states should

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firmly cleave to an individualistic liberalism and/or monolithic model of nationhood, abandoning all efforts to placate cultural groups. Unnecessarily biased institutions could thus be presented as the non-negotiable minima of social and political unity. And so secession would eat away at the best realization of liberal justice in a Canadian remainder state.163 This is an important cautionary tale. Nonetheless, it suffers from the weakness of any argument from contingent consequences. Countervailing scenarios, for instance, can be mustered easily enough. It has often been suggested that secession would mark the first stage in the process of Canada’s political incorporation into the United States. That is an important strain in the pessimistic scenarios that, as we saw above, are likely to influence Canada’s political culture after secession.164 But such fears could induce Canadians to emphasize what is thought to be distinctive in their collective experience.165 The myth of a “multicultural mosaic” is one such claim: it has helped Canadians to position themselves as an alternative to the American “melting pot.” By intensifying the need for tropes of this kind, secession could actually foster support for multiculturalism. Relatedly, secession might spark a desire to claim the moral high ground against an independent Quebec, encouraging Canadians to juxtapose their sensitivity to cultural difference with Quebec’s supposedly monolithic “ethnic nationalism.” This would also be a friendly climate for multicultural ideals. A second weakness with this argument, for my purposes, is that it can only address part of the agenda of this book. It cannot speak to other scenarios for dissociation – e.g., the radical uncoupling of Quebec from Canadian institutions short of secession – which I also hope to confront. Unless a reorganization of the Canadian polity along these lines can reasonably be expected to generate anything like the same existential crisis in English-speaking Canada as secession, which seems improbable, the critique will not apply in this broader context. We still need more.

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section three Beyond Justice: The Sense of Mission, Complex Fraternity, and Developmental Visions

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6 Quebec-in-Canada as Global Exemplar

1 introduction My contention has been that the mainstream liberal principles of equal respect and autonomy, although they do provide some useful grounds for resisting dissociation, fail to offer a fully adequate account of this resistance. It doesn’t follow that all opposition to dissociation must be an expression of idiosyncratic identities (derived from what here are called “experiential” narratives). Certainly, such particular attachments, and the experiential narratives that sustain them, are fundamental to understanding why the possibility of dissociation perturbs some of us; but we are not therefore required to cast these narratives beyond the pale of political theory or scholarly articulation. I want to touch on the implications of this last point in chapter 9, albeit in a very sketchy and provisional fashion. For now, though, I would like to take issue with the suggestion that, having exhausted equal respect and autonomy, there are no further principled goods worth investigating in relation to dissociation. This section explores three categories of such good, each of which finds expression in discourse on political community in Canada. One joins the case for unity to a vision of Canada’s “mission” as global exemplar. Another draws from the complex idea of fraternity that attains its apogee in Samuel LaSelva’s The Moral Foundations of Canadian Federalism. The third resides in “developmental” ideals of citizenship that relate the complexities of multinational politics to superior kinds of political agency. All are intriguing. The latter two certainly stand up. And the third is arguably the most noble – if also, perhaps, the most romantic.

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2 beyond liberty and justice: acton’s dual framework Acton’s classic defence of multinational states does not restrict itself to arguments from liberty, such as those that the previous section reinterpreted in terms of equal respect and autonomy. Under the rubric of a very vaguely defined conception of the “ripeness” that accrues from multinational cohabitation, Acton invokes a range of goods that do not self-evidently fall under our liberal categories. These include “religion,” “civilisation,” and “humanity,” as well as progress. The combination of different nations in one State is as necessary a condition of civilised life as the combination of men in society. Inferior races are raised by living in political union with races intellectually superior. Exhausted and decaying nations are revived by the contact of a younger vitality ... This fertilising and regenerating process can only be obtained by living under one government. It is in the cauldron of the State that the fusion takes place by which the vigour, the knowledge, and the capacity of one portion of mankind may be communicated to the other. Where political and national boundaries coincide, society ceases to advance, and nations relapse into a condition corresponding to that of men who renounce intercourse with their fellow-men. The difference between the two unites mankind not only by the benefits it confers on those who live together, but because it connects society either by a political or a national bond, gives to every people an interest in its neighbours, either because they are under the same government or because they are of the same race, and thus promotes the interests of humanity, of civilisation, and of religion.1 The precise meanings that Acton attaches to such concepts concern us less than the dual problematic itself, i.e., his willingness to invoke liberty and other categories of good on behalf of multinational states. Many contemporary liberals decline systematically to incorporate ideals other than justice into their political thought. But Acton invites us to do so in thinking through the value of this form of polity. Acton’s dual framework is echoed more than once in the Canadian context. Many who accept some variant of the argument that Canada’s multinational nature helps it optimally to realize liberal values also invoke other kinds of principled goods in defence of the Canadian order. Donald Smiley is a striking case in point. His work combines a

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deep concern for the relationship between Canada’s bi-national character and its liberalism with what seem to be more substantive claims about the good. In The Canadian Political Nationality, Smiley argues that it is not enough for a citizen to know that a polity’s survival requires his allegiance. Two more questions must be answered. “First, are the purposes of the association worthy? Second, even if these purposes are in themselves worthy, is the commitment demanded a total one in denying the legitimacy of other loyalties, both to more and less inclusive associations?”2 The latter insistence on respecting multiple allegiances is, Smiley claims, satisfied by Canadian federalism, which was designed to allow for the cohabitation of manifold identities within the same state. “Canada can never, without turning its back on its origins, be totalitarian.”3 Canadian unity requires the cultivation of a purely “political” nationality that both secures citizens’ ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious loyalties and plays no favourites among them. All this is quite familiar from the last chapter’s exploration of Actonian currents in Canada. The first demand, however, points Smiley in an interesting direction – all the way back to Aristotle. The state, Smiley writes, citing The Politics, is responsible for “citizens’ virtue,” and its task is to “make the citizens good and just.”4 In forwarding this insight, Smiley comes close to suggesting that the state should further a substantive account of human virtue, that virtue is one of the ends of its politics. Granted, he cashes out this potentially risky insight in a familiar way. Canada, as per Acton, Trudeau, Cook, et al., cannot be an exclusionary state; and “Canadian nationalism must thus be established on political rather than racial grounds. We have had too much of racial nationalisms.”5 We must instead be pluralistic, tolerant, and just. In other words, we must be liberal citizens; such is the “virtue” he has in mind. Importantly, though, this is not quite all that Smiley means. He continues: “[t]he Canadian experiment of maintaining a federal system which copes effectively with the intractabilities of our cultural and regional particularisms is of more than domestic significance. If this experiment should in the future succeed, Canadians will have a great deal which is useful and encouraging to say to those who under circumstances which are infinitely more difficult than ours are attempting to establish and sustain multi-racial and multi-cultural political communities and new forms of international and supranational organizations.”6 Now this raises a notion that enjoys a surprising currency in Canada, namely, that our nobility and worthiness reside in our status as global

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exemplar. The following discussion examines the nature of such a political affirmation relative to alternative forms of justification, isolates it as a significant current in Canadian discourse, and analyses its premises to determine the extent to which it can be taken seriously as a defence of Quebec-in-Canada.

3 the sense of mission: an introduction In a classic article on American thought, Russell B. Nye suggests that “all nations ... have long agreed that they are chosen peoples; the idea of special destiny is as old as nationalism itself.” But the United States, he argues, has been marked by a sense of mission to a unique degree. Nye distills this belief into three propositions: (a) that the United States is fulfilling a divine plan “as proof that man can govern himself in peace and justice”; (b) that it offers a unique example of freedom and liberty and serves as “the agent for the rest of mankind in achieving it”; and (c) that America is a refuge for the world’s oppressed.7 Elsewhere, “myths of ethnic election” have, on Anthony Smith’s view, played an important role in the long-term survival of national communities.8 Think of Israel. Such talk of mission is also found in the histories of French- and English-Canadian nationalism – as, for example, in Monseigneur Lafléche’s belief in the providential Catholic destiny of his people, or in the conviction of the fin-de-siècle proponents of imperial federation, who expounded upon Canada’s destiny as a great, self-governing power within the globally “civilising” auspices of the British Empire.9 Less often acknowledged, however, is that the theme of mission, far from evaporating with the supposed emergence of a “non-racial sense of nationality”10 in English-speaking Canada, has been transmuted into a claim that Canada’s achievement in managing cultural diversity offers an avatar of global significance. This is not to say that this theme can rival the force of the American variation. Indeed, both John Holmes and John Conway deploy the American sense of mission as a point of contrast with Canada, arguing that no such consciousness exists here.11 “Canada has lacked the sense of mission ... which has been part of the American consciousness since John Winthrop.”12 Nor is the idea of a Canadian sense of mission at all a common referent in discussions of Canadian political culture: classic treatments such as those of David Bell, S.M. Lipset, or Gad Horowitz make no mention of it.13 Nevertheless, I want to argue that a sense of collective mission remains a meaningful part of how Canadians have

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seen themselves and a recurring theme in both domestic and foreign analyses of Canada. If it cannot rival the America version in terms of ubiquity or depth of elaboration, it nonetheless forms a significant current of justification for our polity and needs to be considered if we are to understand the range of affirmations at play in resistance to secession. Substantively, this modern Canadian sense of mission displays some overlap with (c), above; indeed, not only has a prominent strand in domestic discourse identified Canada as a land of opportunity and justice for immigrants, but its recurring contrast of the “multicultural mosaic” with the “American melting-pot” can be read as an effort to go the Americans one better on this.14 But the element that really stands out, relative to American versions, is Canada’s success despite its nature as a deeply divided polity – the most spectacular aspect of which is the French-English cleavage. Thus, a notable theme in the defence of Canadian unity (almost always against the threat of Quebec secession) identifies the moral necessity of sustaining the inspiring example of multinational cohabitation that Canada holds out to the world. We will see momentarily that some such narrative of mission surfaces in many places; but I want to begin by considering its nature as a general form of justification.

4 mission as a form of political justification What sort of political affirmation is such a sense of mission? Strikingly, it ties the justification of polity to a duty to serve as exemplar. The idée-force of a missionary view is that the world would be improved were all polities to do as we have done, or have the capacity to do. We have it within us to become onto others a sterling example of values x or y; and this is a noble end. Such a conception of the moral duty of a state and its citizens bears a vexed relation to liberal thought. Certainly, it can claim no direct relationship with the bedrock preoccupations of contemporary liberal theory, which are mainly directed to the principles required for the realization of justice within a hypothetical community (e.g., Rawls’s “one cooperative scheme into perpetuity”). The connections here are hard to sort out, but the central distinction hinges on the essentially other-regarding or altruistic nature of what I’m calling the “missionary” argument. Such altruism is a foreign consideration to most contemporary liberalisms and certainly does not serve as the moral justification of

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the political community for them. Thus, this sense of mission is not simply part and parcel of a liberal outlook or an extension of liberal justifications of polity; rather it is an independent moral position, a distinct and freestanding type of affirmation. It is true that if we assume, as Rawls seems to do in A Theory of Justice, that the principles of justice are universal – the transcendent upshot of the deliberations of rational agents over the nature of the ideal polity – then prima facie their incarnation in a particular state must be held out as a desirable scenario for all states. In this sense, the distinction between states becomes almost moot, even though a bounded community is taken as a given by the theory. The just state is by definition an exemplary state.15 So it could perhaps be argued that a duty to serve as a positive example to other states is implicit in the theory of a liberal polity. On the other hand, the desire to inspire others certainly is not among Rawls’s working assumptions of what motivates actors in the original position. Aware that he requires relatively uncontroversial assumptions about such motivations in order to make his thesis broadly plausible, Rawls builds his account from “weak premises” and thus positions the participants in the original position as “rational and mutually disinterested.”16 “One should not postulate benevolence with the veil of ignorance,” even toward our fellow contractors, let alone other polities.17 If we assume that the co-operative scheme worked out behind the veil of ignorance will be a bounded community – one polity, among other polities18 – we certainly can submit the desire that our community be an exemplar to other communities as a candidate for the motivations that move actors in the original position. But A Theory of Justice would reject this motivation as fundamentally altruistic. It is thus inconsistent with the “thin” conception of the self that supposedly gives justice-as-fairness its transcendent quality. So, provided that we accept bounded communities as given in the project, we can say that liberalism, at least of the Rawlsian stripe, is principally concerned with realizing justice-as-fairness for ourselves and our fellow citizens. It demands that decisions pertaining to the “basic structure” be consistent with principles of autonomy and equal respect, but not that we see ourselves as legislating by example to other polities, even if we think it desirable that our realization of justice inspires emulation by other polities. Therefore, basing our affirmation of a particular polity on such a missionary purpose takes us beyond the parameters of strictly liberal argument. It moves from what Rawlsian liberals would

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define as the good – part of a contestable “comprehensive doctrine” about our moral duty – not the right – i.e., the criteria of justice.19 Now the belief that Quebec-in-Canada may serve as an example to others implies a critique of secession, on the grounds that it would undermine this inspirational quality. But this is not the same as saying that secession would eviscerate the capacity of Canadians to enjoy liberal justice or liberal-democratic values writ large. Nothing inherent in the act of secession violates the autonomy of others or denies them equal respect. There may be reasons to say that secession would remove certain institutional supports for these values, as explored in previous chapters, but that is not tantamount to declaring secession as such illiberal, undemocratic, or unjust. Of course, secession may certainly entail such violations in practice. We saw in chapter 4 that secession can involve the wrongful taking of assets and territory or usher in the oppression of minorities within seceding units; it can even, in the view of Buchanan, skew democratic practices when used as a threat with which to blackmail majorities; and the formal recognition of a right of secession can create all sorts of perverse incentives against optimally just and democratic outcomes. These considerations, along with the dismal track record of actual nationalist secessions, lead Buchanan to insist on a restrictive approach to secession in international law.20 But this does not mean that, in any particular instance, secession is unjust or even that only “remedial” secessions are just. For Buchanan freely grants that “Remedial Right Only Theories [such as his own] allow that there can be special rights to secede if ... the state grants a right to secede ... or if ... the constitution of the state includes a right to secede.”21 As long as a state establishes a process for accommodating “the legitimate interests that speak against secession,”22 such special rights are perfectly legitimate; and a secession undertaken in this context cannot be condemned unless, of course, it brings about unjust consequences. This flows from the wider insight that a particular exercise of a putative right may be consistent with the demands of morality regardless of whether the consequences of universally entrenching that right in international law would be undesirable.23 The point is this. If we undertake an action in a manner consistent with the demands of justice, we cannot be held morally culpable by liberal theory – even if others, in emulating our action, fail to secure liberal outcomes. Thus, were we to grant that the secession of Quebec will not systematically

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impoverish liberal justice in Quebec or English-speaking Canada, we would have no further basis for a critique of secession on liberal grounds. Kymlicka agrees, and applies the insight to Canada as follows: even if Canadian federalism eventually fails, it would not have been a moral failure. On the contrary, I would argue that it has been a success, regardless of what happens with Quebec, since it has enabled Canadians to achieve prosperity and freedom with an almost complete absence of violence. Moreover, federalism has made possible the development of strong liberal and democratic traditions within both English and French Canada. As a result, should federalism fail, the result would almost surely be two peaceful and prosperous liberal democracies where there used to be one. Multination federalism in Canada may prove to be simply a transitional phase between British colonization and the birth of two independent liberal-democratic states, but if so, it will have been a good midwife.24 Precisely. The primary duty of liberal citizens, at least in the tradition of Rawls, is to act in ways consistent with the equal respect and autonomy of their fellow citizens, at least when it comes to questions pertaining to the “basic structure.” Of course, we can add to this a duty to respect basic human rights and liberal precepts throughout the world. The act of secession need not violate either of these requirements. Hence, Kymlicka can conclude that Canadian federalism would have been a moral success even if Canada breaks apart because the primary criterion of institutional success or failure is the degree to which a given arrangement produces a liberal-democratic society (or societies). The sense of mission, then, speaks to a different conception of duty: our duty to inspire other polities to act in ways that might help them optimally to realize liberal-democratic values, or other ideals for that matter,25 or at least to avoid acting in ways that are liable to have a deleterious effect on those ideals. From this perspective, the failure of Canadian federalism might – pace Kymlicka – indeed be a moral failure, if not a failure to be just. By its lights, the citizen can’t simply say that secession is permissible provided it does not adversely affect her interests or rights or those of her fellow citizens. For that matter, she cannot even make a nationalist or “communitarian” argument that secession is permissible if it allows her community (e.g., English-speaking Canada) better to flourish or to realize its shared purposes. She has to go further

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and inquire into the effects of her example on those beyond her immediate frame of reference and that of her political community; the “basic structure” of her state, and changes to it, must check out against this third and highest order of concern. Citizens must see themselves as legislating not only for themselves or for their fellows but – albeit by example alone – for all of humankind. At the same time, this mode of justification need not be associated with some ultimate cosmopolitan end-point (say, a world without states, or a world where particular loyalties always give way before universal obligation). It can take as given the existence of distinct states and freely grant that we owe our fellow-nationals unique obligations. Yet still it justifies the polity in terms of its beneficent example to others. So it need say no more than that the fate of certain values in the world hinges, to some degree or other, on Canada’s success and that this alone is sufficient reason for Canadians to persevere. This in itself is quite a mouthful; too much, no doubt, for those unwilling to contemplate so grandiose a role for Canada in human affairs. Nonetheless, some such role has been assigned to Canada, with a greater or lesser degree of intensity, by many who contemplate the possibility of secession. Some interesting examples are given below, but the featured exhibit is Charles Doran, the American scholar who offers the most developed exposition of this approach to formulating the normative stake in Quebec-in-Canada. First, however, we need to establish the existence and significance of the missionary argument in Canada, and there is no better way to do this than to turn, once again, to the thought and the rhetoric of that great disciple of Acton, Pierre Trudeau.

5 trudeau’s canada: a “brilliant prototype” Trudeau’s writing, as the last chapter argued, displays a certain tension between the high-mindedness of its goals and the baseness of the motivations it attributes to citizens. Thus, its Mandevillian tendency to theorize federalism as a system in which desirable outcomes – especially the taming of nationalism and the related maximization of liberal justice – flow from the pursuit of narrower interests by agents (including nationalists) “on the ground.” All this is given in Trudeau’s discussion of why multinational states come to be and of the self-regarding motivations that drive agents to commit to such states, summarized earlier. Nationalists find it to be in the best interests of the nation, and themselves, so

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to commit. So Trudeau as political theorist – who, somewhat inexplicably, is motivated by liberal justice – advocates multinational federalism, which achieves these ends despite being composed of baser stuff. But Trudeau also offers an account of the importance of making a success of Quebec-in-Canada that hinges, not on interest, nor even on the desire of enlightened souls to realize justice in Canada alone, but on a more global concern for human flourishing. This account goes beyond the preoccupation with “interest,” whether base, in the sense of mere material calculus or preference-satisfaction, or enlightened, in the Rawlsian sense of perceiving the relationship between just political arrangements and our own higher interests as rational agents. Granted, Trudeau believed that secession was contrary to the material and cultural interests of French Canadians and Canadians in general. He also believed that liberal values were better served by counterpoising nationalisms within the Canadian state. But the real nobility and undeniable grandeur of the best of Trudeau’s work arguably reside in precisely the kind of missionary ideal that Smiley invokes. “It would seem,” Trudeau muses, “a matter of considerable urgency for world peace ... that the form of good government known as democratic federalism should be perfected and promoted, in the hope of solving to some extent the world-wide problems of ethnic pluralism.” More to the point, “Canada could be called upon to serve as mentor, provided she has sense enough to conceive her own future on a grand enough scale.”26 This theme culminates in what is perhaps the most eloquent passage in Trudeau’s work: The die is cast in Canada: there are two main ethnic and linguistic groups; each is too strong and too deeply rooted in the past, too firmly bound to a mother-culture, to be able to engulf the other. But if the two will collaborate at the hub of a truly pluralistic state, Canada could become the envied seat of a form of federalism that belongs to tomorrow’s world. Better than the American melting-pot, Canada could offer an example to all ... states ... who must discover how to govern their poly-ethnic populations with proper regard for liberty and justice. What better reason for cold-shouldering the lure of annexation to the United States? Canadian federalism is an experiment of major proportions; it could become a brilliant prototype for the moulding of tomorrow’s civilization.27 This is not a marginal form of justification in Trudeau’s discourse. Indeed, his often-cited speech to the U.S. Congress declared that the

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prospective “failure of [the] always-varied, often illustrious Canadian social experiment” would represent “a crime against humanism” – or, in the French version, “un crime contre l’humanité.”28 And on the eve of the P.Q. victory in 1976, Trudeau reminded Canadians that our “unique national enterprise ... offers the world a lesson in fraternity,” juxtaposing René Lévesque’s “strong core of blood brothers” with “a deeper brotherhood than that of blood, of a fraternity of hope and of charity in the scriptural sense ... [which] each of us must work towards ... in the reality of our daily lives.”29 This last quotation introduces a distinct element – the concept of fraternity – which needs to be hived off from the emphasis on “proper regard for liberty and justice” associated with the kind of broad, mainstream liberalism we have been invoking under the rubric of Acton. As we’ll see, Samuel LaSelva takes up that theme. For now, what counts is the missionary mode of justification as such. For this form of justification clearly deviates from what we would expect of the Trudeau portrayed by Mathie or Whitaker, one who is primarily interested in transmuting narrow interests into a just society; or the Trudeau that Wayne Norman describes, who believes that the possession of “shared values” is sufficient justification for sharing a polity;30 and it makes good the gap identified by Christiano, who argues that Trudeau’s oratory suffers from “[t]he flat tone of rational rhetoric in a society devoid of transcendent self-references provided by a national myth.”31 Christiano (echoing the mighty George Grant) accuses Trudeau of reducing the value of polity to a good standard of living and a technocratic liberalism. This ultimately fails to justify Canada, for “[a]s the basis for a civil religion ... the commandments of liberalism are fatally universalistic. Anyone may embrace them, and thankfully some do. But there is no reasoning offered for why Canadians are compelled to this choice.”32 However, Christiano’s preference for a “mystically particularist utterance”33 draws too stark a dichotomy between the universal and particular. For it is the peculiarity of the Canadian situation – its complexity as a culturally pluralistic and multinational federal state in a world where such diversity poses serious challenges – that makes Canada’s particularity of universal interest, and so ennobles it, transforming it into “a brilliant prototype,” “an experiment of major proportions.” H.D. Forbes, in a perceptive synthesis of Trudeau’s praxis, characterizes Trudeau’s overarching vision as “pluralism” and is one of Trudeau’s few interpreters to give an appropriate weight to this missionary component.

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Trudeau’s vision was a moral vision ... because it demanded a special kind of self-sacrifice, connected with its being, at least on the surface, an experiment. If successful, all Canadians will of course benefit more or less. Those who designed and conducted the experiment will enjoy everlasting fame as benefactors of mankind. But if the experiment fails to produce a model for imitation, the reputations of some leaders may suffer, and so will the country. The real beneficiaries will be people living elsewhere. Doctors who test new drugs on themselves put the interests of their patients ahead of their own immediate interests. Similarly, Trudeau called upon Canadians to embark on a noble experiment for the sake of increasing mankind’s political knowledge.34 Forbes also makes the important supplementary point that the kind of radically decentralized Canada envisioned by many Quebec nationalists – the sort of thing labelled “dissociation” here – would represent the failure of this experiment. Such a model “might show distant observers that good fences – huge rivers, towering mountains, trackless wastes – make good neighbours,” but the challenge of “crowded countries” in the Third World and elsewhere “was to discover a way for very different peoples to live together peacefully in close proximity, despite their differences.”35 Canadians who retreat to their own sub-communities and minimize their shared frameworks, regardless of the extent to which they continue to uphold liberal-democratic ideals, offer a much less edifying model to a polyglot and heterogeneous world than Canadians who choose a path of rich institutional sharing and mutual engagement. Trudeau exercised an extraordinary hold on Canadians’ self-understanding for the better part of three decades, and so his deployment of an ideal of collective mission warrants special attention.36 But he is not alone in having recourse to such majestic higher purposes. Smiley has already been cited; here are more cases in point: G

Michael Ignatieff, whose conception of nationalism fits quite comfortably with the broader tradition of liberal critique identified with Acton, explains that “[o]ther people besides Canadians should be concerned if Canada dies. If federalism can’t work in my Canada, it probably can’t work anywhere.”37 Given that Ignatieff’s working dichotomy opposes federalism to destructive ethnic nationalism and recursive secessions, we can see how weighty a consideration this is.

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G

Hugh MacLennan contended that “in the particular complex of neuroses from which the rest of the world is suffering, Canada has had an acute and extremely long experience. For not only was this country formed out of the flotsam and jetsam of defeated racial and political groups; some of these groups had once been bitter enemies. But they had to live here, and they had to live in peace with each other ... at this moment in history, the Canadian experience is of immense significance for mankind; if we truly talk about ourselves we will be talking not only for ourselves but for others.” Decades later, William Kilbourn endorsed this argument.38

G

For Bruce Hutchison, the “modest example of working duality” is the “[o]ne achievement [that] plainly distinguishes Canada ... it has managed, despite its frequent blunders, to preserve a dual state, a unique example to mankind.”39

G

Ramsay Cook cites historian Tony Judt to the same effect: “if federal Canada, ‘one of the world’s most fortunate places,’ cannot contain these forces [of cultural nationalism], then ‘the prospect for nonterritorial, state-sharing, overlapping cultural nationalisms of a liberal (or any other) kind is slim indeed.’”40

G

“[T]he Canadian ideal is the ideal of all humanity,” in the view of Stéphane Dion. “If Canada were to break up, we would send a terrible signal to other countries of the world ... Canada’s break-up would not encourage ... cultural majorities in [other] countries to show tolerance, openness and trust towards their minorities.”41

G

Claude Ryan, who combines Actonian arguments about liberty with a belief in the expanded horizons multinational cohabitation opens to us, also observes that “la présence dans l’ensemble canadien de deux communautés linguistiques principales ... présente un intérêt certain pour les sociétés désormais fort nombreuses qui font face à des tensions d’ordre ethnique ou culturel.”42

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“Canadians, because of our uniquely successful experience with innovative federal systems, should become the evangelists of a new federalist gospel. To paraphrase William Pitt, we must continue to save Canada by our exertions, and the world by our example,” writes Peter G. White.43

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“Canada’s disintegration would instruct the world, particularly its less favored peoples, that even the richest, freest, and most developed democracies can die when the will to unify has atrophied,” according to Lansing Lamont. “An eclipse of Canada would darken hopes that the democratic ideal is necessarily mankind’s salvation.”44

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Even Will Kymlicka – not a writer prone to elegiac overstatement – argues that “Canada is a world leader in three of the most important areas of ethnocultural relations: immigration, indigenous peoples, and the accommodation of minority nationalisms.” He goes on to say that We [Canadians] have learned a great deal about what sorts of accommodations are necessary and desirable in a pluralistic country. This experience has been hard-won, achieved only after years of painful struggles, humiliating misunderstandings, and cruel indifference. Nevertheless, we have learned some very important lessons over the years – lessons that many other countries want and need to learn if they too are to survive and prosper ... in this one area, Canada is an internationally recognized leader ... [and] I firmly believe that other countries can learn from our experience, and that we can help other peoples avoid unnecessary conflicts and injustices.45

Granted, there is a difference between arguing that Canada’s experience offers a useful example and condemning Quebec secession as its decisive negation. Because Kymlicka does not take the latter step, his claim above is not quite a “missionary” argument in defence of national unity. Indeed, if my analysis of the nature of such arguments is correct, he could not make such a case, given his reluctance to tie justification to anything other than liberal norms (while an argument about a collective mission of course invokes the “good” rather than the liberal “right”). Kymlicka’s targets above are thus not secessionists but foes of groupdifferentiated rights, who oppose multiculturalism and special accommodation for nationality-based units in Canada. He is urging that we press on with these approaches. Nonetheless, part of what is valuable about Canada’s experience with such policies is that it offers a useful example to others; and this, from our present perspective, is the point. Canada’s sense of national mission “owes much to ... Lord Acton’s famous declaration,”46 but a belief in Canada’s wider purpose goes well beyond those loosely associated with Actonian currents. Charles

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Taylor altogether repudiates the Actonian tradition of “differenceblind” liberalism and urges Canadians to embrace a “deep diversity” that directly challenges the “monolithic model” of statehood he associates with France and the United States. One reason for pursuing this in Canada is that “[t]he world needs other models to be legitimated in order to allow for more humane and less constraining modes of political cohabitation.”47 Again, Canada serves as a model and is the possible locus of an ideal that needs incarnation. And James Tully, a proponent of a quite radical reworking of constitutional politics in the direction of legally differentiated multinationality, presents the Secession Reference as a model statement of the principles underlying a just multinational state, subtly bringing to bear the idea of the Canadian experience as exemplar.48 Other, more diffuse manifestations of this belief in a collective mission may also be worth pondering. “From its origin, our country has had to cope with the existence of deep cultural differences,” writes Jeremy Webber. “The lessons learned at home may also have given us greater sensitivity to cultural distinctions on the international plane, contributing to our impressive diplomatic record.”49 That Canadians have special insights in managing such deep divisions arguably feeds into self-celebratory discourses around Canada’s tradition of international peacekeeping, which often position us as an intermediary between rival nationalisms. We have tended to mythologize ourselves as an international force for “taming nationalism,”50 in Holmes’s words – or containing, at least, the worst effects of ethno-cultural conflicts – and this may be related to our sense of the constitutive complexity of our own country.51 So it is possible that a deep, if elusive, connection binds our profoundest existential debates to our sense of what we contribute to the world. If so, the sense of collective mission may turn out to be a more important thread in Canadians’ self-understanding than first appearances would suggest. In any case, all this should suffice to show that a sense of mission is a prominent stream in Canadian discourse. Smiley, Trudeau, Cook, MacLennan, Ryan, Dion, Ignatieff, Hutchison, Kymlicka, Taylor, et al., are not marginal voices; many of them have been central to discussion over questions of national unity for many years. It is true that the missionary sensibility in Canada has tended not to receive the kind of sustained and visionary articulation that it has enjoyed in the American context. Generally speaking, the above quotations do not reflect the principal arguments of their authors. They do however, play an

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important role in the authors’ attempts to explain the significance of those arguments, i.e., why the “survival of Canada” matters. The above also shows that missionary arguments have been invoked on Canada’s behalf by outside observers. Americans have made much of it, for instance.52 Bill Clinton’s claims that “Canada has shown the world how people of different cultures and languages can live in peace, prosperity, and mutual respect” and that “we look to you; we learn from you”53 might be dismissed as diplomatic flummery, but when his fellow countryman Lansing Lamont casts Canada in precisely the same light,54 and the eminent Charles F. Doran builds a significant scholarly work around this theme, it behooves us to pursue the matter. Indeed, Doran’s text is especially worth considering because (perhaps ironically) it represents the most sustained attempt at a missionary argument for Canadian unity. There is no better source for understanding the structure of such an argument.

6 mission as a scholarly argument against secession: doran’s “democratic pluralism” The central contention of Doran’s Why Canadian Unity Matters is that Canada forms an inextricable facet of a wider North American experiment in “democratic pluralism.” This refers to the “type of democracy that encompasses a variety of ethnic and cultural groupings inside a single, unified set of federal structures”55 or, more elaborately, “a condition of society in which diverse ethnic, racial, religious, or social groupings ‘maintain their autonomous participation in their traditional culture within the confines of a single civilization’ or state. Democratic pluralism seeks to harmonize and to integrate politically [and is] a political and legal guarantee that assimilation is not required.”56 The alternative to democratic pluralism is a “preference for homogeneity”57 as the basis of the political order, with the concomitant implication that “[t]he democratic state is no longer seen to be capable of accommodating societal difference. Rather, societal difference is the arbiter of whether the democratic state can prevail.”58 An obvious critique of secession follows. “Separation along ethno-linguistic lines is a statement that democratic pluralism has failed, that the only way each communal group can obtain its goals is through isolation.”59 Such a principle threatens to fracture the international state system through recursive secessions and ultimately risks destroying the stability, tolerance, and solidarity on which both liberalism and democracy depend.

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This dynamic would place liberal-democratic ideals at risk in Quebec itself, according to Doran; but he offers a more universal reason for opposing Quebec sovereignty. North America, he explains, serves as a “city on a hill,” a “beacon for democratic pluralism worldwide.”60 This metaphor implies “an internal harmony of interests and purpose among the parts of the city”;61 and despite assorted historical deviations from the high principles of the “city on a hill,” the metaphor nonetheless “captures the noble spirit of North Americans, regardless of borders or national and communal differences.”62 The “city on a hill” is a principle of constructive international outreach, an inspiration to other peoples, and an ideal that informs whatever beneficent interventions North American states have performed in the world.63 The secession of Quebec would strike a blow to the “soft power” that North America “radiates to every part of the world” because “[t]he essential concept that underlies [the] flourishing of external contact and openness associated with the North American city on the hill is impregnability. It is safe from internal disharmony, secure from external domination or incipient erosion.”64 Canadians, Mexicans, and Americans must be able to demonstrate to other polities, including the transition governments of formerly communist countries and the developing countries, that these three governments have been able to make democratic pluralism work. By demonstrating that democratic pluralism is a success in their own countries, North Americans can help protect democratic pluralism from risk worldwide. It does matter how federal Canada, Quebec, and the other provinces deal with their own experience with divisive nationalism, however unique and however benign ... if secession occurs, democratic pluralism worldwide will suffer, for the model itself will have failed and democratic pluralism will be regarded as a ‘damaged good’ not worthy of consideration. Homogenization of culture within increasingly fragmented and increasingly isolated populations will become the norm for state organization.65 Thus, the failure of Quebec-in-Canada would be the failure of the harmonious North American “city on a hill.” Instead of radiating the principles of intercultural co-operation and democratic pluralism, North America would become merely another carrier of the separatist “contagion.”

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That a major scholar of international politics could frame the Quebec issue in this light, and that so many high-profile Canadian thinkers deploy, with greater or lesser degrees of intensity, variants of the argument from international duty, testifies to its intuitive appeal. But how valid is the insight? In its strongest form, the missionary approach frames Canada as an example whose implications are decisive for the fate of certain values in the world. So it follows that something about Canada’s situation must stand out as unique, or at least privileged, for the purposes of realizing the values in question. The significance of the Canadian experiment would, after all, decline to the extent that we understand Canada to be merely one of a number of countries engaged in similar projects. Second, the Canadian experiment must be of wide-ranging applicability, addressing very common and recurring problems in international politics. The more narrowly (or precisely) we define what is at stake in the Canadian example, the less universal become the implications of its failure and the less generally applicable and relevant the experiment. Third, international exemplars must in fact be a significant independent variable in the domestic politics of states. Otherwise the practical significance of the Canadian example shrinks radically, however strong its theoretical appeal. Finally, and relatedly, international perceptions of the Canadian experiment must in fact conform to those of the advocates of the missionary model. An example can only inspire if it is explicitly taken as such. The first two assumptions are more theoretical in nature, centring on how we define the Canadian endeavour and the example it poses. The latter two raise largely empirical or practical questions about the manner in which examples and perceptions actually operate in a global context. But all four are at play in Doran’s text. Canada is presented there as an inextricable part of a uniquely inspiring North American model. Its failure promises to stigmatize the model as a whole. The ideal at stake in Canadian unity is the highly general one of cultural coexistence within states; this is an issue of almost universal application. Separatism, Doran tells us, might be a kind of “contagion” in international politics, such that a successful secession here would generate momentum for secession elsewhere; thus, examples do function as independent variables, and Canada’s failure has huge practical significance.66 Finally, North America really is, and really is seen to be, a “city on a hill” to a benighted earth.

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The last two claims, being empirical propositions, could only be demonstrated through systematic studies of (a) the role played by international examples in the discourse of secessionist movements and in the efforts of states to manage divisive nationalisms; and (b) foreign interpretations of what is at stake in Canadian battles over unity, as expressed by, say, the journalists, academics, and statesmen of other countries. Neither issue can thoroughly be canvassed here, but we do know that many states routinely study the practices and institutions of other states. There are also some clear examples of states referring to the Canadian experience in federalism and pluralism as guides to their own practice.67 Then again, it’s far from clear how much weight such examples really carry in domestic deliberations over institutional design and how much influence is assigned specifically to the Canadian example in such cases. We also know that the sovereignty movement in Quebec, for one, has made frequent reference to successes of foreign nationalisms, ranging from its early identification with decolonization movements of Africa and elsewhere to its regular citation of lessons drawn from the break-up of Czechoslovakia and (more troublingly) Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Indeed, the much-criticized inclination of sovereigntists to frame independence as the “normal destiny of nations” entirely relies on such external referents. If Quebec sovereigntists are any indication, then, secessionist movements do tend to draw moral strength from other successful independence movements. But again, how much difference this makes to the success or failure of those movements remains unanswered. Significantly, Doran offers only sophisticated assertions on these fronts. Despite numerous insights into the phenomena of nationalism and secession, his metaphor of “contagion” is unsupported save by some speculative hypotheses briefly enucleated at the end of one chapter.68 Nor do others who invoke the missionary ideal seem to offer much more. At best, then, arguments about the actual significance of the Canadian example abroad remain speculative. Only further research on international perceptions of the Canadian dilemma could make them more than this. The first two assumptions invite more sustained reflection here. Why is Canada a particularly important test case for the ideals it is supposed to exemplify? What makes Canada such a decisive example? The answer must be that Canada enjoys a privileged position as an extremely prosperous and secure liberal democracy. This can be taken as

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the key to explaining why it enjoys an especially exemplary status: it faces fewer complicating variables (poverty, a culture of violence, memories of large-scale historical atrocities, and so forth) that would contaminate the experiment in multinational cohabitation. Canada seems to approximate ideal laboratory conditions, so to speak. Hence, Ignatieff’s remark that “if federalism can’t work in my Canada, it probably can’t work anywhere,” and Doran’s conviction that “[i]f democratic pluralism fails in North America, where the political and material conditions for its success are so propitious, then it is likely to have much less prospect of success elsewhere in the world system, where the circumstances are so much harsher and less conducive to democratic practice.”69 There is some rough common sense to this. But given the lack of hard information about how examples in general, or the Canadian example in particular, actually function in international politics, alternative readings might be equally plausible. Take the contrarian (or satirical) insight that Canada’s unity dilemmas are better understood as pathologies of privilege. Mordecai Richler spoke for this constituency when he had Barney Panofsky excoriate Canada as “a cloud-cuckoo land, an insufferably rich country governed by idiots, its self-made problems offering comic relief to the ills of the real world out there, where famine and racial strife and vandals in office are the unhappy rule.”70 So much for the pretence of a useful Canadian example! Instead, Richler frames Canada’s dilemmas as idiosyncratic aberrations with no necessary implications for others (i.e., “the real world”). One possible upshot of such reasoning is that peoples less inured to luxury and security may better understand the urgency of peaceful coexistence, and thus have incentives to make the “experiment” work, where we have failed – if only they can rid themselves of “vandals in office” and other evils. This may fall short of serious academic analysis, but it at least has the merit of underscoring the difficulty in making too much out of a single case. Any specific political project encompasses a vast array of variables, some of which may be highly idiosyncratic. Thus, as long as there are other states engaged in the experiment, it may yet succeed, whether or not Canada endures in its present form. Countries such as India and Sri Lanka, or for that matter Spain and the U.K., can all be classified as states in which distinct arrangements for multinationality are very much on the institutional agenda, albeit in quite different ways. Also related to the question of the decisiveness of the Canadian example is the possibility that Canada might be able to continue to

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exemplify a given set of ideals despite the secession of Quebec. Both a sovereign Quebec and a remainder Canada will remain diverse societies characterized by both polyethnic and multinational pluralism. Now this is often taken as a stinging refutation of Quebec sovereigntists: they won’t be able to escape Canadian-style diversity even if they achieve independence (the assumption being that secession is necessarily a flight from diversity). But, of course, thoughtful sovereigntists are well aware of Quebec’s complexities. Many argue for secession on the grounds of Canada’s insufficient accommodation of multinational diversity rather than Quebec’s need to escape complexity. So the federalist argument can here be inverted: if a sovereign Quebec will be a multinational, polyethnic state, just like Canada, then secession poses no threat to the principle of diversity, and this principle cannot be used to rebuke the sovereignty movement. What to make of this? Recall our working distinction between arguments from inherency and contingency. Doran agrees with the arguments from empirical probability explored in the previous section, such that Quebec secession, in his view, is likely to degrade liberal values in a sovereign Quebec. And the previous section explored the possibility of a backlash in English-speaking Canada against accommodating cultural pluralism of all sorts in the wake of secession. Under such scenarios, Quebec secession would indeed corrode or destroy the capacity of both societies to exemplify the best realization of justice. But these are contingent scenarios. It is similarly possible that a sovereign Quebec and a remainder Canada will, after some turmoil, return to their default position as exemplary multicultural and multinational orders. Should this come to pass, Canada and Quebec could continue to incarnate whatever ideas we choose to attach to peaceful coexistence amid “deep diversity.” One might reply that Quebec secession will likely draw massive international attention and be interpreted abroad as a spectacular case of the failure of a multinational state – a precedent for secession and against cultural cohabitation, regardless of its consequences for Canadians or what Canada and Quebec look like after independence. An overwhelming reason for opposing such a precedent is that secession generally risks bringing in its train not simply economic dislocation, but more fundamental moral costs, such as violence, bloodshed, hatred, sustained instability, and so on. It is important, then, that Canada not be seen to endorse or exemplify such a dangerous precedent, for – regardless of the actual effects of secession on the capacity of Canadians

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to realize the desired values – our example would encourage others to follow a path that, in their case, may collide with these values. All this is sensible enough. But the question originally raised in my theoretical treatment of the sense of mission as political justification remains alive: if we undertake a given action in a manner fully consistent with justice and democracy, can we really be held responsible if others fail to emulate us in the latter respect? Is the exemplar to be blamed if its example is poorly read? Surely not. This thought can be carried further. Were Quebec-in-Canada to be dismantled without catastrophic effects, then, ironically for the missionary perspective, the ultimate lesson of the Canadian experience would be one of sustained fidelity to the desired values amid radical turbulence. The sovereigntist project undertaken in accord with the principles laid out in the Secession Reference, for instance – federalism, constitutionalism, rule of law, respect for minorities, and democracy – would be as much a tribute to the validity of these ideals even under conditions of crisis as to the principle of secession; and secessions undertaken in defiance of these ideals could not intelligibly be said to be following the “Canadian example.” This throws the argument from duty on its head: secession becomes recast as fully compatible with our duty to serve as exemplar, provided it is pursued in the right spirit, according to the correct regulatory principles, i.e., those implied by the values that our example is supposed to promote.71 All that remains for the conservative position is the possibility of unintended consequences (which, of course, is not insignificant). The issue of perceptions raises another problem. By defining “democratic pluralism” so diffusely – as a largely undifferentiated North American project shared by both Canada and the United States – Doran invites the observation that the American experiment in “democratic pluralism” will remain untarnished, no matter what happens to Canada. Thus, the world would continue to enjoy an overwhelmingly influential and powerful example of this ideal. It is difficult to believe that the collapse of Canada would offer much distraction from the brilliant spectacle of the most economically, militarily, and culturally powerful society on earth. Insofar, then, as the U.S. can be expected to continue to exemplify “democratic pluralism,” why should we fret over the fate of Canada? Adequately addressing such criticisms requires us to focus on the precise nature of the diversity represented by Quebec-in-Canada and whether this category of diversity would in fact be replicable in a sovereign

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Quebec or remainder Canada (or in the U.S., for that matter). I suggested earlier that a large national minority, engaged and influential in the politics of the wider state, would be more apt to generate the kinds of democratic frustrations examined in chapter 3 than national minorities that are comparatively marginal in shared institutions; and that more powerful nationality-based units will be more likely to pose an ongoing challenge on a variety of fronts. Quebec secession would take us from a situation in which two large national units share a state with an array of indigenous peoples and ethnocultural communities toward one in which two states, each comprising a single dominant “nation,” would share the state with many small nationality-based units. While they would remain categorically similar – they would still be multinational states – they would now experience and incarnate multinationality in a different way. Quebec secession, then, would represent a flight (or, less polemically, a shift) from a certain kind of multinational experience to another, both for Quebec itself and for English-speaking Canada. Only by drawing such nuances about types of diversity can we get around the sovereigntist claim that secession would represent no movement away from “diversity,” or the related charge that the United States – a multinational state, but not of the Canadian variety – would continue to offer an adequate example of “democratic pluralism” in Canada’s stead. We become able to say that a sovereign Quebec and remainder Canada will not simply be interchangeable with Quebec-inCanada in moral terms. Doran neglects to attach any analytical significance to distinctions between multinationality and ethnocultural diversity, let alone between distinct kinds of multinationality; these are all lumped together as variations on the theme of “democratic pluralism.” And this leaves the door wide open for the sovereigntist rebuttal that the remainder states will continue to incarnate “democratic pluralism.” Once we get more precise on what specifically is at stake in Quebec-inCanada, rather than “pluralism” in amorphous terms, we may entertain the possibility that some special value really is at risk in secession. At the same time, however, emphasizing this distinction carries the cost of shrinking the universal relevance of the Canadian example. Although almost every state harbours some degree of ethnic diversity, not all states contain a national minority as powerful as la nation canadienne-française, or a nationality-based unit akin to Quebec. For those lacking this ingredient, Canada’s experiences with Quebec offer no necessary insight. What is at stake here is only this kind of experiment in diversity, not cultural pluralism per se.

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7 mission accomplished? some concluding thoughts So the missionary ideal is probably most credible in softer forms. It is one thing to insist that Canada’s example plays a strong causal role in the destiny of the state system; quite another to suggest, more humbly, that in a world riven by ethnic rivalries and violence, we need as many successes as we can get, and that Canada’s peaceful, liberal, and democratic pluralism, along with that of some other privileged countries, may serve as one meaningful source of inspiration and place of refuge, among others. As Roch Carrier puts it, Ce pays doit durer Pour que la tolerance et la paix règne entre les deux rives d’un continent ... Il faut que ce pays dure Pour donner sur cette planète un refuge à la paix.72 Such rhetoric locates Canada within an international context, celebrates its exemption from the costs often associated with the competition of nationalisms, and, by extension, suggests that secession might put this exemption at risk. That it takes “cette planète” as its primary referent perhaps distinguishes it from purely Canadian-centred arguments, such as those that emphasize the costs that secession might effect upon liberal ideals in the remainder states. It works from a concern for the realization of certain values on a global level and observes that Quebec secession, by undercutting these values in Canada, would thus mark a net loss for these values in the world. At worst, there would be one less home for the richest kind of liberalism; at best, there would be one fewer place where powerful national communities undertake a strong form of shared political life. The above discussion has remained fairly general as to the nature of the values that the Canadian example supposedly serves. This is because a number of different values, not simply straightforward liberal-democratic values, have been associated with Quebec-inCanada. We can now begin to deepen our understanding of the range of goods woven into our multinational state (and which, if the sense of mission makes any sense, we therefore exemplify, or have the potential to exemplify). High on this list is Samuel LaSelva’s seminal case for “complex fraternity.”

7 Moral Foundations? Complex Fraternity and Dissociation as Tragedy

1 introduction LaSelva’s landmark The Moral Foundations of Canadian Federalism is perhaps the most spectacular example of an explicitly goods-based argument for the Canadian order. His text isolates the “powerful ideal of fraternity” as the animating affirmation of Canadian federalism, one that extends back to George-Étienne Cartier’s speeches on the Quebec resolutions and continues to run through a range of practices, from equalization to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. “Canadian nationhood,” LaSelva argues, “presupposes Canadian federalism, which in turn rests on a complex form of fraternity that can promote a just society characterized by a humanistic liberalism and a democratic dialogue.”1 LaSelva is never quite clear about where the moral emphasis lies – with fraternity, or with justice proper; it is perhaps best to say that the two are mutually reinforcing, that the boundaries of our reciprocal obligations (justice) are determined by a “complex fraternity,” and that this fraternity is nurtured, in turn, by justice.2 The Canadian experiment “presuppose[s] that peoples with distinctive ways of life could possess goodwill towards each other, participate in common endeavours, develop and sustain common allegiances and common sentiments, and operate political institutions for the welfare of all.”3 Federalism in Canada “has moral foundations precisely because of its connection with this powerful ideal.”4 This entails both apartness and shared space. Federalism upholds each by dividing sovereignty, carving out autonomous spheres in which different communities might pursue distinct “ways of life,” and simulta-

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neously creating a “Canadian political nationality” at the centre, where these communities may express an active and meaningful common life, bound by fraternity. “Canadian federalism is about divided jurisdiction, divided loyalties, multiple identities, and intersecting communities of belonging. When it is so understood, it becomes capable of mediating the potentially divisive traditions of Canadian pluralism.”5 Distinct identities, nationalities, and ways of life thrive, while also engaging in the more universal values neglected by too exclusive a concern for the particular – values such as justice and fraternity across as well as within communities.6 Canada, then, properly conceived, can accommodate minority nations and “societal cultures,” as well as regional and ethnocultural diversity, while remaining more than just a loose affiliation of solitudes. The Canadian situation becomes tragic when the “cooperative virtues” that sustain Canada give way before a clash of incommensurable identities and values. Such conflicts occur when national minorities are treated as targets for assimilation rather than accommodation (as in Canada’s dealing with its Aboriginal peoples); when narrow dreams of an undifferentiated Canadian citizenship overwhelm our capacity to affirm diversity (as arguably occurred in debates over the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords); when ethnocultural communities are marginalized; or when the negotiation of shared space is rejected in favour of a politics of exit (as in Bercuson and Cooper, or in pur et dur variants of Quebec nationalism). LaSelva’s critique of the exit-based politics of secessionists and nationalists flows logically, he thinks, from his celebration of fraternity. “Nationalists want to confine fraternity; federalists want to expand it.”7 Indeed, fraternity offers a reason to oppose all forms of exit-based alternatives to Quebec-in-Canada as we know it, whether in the form of a radically asymmetrical federalism or outright sovereignty. For if our aim is to realize this ideal, then disaggregating Quebec from Canadian institutions – even if some degree of “partnership” or “association” survives – amounts to a massive retreat. That there are different degrees of retreat does not change its nature, as a step backwards for complex fraternity. Thus, LaSelva’s case applies to all forms of dissociation. This demands some elaboration. LaSelva accuses secessionists of neglecting complex fraternity in favour of an exclusive attachment to their narrower “national” identity.8 Prima facie, their agenda implies a withdrawal from shared space, and solidarity, with English-speaking Canada. Also, insofar as secession would cast into doubt the survival of

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Canada itself, it would imperil the moral foundations that have given meaning to the Canadian endeavour. So LaSelva writes of secession as “the disappearance of Canada (as it has existed),” and that for many, the disappearance of Canada would be a tragic event, a genuine catastrophe in which virtually all parties would experience defeat. A fragmented Canada, it is often suggested, would simply be swallowed up by the United States and gradually assimilated into the American melting-pot. If such a result occurred, it would represent not only the loss of political independence, but also the disappearance of distinctive identities and ways of life. Those who initially favoured the disappearance of Canada might experience short-term success, yet they too would suffer ultimate defeat. Such, in outline, is the story of Canada told as one of tragedy.9 The contrast here is with those who believe that “healthy nations would emerge from the constitutional ruins.”10 For them, secession would not mark the self-evident tragedy described above – although, of course, it would still strike a blow against the complex fraternity that LaSelva deploys against them. LaSelva proceeds to carry the argument further by blurring the distinction between radical decentralization and secession, on the grounds that “weak confederacies are inherently unstable because they fail to establish central governments capable of sustaining themselves.”11 Thus, forms of dissociation that fall short of outright secession, in addition to being, a priori, a net loss for fraternity, also invite the spectre of out-and-out collapse that haunts secession itself. This analysis of dissociation as tragedy combines what I’ve been calling inherency and contingency arguments. Any radical disaggregation of Quebec from Canada would, by its very nature, diminish fraternity; and it would risk catastrophic unintended consequences. The degree to which we fear the latter will depend on our willingness to distinguish between secession per se and its possible consequences, such as the utter disintegration of a remainder Canada. As observed in chapter 5, it can credibly be argued that Canada would not break up and assimilate “into the American melting-pot” after Quebec secession. This being so, it is fortunate that LaSelva’s argument does formulate dissociation as inherently regrettable. However, a certain imprecision must be cleared up before we can determine the limits of his argument. LaSelva writes that Canadian federalism permits fraternity across different “ways of life,” but he draws no categorical distinction between

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(say) provincial, regional, ethnocultural, and multinational diversities. Indeed, he never defines what he means by “ways of life,” save to say that Canadian federalism entails many of these.12 That he has national, as opposed to ethnocultural or regional, cleavages primarily in mind when he writes of “ways of life” might be inferred from the fact that his text is disproportionately concerned with challenges posed by Canada’s multinational nature – Quebec/Canada relations and Aboriginal issues – while other problems of Canadian nationhood and federalism, such as regional equity and multiculturalism, receive largely incidental attention. When he justifies his search for foundations on the grounds that “a federalism without foundations is more easily transformed into the local sovereignties envisaged by Québécois and Aboriginal nationalists or into the kind of centralized unitary state advocated by Durham or Macdonald,”13 or writes that “the great danger faced by Canadian democracy is that citizens will deny each other mutual recognition and destroy the country,”14 he perhaps reveals a de facto preoccupation with the special challenges of this type of diversity. Then again, he also cites programs such as regional equalization and the welfare state, which bear no obvious connection to Canada’s multinational nature, as examples of policies designed to promote fraternity; and he clearly does think that fraternity offers a comprehensive guide to issues of nationhood in Canada, including ethnocultural relations and other manifestations of “identity politics.”15 Fundamentally, then, LaSelva is not interested in systematically delineating different types or orders of “complex fraternity.” Such distinctions, however, may be of more than pedantic interest. For precisely what we make of the inherent implications of the “tragedy” of Quebec secession will depend on whether we are willing to draw distinctions between categories of diversity and, therefore, of the experience of “complex fraternity” associated with coexistence across each. Simply put, the more we are willing to identify multinationality as a special order of experience in fraternity, the more powerful our critique of secession will be. We can begin to see this by taking note of a prominent thread in LaSelva’s challenge to Quebec nationalists. Pondering the inclination of their “new nationalism” to see the state as expressive of nationality, he makes the now commonplace observation that “[i]n Quebec there are groups that either do not share the aspiration of independence or believe (as do some Aboriginal Canadians) that a principle of selfdetermination should be extended to French-speaking Quebecois only

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if it is also extended to them. In such a situation, the unqualified and consistent application of expressivist principles may simply exacerbate political conflict and social fragmentation.”16 This is perfectly sound, but it also reminds us that a sovereign Quebec would – unless it concedes the partition principle, of its own volition or otherwise – remain a complex, diverse society: indeed, a multinational society. Perhaps this doesn’t matter, since Canadian-style federalism is the carrier and realization of LaSelva’s fraternity, and an independent Quebec may well fall short of the federal model. But what of English-speaking Canada? If federalism is primarily what counts, must we not conclude that a Canada-without-Quebec, provided it retains its federal system, would continue to realize or represent the ideal of “complex fraternity?” A remainder Canada would remain very regionally and ethnoculturally diverse, and if its continued existence as a federal polity might be in doubt, powerful institutional and cultural factors will almost certainly come to the defence of the federal principle. So the question is whether federalism, plus some rich array of diversities, really is all that is required for the maximal realization of the complex fraternity LaSelva celebrates. We should recall, in this context, that the United States is an astonishingly diverse federal polity with a regional complexity to rival or surpass that of Canada, yet it seems to fall outside the scope of what LaSelva has in mind. Indeed, LaSelva accepts without much question the venerable caricature of the U.S. as “melting pot” and holds it out as the antithesis of Canadian fraternity. Where, then, lies the crucial difference between Canada’s complex federal fraternity and American federalism? Possibly, it rests with the greater level of autonomy enjoyed by Canadian provinces or (perhaps more plausibly) the greater space which these and other diversities are encouraged to occupy in the identities of citizens. If so, then tracing the implications of secession on complex fraternity in English-speaking Canada carries us back to the kinds of considerations we raised in our study of Actonian currents of thought, where the central question is how secession would affect Canada’s supposed condition as a liminal space, an alternative to monolithic conceptions of nationhood. We saw in chapter 5 that Quebec’s departure might usher in a contrary dynamic, a push for relative uniformity. A remainder Canada could conceivably be federal, and diverse, while also moving away from the optimal balance between apartness and shared space that LaSelva denotes by the term “fraternity.” More spectacularly, Canada could altogether fall apart, eventually to be consumed by the

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United States. Since American federalism apparently does not incarnate the Canadian idea of fraternity, such a fate would put an end to the ability of English-speaking Canada to realize it. Either argument works from contingent consequences. But there is another important difference between Canada and the United States. Canada’s version of federalism is interwoven with its experience as a multinational state. Quebec, unlike American states, is a nationality-based unit. No other Canadian province, and no American state, is such a unit. Once we draw the distinction, we begin to see the outline of a much more dramatic narrative of tragedy – one that frames secession as the absolute and necessary negation of a particular kind of experience in fraternity. The above scenarios, conversely, are all contingent: they suggest that, under certain conditions, Englishspeaking Canadians’ capacity to realize complex fraternity would wither. But if we say that the fraternity in question is specifically a fraternity across national (as opposed to ethnocultural or regional) boundaries, or at least that such fraternity across nations is a distinctive aspect of Canada’s moral foundations, not reducible to these other aspects, we are in a position to frame secession, and to a lesser degree other forms of dissociation, as the irreparable loss of this good, for us. Even ignoring the above distinctions, the departure of Quebec would mark an irreparable loss for fraternity in one intrinsic sense. The ties between English-speaking Canada and Quebec would be radically diminished. With them would wither the “sense of brotherhood” of which Henri Bourassa wrote.17 And this would, indeed, be a grievous loss, akin to a permanent estrangement from a close friend or partner. Nonetheless, if we freely throw around an undifferentiated idea of “fraternity” to define all sorts of political relations in Canada – ranging from ethnocultural to regional to relations among citizens for the purposes of redistribution – we risk blunting the force of this argument. This can be understood by analogy. Imagine a person who grows estranged from a very dear, lifelong friend. We may call this a tragedy. But suppose, as well, that she has a very rich network of friends, including a number of other long-time friendships. Under these circumstances, she will – without denying the tragic loss of that particular relationship – continue fully to realize whatever goods are given in friendship, despite being severed from one locus of it. She will continue to be able to share pleasures small and large, exchange ideas, laugh, find solace and companionship, and so forth. The situation would be quite different were she to lose her only close friend, her best

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friend, or some other relationship of a categorically unique kind in her life. So there is a meaningful difference in scope between losing a particular locus for realizing a good and the loss of our only such locus. The latter is a tragedy of a more absolute kind. Provided we are willing to draw distinctions between the kind of fraternity realized across regional or ethnocultural borders and the kind realized across nationality-based units, we can frame dissociation as a tragedy in this more profound sense. We can say that Quebec’s departure would not simply be a loss for some all-encompassing ideal called “fraternity,” which we would nonetheless continue to be able to realize among ourselves in the absence of Quebec. Rather, it would mark the irreparable loss of a very special experience in complex fraternity – the experience of sharing a state with a nationality-based unit other than our own. Of course, a remainder Canada would continue to include large numbers of Aboriginal peoples. So it would remain able to realize the good of multinational fraternity after dissociation. But I have consistently argued for a further distinction, maintaining that Quebec-inCanada represents a somewhat different model of multinational experience from that which is given in relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal in Canada. Insofar as this holds, we are able to say that dissociation would mark the irreparable loss of Canadians’ capacity to realize the sort of complex fraternity associated with that order of experience. Quebec, then, may represent the unique realization of a good, for us. These remarks are offered less as a critique of LaSelva’s argument than as a series of suggestions as to how we might build on that argument for the purposes of answering the specific questions before us. There may be many more dimensions to complex fraternity than LaSelva seems to consider. And his account of the tragedy of Quebec’s departure can be enriched by these distinctions.

2 fraternity and beyond: complex fraternity and constitutional morality LaSelva’s is a powerful and provocative thesis. It strikes bedrock. Complex fraternity can, indeed, be considered a moral foundation of Canadian federalism per se, and Quebec-in-Canada more particularly. Still, the question arises whether fraternity exhausts the possibilities, whether it is fully sufficient as an account of these foundations. By examining LaSelva’s conception of the Canadian “democratic

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dialogue,” we can begin to trace a developmental ideal of Quebecin-Canada that supplements complex fraternity and thus completes our trio of arguments from the good. LaSelva grapples with the relationship between complex fraternity and the challenges posed by the democratization of constitutional politics in Canada. His view is that Canada is an “unusual experiment in democracy”18 because its greatest challenge is “mutual recognition in an ethnically or culturally divided society.”19 Drawing from Taylor, McRae, Webber, and Cairns, LaSelva identifies a possible way of avoiding – if not solving – the “great danger” of misrecognition and crack-up. Canada must embrace a “constitutional morality,” built on “reciprocal sensitivity and mutual trust,” in which interlocutors strive to “accord a generous place for the ambitions and concerns of others.”20 Such an approach differs from a zero-sum aggregative model of democracy of the sort canvassed in chapter 3. On the latter account, citizens and communities advance demands and are deemed winners or losers depending on the extent to which their existing preferences are satisfied. While such agonistic processes cannot be expunged from democratic contestation, the constitutional morality LaSelva has in mind tries to submit them to a dialogical rather than adversarial discipline – a “dialogue of democracy,” as he puts it, grounded in fraternity. “Canadians are different among themselves, but they have also demonstrated a will to live together,” he explains. “They have distinct ways of life; they also possess common values, common allegiances, and common ways of life. Such beliefs provide a focus for constitutional morality and reveal some dimensions of mutual recognition in Canada.”21 We must be prepared explicitly to recognize our distinct identities and difference, as well as our desire for a shared life. The democratic challenge posed by this ideal, according to LaSelva, is to proceed in a fashion consistent with fraternity and democratic participation, succumbing to neither elite accommodation nor dissociation. And this calls for a constitutional morality based on democratic dialogue and mutual recognition among our constitutive peoples, which could also respect the ethnocultural and regional complexities embedded within them, while paying as much heed to our desire for a “shared way of life” as to our differences. The notion of a “dialogue of democracy” across deep diversities is one example of the attempt to escape the impasse between Quebec and Canada by imagining a more satisfactorily realized conversation among the respective populations. For LaSelva, fraternity is the regulatory

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principle that underpins this dialogue: it explains why we ought to pursue it and offers some clue to the conditions according to which it must be undertaken. Still, the question remains whether fraternity is the only moral foundation of Canadian federalism, whether it offers a wholly satisfactory explication of the relevant constitutive commitments. The possibility that fraternity may not be the whole story arises when we consider what is lost, or overlooked, by LaSelva’s subordination of his constitutional morality to fraternity. He argues that “[t]he appeal to constitutional morality is not merely or even primarily a moralistic appeal. Rather, it is a restatement of the principles that sustain Canada.”22 In other words, a democratic dialogue built on mutual recognition in a multinational state is primarily conceived as the means to Canada’s complex fraternity; it “sustains” this purpose. Were it a “moralistic” appeal, it would instead be an end in itself – it would be, at least in part, a purpose that Canada exists to realize, as much as the reverse. But it is worth asking whether part of the resonance of fraternity resides precisely in such a moral appeal. Think, for instance, of Plato’s Symposium, where love of a particular individual is treated not just as an end in itself but also as a step toward our apprehension of Beauty. Love is good at least in part because it brings us to something else, something greater that its immediate object.23 Now a Platonic metaphysic is obviously not my concern here; the point is simply that it is possible to conceive of fraternity as more than a freestanding end and as more than a complement or means to ends such as liberal justice. Fraternity may be valued in part because of the vistas it promises to open to us, the challenges it poses for us, the civic abilities it demands that we develop and deploy. It may draw some of its moral power, at least, from the sense that certain values inhere in a dialogue across deep diversities. Indeed, a claim of this kind is precisely what needs to be explicated if we are to arrive at a satisfactory understanding of the range of affirmations woven into Quebec-in-Canada. The next chapter takes up this point.

8 From Progress to Dialogue: Developmental Visions of the Multinational State

1 introduction We have explored, under the rubric of goods-based arguments, missionary justifications for Quebec-in-Canada and LaSelva’s complex fraternity. The path is now clear for what are arguably the most ambitious and far-reaching such arguments, which I will call “developmental” conceptions of Canada as a multinational state. That slightly imposing label covers what is at heart a straightforward insight: namely, that Quebec-in-Canada in particular, and (perhaps) multinational states in general, tend to be more challenging forms of polity than less heterogeneous alternatives; and that, once traditional consociational mechanisms have been discredited, they consequently make greater demands on the capacities of their citizens – or at least offer structural incentives for citizens to develop and refine these capacities, which other states do not. We can define the capacities in question in a variety of ways, some more fanciful than others.1 My preferred formulation stresses virtues such as empathetic understanding, the expansion of imaginative horizons, and the ability to creatively navigate a complex array of interpretations about profound matters of citizenship and community, cutting across deep cleavages of culture and language. Less ambitious articulations might simply posit a capacity among mass publics in deeply divided societies to arrive at reasoned compromises and a fruitful degree of mutual understanding of the sort that has historically been restricted to processes of elite accommodation in Canada. However we define the specifics, the point is that the development of such capacities in mass publics can be read as more than a means to the ends of

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stability, fraternity, or justice in deeply divided states such as Canada. It can be seen as an end in itself: part of a richer vision of citizenship than is implied by conventional liberal-democratic models, and thus as part of what justifies such states and makes them worth affirming. If this follows, then we should affirm Quebec-in-Canada because it holds out the promise of such a developmental politics. This chapter begins by considering some venerable precedents for this approach, showing that such teleological ideals have been woven into theories of multinational states as far back as Mill and Acton, as well as into some currents of Canadian nationalism. Taking Mill’s ideal of progressive agency as a general inspiration – thus snatching affirmation from the teeth of his critique of multinational states – I proceed to consider more recent applications of the developmental vision, paying special heed to dialogical theories of relations between nationalitybased units in Canada. My suggestion is that such a vision is an important idée-force underlying these very influential theories (including those of Taylor, Webber, and Tully). And no defence of Quebec-in-Canada is complete without some exploration of this vision. On one level, the claim that some form of developmental ideal has been part of the way Canadians think about multinationality should be relatively uncontroversial. We are all familiar with complaints about the “narrow” or “parochial” field of vision of radical decentralists and nationalists and the related implication that Canadian federalism brings us into a wider horizon, expanding and enriching us as citizens. Confederation itself owes something to the desire of colonial elites to escape their stultifying political backwaters, a move into a wider field of challenge and ambition.2 But it’s harder to cash out this intuition analytically or conceptually. Even for the theorists of dialogue deployed here, the explicitly developmental thread is often one among many, sometimes only hinted at or implied. It needs some elaboration, some teasing out. Nor is this the only difficulty. For, granting that a developmental vision plausibly can be conveyed, its translation into a decisive critique of dissociation can’t be taken for granted. Two further problems must be overcome. First, as I have repeatedly observed, a Canada-withoutQuebec would remain a multinational state by virtue of its Aboriginal peoples and would, therefore, continue to be a suitable venue for this ideal. Second, it would also be a multi-cultural polity, and many of the opportunities for transformation or development that reside in the multinational experience can also be considered part of the experience of

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ethnocultural diversity. I offer an argument about structural incentives that may help to get around the second problem. My ongoing insistence on differentiating among kinds of multinational state can, I hope, clarify the limitations of the first. This developmental current of thought marks the last of the most important sets of principled goods relevant to articulating resistance to dissociation. Perhaps, in the end, no single one of these will seem entirely sufficient. The hope remains, however, that their cumulative impact is adequate to the purpose of this book – a signpost to the variety and richness of the affirmations given in Quebec in-Canada.

2 admixture, fusion, and development Let’s start, as Lewis Caroll advised, at the beginning. Acton’s argument about progress works by an analogy with the importance of sociability in individual development. “The combination of different nations in one State is as necessary a condition of civilised life as the combination of men in society,” and “[w]here political and national boundaries coincide, society ceases to advance, and nations relapse into a condition corresponding to that of men who renounce intercourse with their fellow man.” This is an appealing refutation of Mill’s liberal nationalism because it presses the latter’s preoccupation with progress into the defence of the multinational states that he criticized. Indeed, it evokes what we would now call a “dialogical” understanding of human beings, insofar as it relies on the obvious point that individuals, and societies writ large, develop better in mutual engagement than solipsistic isolation (a proposition of which Mill would certainly have approved). Acton’s developmental argument finds application in G.E. Cartier’s often-cited declaration that Canadians are “of different races, not for the purpose of warring against each other, but in order to compete and emulate, for the welfare of all,”3 as well as in Trudeau’s denunciation of Quebec nationalists as “reactionaries,” hostile to the march of progress, as he understood it. But of course Acton’s assertion is ultimately sustained by the assumption that nationalism is about not simply institutional separation, but a self-destructive xenophobia that seeks to seal off the nation from all outside influence. It rests on the view that nationalism and cultural isolationism are synonymous. This is a fallacy, as David Cameron shows, because (a) creative interaction can occur between nationalities in different states, as well as within a state. Peoples need not share a political community in order to engage, chal-

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lenge, and learn from each other; and (b) deeply creative relationships can flourish among persons of the same nationality. In fact, a profound embeddedness in the “tradition of a situation” is often the hallmark of great achievement, especially in the arts.4 Taking up (a), John Stuart Mill accepted that mutual emulation and cultural fusion can and do occur across state borders. “Each nation ... exemplifies a distinct phasis of humanity ... in which the elements which meet and temper one another in a perfect human character are combined in a proportion more or less peculiar,” he argues; and by the study of history and travel literature, each nation can see “in some other a model of the excellencies corresponding to its own deficiencies,” and thus may “betake themself, however tardily, to profit by each other’s example.”5 Yet there remains something powerfully intuitive about Acton’s idea that this kind of cross-fertilization will occur much more readily in one state, where institutions of government are shared. Indeed, Mill was willing to concede the hypothetical. “Whatever really tends to the admixture of nationalities, and the blending of their attributes and peculiarities in a common union is a benefit to the human race ... The united people, like a crossed breed of animals (but in a still greater degree, because the influences in operation are moral as well as physical), inherits the special aptitudes and excellences of all its progenitors, protected by the admixture from being exaggerated into the neighbouring vices.”6 His skepticism about the viability of representative government in multinational states flows from empirical hypotheses about the necessity of national solidarity to liberal-democratic politics. “To render this admixture possible, there must be peculiar conditions”; and “the greatest practical obstacles to the blending of nationalities are when the nationalities which have been bound together are nearly equal in numbers and in other elements of power.”7 In these cases, each resists merger and “cultivates with party obstinacy its distinctive peculiarities.” Such states do have the theoretical potential for a profitable “admixture” of national virtues but, in practice, tend to harden differences. Mill was therefore most comfortable with multinational states as devices for elevating weak and “backward” peoples. “Experience proves that it is possible for one nationality to merge and be absorbed in another; and when it was originally an inferior and backward portion of the human race the absorption is greatly to its advantage.”8 He proceeds, notoriously, to urge the absorption of assorted small nationalities

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(Welsh, Scottish, Basque) into “the current of ideas and feelings of ... highly civilised and cultivated people[s]” – namely, the British or the French.9 Indeed, he endorses the Durham Report (which must be the single most spectacular non-starter for any helpful analysis of Quebec-in-Canada). This flows logically from his sense of a hierarchy of cultures.10 Now Mill’s willingness to classify certain cultures as inferior and to justify the wholesale assimilation of such cultures into “superior” rival cultures is entirely in line with progressive thinking of his era. But it’s an obvious non-starter for us. Its assumptions about “the existence of a universally applicable standard of progress in terms of which the level of civilization in all societies can be measured”11 are no longer de rigueur; and whether or not justifiable methods of cross-cultural evaluation exist is not our concern here. If Mill’s related thesis about “cross-breeding” is framed in the equally discomfiting eugenicist language common to our late Victorian counterparts, it at least has the merit of setting aside the zero-sum logic of assimilation. Since I start from the assumption that none of Canada’s nationality-based units can intelligibly be labelled “backward” or “inferior,” Mill’s “admixture” argument is, in principle, admissible, where his “cultural inegalitarianism”12 vis-à-vis French-Canadian society is not. Of course, Mill would not have sought to apply this argument about admixture to the Canadian case, in part because he advocated the assimilation of French-Canadians but also because Canada might not have possessed the empirical prerequisites that he thought necessary for such a fusion.13 Nonetheless, despite Mill’s doubts on this score, the dream of a racial and/or cultural fusion did coalesce into one kind of “developmental” current in defence of Canada as a multinational state. We know this from the work of Carl Berger, who shows that many early Canadian nationalists deployed an environmental determinism that imagined that French and English Canadians – already presumed to be of similar genetic stock – would be “welded together” in the process of “creating ... a homogeneous Race” of sturdy northerners.14 Of course, many of these also believed in the inevitable eclipse of French Canadians’ power within the Dominion. Still, “[i]mplicit in a good deal of the literature describing the position of the French in Canada was the notion that their collective qualities formed a necessary counterpoise to Saxon character and that the interaction of the two races would provide distinctiveness to the Canadian nationality. This notion was ultimately

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grounded upon racial stereotype: the grace and cheerfulness of the French would combine, it was said, with the drive and will of the Anglo-Saxon.”15 Such ideas lingered well into twentieth century. Insofar as nationalists of the time spoke of the new Canadian “race” in unitary terms, they assumed either the fusion of French and English or the assimilation of French Canadians. “To us,” muses Lawren Harris, “there was also the strange brooding sense of another nature fostering a new race and a new age.”16 Hutchison wrote in purple prose of our “two great races ... not yet merged” as sterling raw materials for some eventually glittering alloy. Canada “is still a dual personality – a country not fully formed, not crystallized yet into final shape and substance.”17 The key, of course, is the conditional phrasing; we are not there yet, but thence lies our destiny, and it’s up to us to seize the nettle. “Long have we been a-growing, but with strong bone and sure muscle – of two bloods, French and English, slow to be reconciled in one body ... now we must make our choice. Now must the heaving, fluid stuff of Canada take shape and crystallize, and harden to a purpose.”18 Even the architecture of Parliament testifies to “how the two races of Canada struggle to blend, to understand, to become one.”19 The fusion imagined here seems as much metaphorical as biological, but the operative language remains that of Mill. The earlier writings of Arthur Lower offer another straightforward example of the racialist dream of the emergent Canadian. “Sooner or later will not our vigorous climate, working on sterling stock, hammer out a vigorous and distinctive people, the ‘men of the north’?”20 But this eventually cedes to the conclusion that “[t]he two communities will never be one, there can be no question of blood-brotherhood.”21 In place of racial fusion arises a dialectical vision, driven by the antitheses of “two Canadian ways of life.” As a matter of historical fact, Lower argues, these have “complement[ed] each other, unhappily and acrimoniously,”22 each profoundly shaping the other; but there remains hope of a more harmonious sort of synthesis wherein greater understanding will lead each to benefit from the distinctive genius of the other, while softening their own excesses. Indeed, these “variants of the same fundamental”23 already have formed “what may be called a Canadian people, a people of two wings to be sure ... but nonetheless a people” with institutions distinctively its own.24 The crude imagery of racial fusion gives way, in Lower, before a subtler dream of deep, engaged brotherhood that transcends the antagonisms of thesis-antithesis.25

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The case of Lower shows that the “fusion” metaphor has not been exclusively a racial one. Other variations on the notion have no doubt marked Canadian popular and/or high culture. Even into the 1960s, a dream of blending seems to have lingered, perhaps most notably in some rather romantic visions of the implications of official bilingualism. Thus, Ray Conlogue recalls a vague, yet vivid, association between official bilingualism, the leadership of Pierre Trudeau – in his very person, a sort of avatar of the intermingling of French and English (with a suitably obscure hint of aboriginality thrown in for good measure) – and an ideal of “fusion.” “[A]fter the passage of the Official Languages Act ... I became, like most anglo-Canadians of my generation, an unquestioning admirer of Pierre Trudeau. It was easy to believe, in the heady atmosphere of sixties cultural nationalism, that Canada was about to climb to some as-yet-undefined sunny plateau of national achievement. That this should involve a fusion of the two cultures, and the embrace of the two languages, seemed entirely natural.”26 Race has here vanished as a referent, supplanted by an ideal of Canada that transcends the French-English cleavage and yields a kind of cultural synthesis. This is more than peaceful cohabitation within a state; it is a melding of attributes and personalities. The terms of reference of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism asked the commission to “recommend what could be done to enable Canadians to become bilingual”27 – and note that the agenda is not to make the Canadian state bilingual, but its citizens. The Report’s recommendations on second-language instruction clearly imagine a polity in which all citizens have some working grasp of both official languages, on grounds of utility, cultural exchange, and “increasing the mutual understanding of [Canada’s] two cultural groups.”28 If something less than the racial fusion envisaged by early nationalists is given here, there is a clear suggestion of a “melding together” linguistically. We shall all, in our persons, incarnate linguistic duality. Any ideal of fusion, of course, implies the supplanting of difference by a richer unity. More ambitious forms of the arguments descending from Mill’s thesis do not, in the end, justify multinationality as a permanent condition; the multinational state is instead praised for offering superior raw materials for some higher synthesis. Contemporary analysis eschews such preoccupations. The task of those who would defend a strong zone of institutional sharing between Quebec and Englishspeaking Canada is no longer to argue from fusion in this sense but rather for such sharing as one aspect of polity. This means a shared insti-

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tutional life, implying shared experiences, common projects, and solidarity. But it is perfectly reconcilable with ongoing structural differentiation, as we know from reading LaSelva, among many others. In any case, we would be ill-advised to build an argument around the idea that English-speaking Canada and Quebec incarnate distinctive and complementary clusters of “objective” attributes and that sharing a state best fosters their beneficial interplay. This would invite numerous difficulties, ranging from the implicit reliance on a dubious “snooker ball” theory of culture29 to the leap of faith that the objective traits of Quebec and Canada, once identified, must prove mutually complementary. A more promising strategy is to concentrate on the challenges that mutual reconciliation poses to citizens in this multinational state and the cluster of abilities and virtues required in order to overcome these challenges. If these turn out to be more formidable than those demanded by more homogenous sorts of polity, we shall have a broad argument in favour of multinational states, derived from a substantive notion of human flourishing – i.e., a vision in which those abilities and virtues are seen as valuable, as ends in themselves. If, furthermore, the specific type of multinational state represented by Quebec-in-Canada shows itself to be related to these abilities and virtues in some privileged way, then we shall have a strong developmental argument for Quebecin-Canada. Either would bear a family resemblance, ironically enough, to an approach to politics strongly associated with Mill, who is one of the most prominent representatives of a developmental ideal of human agency within the liberal canon. His utilitarianism works from a view of authentic happiness as the development of those abilities that befit “man as a creature of elevated faculties.”30 The details of what Mill had in mind need not delay us for long. Wendy Donner helpfully argues that he focuses on “affective development,” i.e., the refinement of aesthetic and imaginative sensibilities; “intellectual or cognitive development,” problem-solving, conceptual thinking, and so forth; and “moral development,” the capacity to affirm the noble and the good.31 And Sharpless elaborates: “[t]o Mill ... culture suggests a broadening and expansion and development of human character along two lines. On the one hand, culture means intellectual culture, the expansion of the rational and analytic powers of the mind ... On the other hand, the term suggests a broadening and opening out of the feelings, an extension of the capacity for sympathy, and an ability to ‘feel’ and imagine the emotions of others.”32

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Significantly, Mill’s work links substantive ideals of progressive agency to political justification. It thus moves beyond what our contemporaries refer to as “liberal neutrality.” Although On Liberty advocates a prototypically liberal framework, emphatically rejecting state coercion as a basis of improvement, Mill never hesitated to make qualitative judgments about the worth of lives lived and, more importantly, to knit such judgments into the fabric of his political thought. “The choice of political institutions [is] a moral and educational question more than one of material interests,” he writes.33 Mill was moved by the vision of a social order that could maximize human capacities, and was prepared to condemn any polity not maximally conducive to the “permanent interests of man as a progressive being.”34 Thus, Mill (after much hesitation) endorsed democratic participation on developmental grounds. The citizen “is called upon, while so engaged [in public life], to weigh interests not his own; to be guided, in case of conflicting claims, by another rule than his private partialities; to apply, at every turn, principles and maxims which have for their reason of existence the common good.”35 That the “education of the intelligence and of the sentiments ... is carried down to the very lowest ranks of the people when they are called to take a part in acts which directly affect the great interests of their country” is, he explains, “[a]mong the foremost benefits of free government.”36 Participation develops our affective, intellectual, and moral powers by thrusting us into a wider universe of concerns, ideas, and goods. This, not justice, is its primary justification. Mill never grants that a similar progression could occur across nations in a multinational state. Yet it remains possible to draw an analogy between the development of the “intelligence and sentiments” of citizens through engagement with the public good of the nation-state and the development of similar capacities promoted by engagement with the public goods of other nationalities within a shared state. Mill’s ethics and political thought rail against the folly of taking the current character of human beings, including their desires and projects, as fixed data;37 and some such attitude must be a fundamental starting point for any developmental argument. But if it is indeed the case that “Mill recognized no limit to the extent to which people could take on the well-being of others as their own, through the influences of education, political authority, religion, and public opinion,”38 why insist on such a rigid pessimism about the capacities of nationalities of comparable material and cultural “development” to transcend hostilities and

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misunderstandings? Why view antipathetic relations among elites and citizens within multinational states as necessarily fixed, thus dismissing our potential to enter into the common goods of other nationalities within a state and then, perhaps, to reconcile them? This is not to propose that the letter of Mill’s view of “man as a progressive being” should comprehensively be co-opted on behalf of multinational states. Bhikhu Parekh argues against Mill’s relevance for a defence of cultural diversity, primarily on the grounds that his theory of agency is insufficiently attentive to the role of culture in constituting conceptions of the good and that his view of optimal human development is too ethnocentric to be the basis of a comprehensive theory.39 Parekh’s insights are well taken, but this book, unlike his, is not interested in devising a systematic ontology of culture or in applying to the letter Mill’s theories on human and cultural development. We are free to invoke Mill in a much more general way. The spirit of Mill’s vision of polity as an agent for the development of human powers – more precisely, intellectual powers and, above all, the “broadening and opening out of the feelings, an extension of the capacity for sympathy, and an ability to ‘feel’ and imagine the emotions of others” – all of this can be reconciled with multinational cohabitation in a way that Mill thought impossible. In fact, it can form a basis for the affirmation of Quebecin-Canada. And this matters, because Mill is a prototypical critic of multinational states and a major antecedent of the cluster of arguments that, we saw, can be marshalled for dissociation on grounds of the democratic realization of English-speaking Canada. The developmental approach to politics offered by the great liberal critic of multinational states can be, therefore, reclaimed and refashioned in their defence. I suggested earlier that the key to the developmental thesis lies in the nature of the abilities or virtues that allow citizens to transcend the special challenges of multinational states. It is important to clarify the nature of the argument. Some of the qualities that Mill associates with political participation seem to resurface in Rawls’s account of the “public reasons” required of citizens when deliberating matters of the basic structure. “[C]itizens are to conduct their fundamental discussions ... based on values that the others can reasonably be expected to endorse and each is, in good faith, prepared to defend that conception so understood.”40 This notion of public reason is akin to the conception of justification that rests at the heart of ideals of “deliberative democracy.” On such accounts, we must “find reasons that are compelling to others”41 and forward these as the basis of discussion, the idea being

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that one cannot simply cite one’s own idiosyncratic and contestable “comprehensive doctrine” about the good life as sufficient justification for subjecting other citizens to the coercive power of the state. These models demand such reasons, not as part of a theory of the good life, but as a requisite of liberal justice in societies characterized by reasonable pluralism – i.e., a diversity of reasonable views about the good (but not necessarily multinational diversity). Basic justice, on this account, insists that citizens stand in one another’s shoes to a degree. It calls on them to develop powers of imagination, principled reasoning, and empathetic understanding adequate to the purpose of formulating viable public reasons. These virtues seem to approximate those cited by Mill in his developmental defence of participation. That mainstream theories of liberal justice include such virtues suggests that they are not ends in themselves but are, rather, sine qua non of the standard liberal value of equal respect. So the conceptual, imaginative, and empathetic skills required for the offering of public reasons under conditions of “reasonable pluralism” can be framed as mere instruments of liberal justice. Is the same true, however, of the virtues required for stability or justice in multinational states? Not necessarily, because (a) that form of diversity poses special challenges to citizens’ capacities to offer public reasons not given in simple reasonable pluralism; and (b) multinational diversity, or at least certain kinds of multinational diversity, is not analogous to the pluralism of comprehensive doctrines because it is, at least in some cases, extricable. Thus, we are forced to ask why we ought justly to accommodate it, not merely how justly to accommodate it.42 The two propositions are interrelated, and the seeds of an answer to the latter question are found in point (a). Bluntly put, deep diversity implies correspondingly deeper challenges to the empathetic, conceptual, and imaginative powers required for the formulation of mutually acceptable public reasons. Since justice does not demand that we take as inextricable the form of deep diversity given in Quebec-in-Canada – we always have the option of dissociating into separate, fully just liberal states – we can’t say that justice requires that citizens take up these deeper challenges. The principled reason for doing so (apart from transition costs, which this study has discounted) must therefore be that the riches yielded by citizenship in such states are desirable in themselves. They are ends. That is why it’s worth making reference to Mill’s developmental conception of agency here; multinational states demand more of their

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citizens, at least in contexts where elite accommodation is not on, than do other forms of liberal polity. And they may be justified by this ideal of development. Of course, all this assumes the plausibility of proposition (a). And not everyone will accept that democratic deliberation in multinational states is qualitatively (if not categorically) different from that found in states characterized by reasonable pluralism. Nonetheless, there is a sustained current of thought, which we canvassed in chapter 3, that stresses the distinctive challenges of democratic governance across parallel national solidarities and their corresponding networks of institutions, attitudes, traditions, and narratives. A classic example is Mill’s hypothesis that multinational states, especially those in which national cleavages cut along linguistic lines, must contain irreconcilable and hostile elites and irreducible solidarities, flowing from the radically separate networks of communication that different languages imply. This tradition, as we saw, haunts Canadian thought. Conlogue, to cite a particularly stark example, doubts that “there can be national feeling, in a country divided in two populations which cannot communicate their experiences to each other”43 and somewhat extravagantly hypothesizes that Canada’s problems are “an example of inbuilt limitations in human behaviour, a touching of the outer limits of empathy.”44 More optimistic theorists, such as Kymlicka, Webber, Tully, LaSelva, Taylor, and even Laforest, are reluctant to go this far. But they do tend to acknowledge the force of this kind of pessimism. Canadian federalism, in Jeremy Webber’s view, gives “minority as well as majority cultures ... a space in which their terms of debate, their traditions, can serve as the dominant framework for political discussion,”45 but this poses a problem for democratic goods because public debate occurs in different languages. The use of different media almost inevitably separates political discourse, creating substantial autonomy. That autonomy is never absolute. There may well be substantial reasons, accepted by members of all linguistic communities, for continuing a dialogue across linguistic boundaries. Nevertheless, linguistic differences are likely to generate a relative autonomy, producing the kind of distinctive dynamic that supports demands for institutional autonomy ... in the case of aboriginal peoples ... the same kind of process could occur as a result of pronounced cultural differences.46

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The difficulty is that “[d]emocracy demands a high degree of responsiveness between citizens and governments.” And “[i]n deeply divided societies – societies in which there are two or more largely autonomous political communities – this pattern of demand and response becomes much more complicated.”47 Webber is mindful of ethnocultural and federal pluralism and the rich challenges they pose but still feels compelled to underline the special complications that ensnare “deeply divided” (multinational) societies. High on the list is the separation of political discourse along linguistic lines, along with “cultural differences” that are bolstered by distinct institutional frameworks. Kymlicka agrees that multinationality implies special obstacles to mutual understanding. Examining the general tendency of language groups to become increasingly territorialized within states, and consequently to demand “increased political recognition and self-government powers,” he suggests that “these ‘national’ linguistic/territorial political communities ... are the primary forums for democratic participation in the modern world.”48 Political debates at the federal level in multination states ... are almost invariably elite-dominated. Why? Put simply, democratic politics is politics in the vernacular. The average citizen only feels comfortable debating political issues in their own tongue. As a general rule, it is only elites who have fluency with more than one language ... Moreover, political communication has a large ritualistic component, and these ritualized forms of communication are typically language-specific. Even if one understands a foreign language in the technical sense, without knowledge of these ritualistic elements one may be unable to understand political debates. For these reasons, and other reasons, we can expect – as a general rule – that the more political debate is conducted in the vernacular, the more participatory it will be.49 Because democratic politics is in the vernacular, less is shared in multinational states, including basic instruments of public discourse, such as media and language, to say nothing of historical and experiential narratives of polity or “ritualized forms of communication.” Solidarities are, partly in consequence, more tenuous. As Taylor observes, Quebecers’ attachment to Canada tends to be mediated through the prism of prior identification with their nationality-based unit in a way not generally true of anglophone Canadians.50 The related factors of structural differentiation and distinct patterns of allegiance,

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encapsulated in Taylor’s concept of “deep diversity,” coalesce to make the multinational state a particularly challenging experiment in democratic politics. In chapter 3 we saw that consociational democrats in general, as well as Canadian politicians and scholars, have tended to deal with this problem (and thus circumnavigate Mill’s pessimism) by looking to practices of elite accommodation. Mill’s wider vision of politics holds very strongly that elites must lead the way in training the masses to navigate the complexity of political decision-making and to think in terms of the public good, but does not consider the possibility of effective elite accommodation as the binding force of “consociational democracy” in multinational polities. Theories such as those of Noel and Lijphart, of course, do. But we also saw that consociational solutions, built on strategies of elite accommodation, are no longer tenable in the Canadian context, even though the profound underlying divisions remain. This combination of factors leads participatory democrats such as Whitaker and Resnick to revisit the logic of Mill’s arguments about the necessity of nationalist solidarity in democratic societies and so to advocate dissociation. I deferred my confrontation with their democratic arguments until after some consideration of liberal justifications for Quebec-inCanada. But the contours of my reply should now be clear. The developmental model of polity can free us from the apparent antimony between unity and optimal democratic realization. Neither the consociational nor democratic-nationalist solutions to the Canadian dilemma pays sufficient heed to the possibility that mass publics could develop the resources needed to work toward mutual understanding and reconciliation across deep diversity. Consociational democrats take stability as the primary goal and posit passive mass publics. Liberal-democratic nationalists look to engaged publics and seek to realize either participatory or deliberative models of democracy, or both, plausibly arguing that these ends are best served in a nationalist context. The developmental position, however, assumes active, participatory publics but looks, teleologically, to a progressive refinement of their empathetic and imaginative dexterity, culminating in a community that can adequately navigate the exceptional complexities of the multinational polity, with all its diverse orders of solidarity and national belonging. And since this is only an alternative to secession, rather than the sole option available given inextricable pluralism, this development is something we have to choose for its own merits, as a freestanding end.

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Such developmental thinking is not exactly new in the context of Canadian thought. Frank Underhill appealed to one version of it fortyfive years ago, in musing that Canadians could only transcend the “modus vivendi without cordiality” of which Siegfried wrote by the ascension of “leaders from both sides ... who reach a degree of understanding and cordiality that approaches brotherhood.” These are the “type of statesmen that appeals to our better selves, who tries to induce us to stretch our imaginations and sympathies, to display a spirit of generosity towards people who are different from ourselves,”51 and thus sustain Canada. This is a rather more elite-driven scenario than those favoured by contemporary theorists, but the spirit of the argument is akin to theirs. Claude Ryan’s thought, likewise, evinces a developmental quality in such passages as this: “[a]u lieu de percevoir comme un obstacle la cohabitation de deux langues principales dans une même société politique, nous pourrions l’assumer comme une invitation à un dépassement continu de nos horizons immédiats, comme une chance qui nous est offerte d’accéder à un vision plus large du monde. Nos chances de fournir une contribution originale au progrès de la famille humaine, loin d’être diminuées, en seraient accrues.”52 Similarly, John Meisel wrote in 1977 of the “enriching experiences” that the “institutionally inspired close ties with fellow citizens of the other major [national] group” have afforded him. Duality has “deepened my own perception of life and of myself,” he explains, and he “fear[s] that future generations of francophones and anglophones would be much less likely to benefit from one another’s proximity if Quebec separates.”53 This pedigree notwithstanding, my contention is that the best contemporary expressions of the developmental tradition reside in a cluster of arguments for a dialogical conception of the Canadian polity. Calls for dialogue were commonplace in the constitutional crises of the 1990s, but we can count Tully, Webber, LaSelva, Mendelsohn, Blattberg, and even Laforest, as especially perspicuous representatives of this position; and it may help to begin by revisiting the work of Charles Taylor, whose visions of agency and dialogue have influenced all of these.

3 dialogue as identity, dialogue as project Taylor’s famous case for institutionalizing deep diversity in Canada invokes a considerable range of goods. These include what we are calling

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“experiential” goods: he professes a “gut attachment” to Canada, a “bond ... not based here on likeness, or (simply) on unity of purpose, but the sense of partnership formed over decades of common history.”54 In our terms, Taylor’s civic identity is embedded in experiential narratives that make Quebec an inextricable facet of Canada, and this is the identity he wishes to save. But of course deep diversity is about more than Taylor’s “gut.” It is a “remarkable experiment,” a historically significant corrective to the “French-American model” of uniform citizenship; and Taylor expresses his hope that Canadians could “even find it exciting and an object of pride that they belong to a country that allows deep diversity.”55 The political accommodation of deep diversity is an end in itself. But what drives this ideal? The above suggests a variant on the “missionary” model of justification that we examined earlier. “The world needs other models to be legitimated in order to allow for more humane and less constraining modes of political cohabitation.”56 There is nothing wrong with this, although I’ve suggested that such arguments tend to be a bit naïve, hinging on problematic assumptions about the role of exemplars in international politics. Another, somewhat contradictory, answer is that the “uniform model of citizenship” is doomed anyway. “We have the choice of going this route of diversity alone and in mutual enmity, or going it together in some relation of mutual support.”57 Taylor must mean by this that both a sovereign Quebec and remainder Canada would still contain Aboriginal communities that can only be accommodated through some variant of deep diversity. But arguments from inevitability are, in a sense, lazy, or at best technocratic substitutes for justification. We still need to know why deep diversity is desirable, something to be fought for. Taylor offers an important hint when he remarks that “we might come to be not dismayed and threatened, but even stimulated and enlarged by the differences we would have to bridge to keep this larger [Canadian] frame” amid so much “deep” difference.58 Note the conditional future tense here. This is not an experiential claim, but a developmental one – an evocation of a good that we might be able to realize, rather than a historical narrative to be preserved. In order to find some elaboration on these remarks about the implication of diversity for agency, we might turn to Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition,” where Taylor constructs an influential case for the importance of recognition in human life, tracing its roots in ideals of authenticity and equal respect and framing it as a “vital human need.”59

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Now this suggests yet another kind of argument. It might be thought that deep diversity is a good because it represents a model of politics that takes seriously the need for equal respect. This is a variant on arguments from justice. Canada should accommodate Quebec because failing to do so would amount to a denial of something fundamental and involve us in iniquities of greater or lesser degree. But specifying the nature of justice does not in itself prescribe the best means for attaining it. Again, arguments from justice decline in force in direct proportion to the extent to which the aggrieved party has the option of extricating itself from the unjust arrangements. Secession (or dissociation) represents such an exit option. So justice cannot offer a full explanation of why Quebec must achieve recognition within Canada. Others of Taylor’s arguments have greater promise. In discussing the question of whether all cultures have equal worth – and he has in mind here the debate around multicultural curricula – Taylor suggests that we can’t know this a priori. Rather, the equal worth of assorted cultures and cultural artifacts can be no more than a “presumption,” a “starting hypothesis,” which must be tested through a serious and empathetic attempt to enter into their world: the pursuit of a “fusion of horizons.” “We learn to move in a broader horizon, within which what we have formerly taken for granted as the background to valuation can be situated as one possibility alongside the different background of the formerly unfamiliar culture. The ‘fusion of horizons’ operates through developing new vocabularies of comparison, by means of which we can articulate these contrasts.”60 He intends something quite specialized by this. Taylor is concerned with multiculturalism in the academy, and this is a scenario for academics and intellectuals – the same people who already partake (in a serious and committed way) of the canon of Western civilization, and who are now being enjoined by critics to abandon or modify it. Only through such an authentic fusion can we determine the relative merits of assorted cultures or cultural works. This is an epistemological program and certainly is not intended as a recipe for citizenship writ large. We can readily imagine, however, a case of this kind being extended more generally to political life in multicultural societies.61 Those who envision the Canadian polity in dialogical terms gesture toward just such an application of this expansive vision – a dream of a profound deepening in our self-understanding and our way of viewing others – in defence of Quebec-in-Canada and/or the relations of constitutive actors in multinational polities writ large. Granted, they are,

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like Taylor, animated by more than this. Experiential narratives, ideals of justice, and other goods, such as fraternity and the sense of mission examined earlier, all help to reinforce their commitment to Quebec’s participation in Canada. Indeed, dialogical accounts of political community in general, and Canadian community in particular, tend to be both explanatory and normative. They advocate certain kinds of dialogue – undertaken in the correct spirit – as solutions to instability in our multinational state, but they also argue that Canadian identity and solidarities already are constituted in dialogue (or “multilogue”.)62 Thus, Charles Blattberg argues that we Canadians would feel more “at home” in our constitutional framework – i.e., in a greater degree of expressive harmony with it and with our fellow citizens – were we to engage one another in a richer spirit of dialogue; and also that such a politics is truer to the reality of our extant identities than more adversarial kinds of politics.63 In a related vein, James Tully claims that citizens are, empirically speaking, products of a historical process of interaction and exchange among the constitutive actors of the polity. But that process has been imperfect from a normative point of view. Tully explains that “[t]here is not one national narrative that gives the partnership its unity, but a diversity of criss-crossing and contested narratives through which citizens participate in and identify with their association.”64 Instead, it is the conversation itself that nurtures allegiance and defines our identity. Participation in dialogues and negotiations over how and by whom power is exercised over us constitutes our identities as ‘citizens’ and generates bonds of solidarity and a sense of belonging to the political association (the ‘people’) that comes into being and is sustained by this (game-like) activity ... Citizen identity is not generated by the possession of rights and duties, or by agreement on substantive or comprehensive common goods, fundamental principles of justice, constitutional essentials, shared values, understandings or national, multinational or cosmopolitan identities or, finally, by consensus on a set of universal principles of validation.65 All these elements are negotiable. “[W]hat citizens share is nothing more or less than being in on the dialogues over how and by whom power is exercised which take place both within and over the rules of the dialogue”;66 and “[w]hat shapes and hold individuals and groups together

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as ‘citizens’ and ‘peoples’ is not this or that agreement but the free agonic activities of participation themselves.”67 Thus, “[o]ne’s own identity as a citizen is inseparable from a shared history with other citizens who are irreducibly different; whose cultures have interacted with and enriched one’s own and made their mark on the basic institutions of society. The loss or assimilation of any of the other cultures is experienced as an impoverishment of one’s own identity.”68 This emphasis on “dialogues and negotiation” as constitutive of solidarity and identity most readily lends itself to arguments that the loss of an interlocutor would mark a painful rupture with the identities thus created.69 In my terms, this is an “experiential” argument. Webber asserts, similarly, that “[t]o the extent that [we] consider ourselves Canadians ... [we] lay claim to an identity that is manifestly not formed solely within the linguistic group in which [we] live. The presence of the French fact within this pan-Canadian community is clear from the traditional account of the events of Canadian history.”70 He goes on to cite the contributions of French Canadians to an array of foundational debates, including responsible government, federalism, and the modern search for Canadian identity, and asserts that “[m]ost of our debates in fields as diverse as foreign policy, the ownership of family property, regional economic development, and cultural policy have been coloured by the presence of a vibrant French-speaking society within Canada.”71 Indeed, “our diversity has shaped our sense of ourselves, certainly at the level of politics, but also, with more subtlety, at the level of our social relations generally.”72 In other words, we (English-speaking Canadians) would not be who we are, as Canadians, had it not been for our historic dialogue with French-speaking Canada. With the loss of the interlocutor comes self-abnegation of a kind: insofar as we embrace the Canadian present, identifying and affirming our identities as Canadians, we are bound to the histories that made these identities possible; and insofar as we are bound to such histories, we must affirm Quebec-in-Canada, which was a crucial element in their development. Patriotism in Canada just is our allegiance to this “Canadian conversation.” Such narratives locate us at a particular nexus of time and place and urge us not to negate what has made that location possible, simply because it is what we are. There is a great deal to be said in favour of these kinds of experiential understandings as a way of expressing what is at stake in Quebec-in-Canada, and such narratives will be explored in a bit more depth in the final chapter (where, indeed, I shall take issue

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with some aspects of Tully’s presentation). But they are categorically distinct from what these pages have been calling principled affirmations. They give no explanation of why Canadians ought not to simply refashion their identities to exclude Quebec, or to radically diminish Quebec’s place within them, just as, for instance, earlier generations of Canadians reimagined their situation such that their British origins ceased to seem experientially pressing. “The fact that people grow up identifying with this historical conversation,” Kymlicka observes, “does not really explain why they can’t come to tire of it.”73 A strong normative answer to this would require us to add a dimension of futurity to our account of dialogue – some sense not just of how a de facto process of dialogue has got us here, but of how the superior realization of that dialogue, consciously affirmed by the citizenry and regulated by its own rules of legitimacy, could hold out a promise of enrichment and the attainment of worthwhile ends. Tully goes the furthest in explicating the full normative implications of a dialogical vision of deep diversity. He places dialogue at the very heart of the “conventions of justification” that he extrapolates out of certain constitutional traditions in Canada and that reveal the “spirit in which justice can be rendered to the demands for cultural recognition” in modern states generally.74 These normative conventions emanate from the dialogical ontology of political community described above; Canada, for instance, is nothing more nor less than the negotiated coexistence of a legion of “federation stories” – “different yet overlapping ways of thinking about the character of Canada [that] are deeply inscribed in the diverse cultures, political struggles, and ways of life that make up Canadian history and social movements.”75 There is no metanarrative here, only “the continual negotiation, in terms of these competing federation stories, on an intercultural middle ground that has been slowly woven together and worn smooth over centuries of crisscrossing and overlapping negotiations and interactions.”76 The conventions that Tully identifies are meant to oversee the endless, agonistic process of negotiation and contestation among constituent members over the basic structure of the association. The polity will be legitimate, and hence stable,77 insofar as it adheres to the following requirements: (a) mutual recognition – i.e., the recognition of each member “in its own terms” as a basis for subsequent discussion; (b) consent, whereby all those affected by constitutional agreements, or their representatives, must agree to terms negotiated in a manner “fair by the customs of each member”; and (c) cultural continuity, according to

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which the “mutually recognised cultural identities of the parties,” their “customs and ways,” continue under the constitutional settlement, unless explicitly and voluntarily surrendered.78 These conventions, Tully argues, ought to guide statecraft in contexts marked by deep cultural pluralism. But ours are “dark and discordant times.”79 The conventions, all too often, are forgotten or violated. The leading culprit is a “diversity blindness” that stops us from taking the first step of acknowledging the existence and legitimacy of different federation stories. Citizens suffer from a tendency, almost inherent in federation stories, to mistake their partial perspectives for meta-narratives: “taking a subset of the fundamental characteristics as the fundamental character of Canada.”80 Hence, adherents of a given vision of Canada tend to want to subsume other visions within their own, tolerating them only insofar as they check out against the claims of their own preferred story, rather than accepting the irreducible pluralism of the Canadian experience. “A federation story is one understanding customarily taken as the comprehensive understanding, as the ground of all others. When a person is confronted with a story that competes with the fundamental characteristics, she or he treats it as a (mis)interpretation or opinion, and translates and discusses it in the familiar and customary terms of his or her own. The common expressions of one’s own story remain hegemonic and are reinforced by everything one says and does. Competitors return the compliment.”81 Diversity blindness is not unique to Canada. In Tully’s view, it taints great portions of Western political and constitutional thought, which have too often been seduced by imperial habits of mind that deny or subordinate the voice of the Other in favour of their preferred language games.82 But in the specifically Canadian context, diversity blindness drives the zero-sum approach to constitutional negotiation that we examined in chapter 3 under the rubric of “aggregative democracy,” and according to which each participant tries to maximize the standing of her own partial narrative at the expense of others. Intricate compromises, such as those of the Charlottetown Accord, are rejected as a motley mess. Injustices follow, such as the denial of formal recognition to Quebec and Aboriginal nationalities, and sustained instability is the result.83 The antidote is a fundamental change in ethos. Canadians must transcend diversity blindness by cultivating a set of attributes that Tully calls “federal abilities.” Only through such transformation can Canadians

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manage their constitutive diversities in a legitimate fashion, ushering in constitutional stability, if not necessarily constitutional fixity.84 These federal abilities are largely extensions of Tully’s conventions of justification; they are the cluster of attitudes and skills required to fulfill and sustain them. “Diversity awareness” is “the queen of the federal virtues” and denotes the “civic ability to see their association from multiple viewpoints.”85 It requires that we “free ourselves from deeply ingrained, imperious habits of thought” (e.g., our federation stories) and instead strive for a “world reversal, where one’s own customary forms of reflection set the terms of discussion, to a genuinely intercultural popular sovereignty, where each listens to the voice of the other in their own terms.”86 Audi alteram partem: always listen to the other side. Instead of approaching “multilateral negotiations as a sport of [a] comparative advantage type”87 – aggregative democracy – diversity awareness proceeds from an “ability to think aspectivally,” leading to mutual disclosure and recognition and then to authentic dialogue. In broad terms, “diversity awareness” implies the willingness and ability to re-imagine our manner of understanding our polity, or polity in general, as one of a multitude of contestable or partial positions – mere facets, so to speak, of a vast jewel. “This ... is the most important first step in contemporary constitutionalism.”88 Tully further explicates the concept with reference to traditional Aboriginal practices, integral to their “form of government,” of “tell[ing] and exchang[ing] stories of one’s family, clan, nation, and federation ... at public feasts in order to acquire a multiple vision of reality.”89 He laments the fact that Canadians have had no sustained opportunities to replicate this experience. Not until 1992 did referenda become a de facto part of the constitutional process outside Quebec, and the manner in which elites framed public debate over the Charlottetown Accord unfortunately encouraged the aggregative, rather than dialogical and deliberative, model of democratic practice.90 He continues: Canadians need to engage in more exchanges, and become a little more intercultural, in addition to multicultural, in order to surmount the impasse. The inability to appreciate the other ways of participating in the federation and imagine how just relations among them might be negotiated is the first cause of the impasse. This first step is not easy in the best of circumstances. It requires an act of the imagination – the ability to imagine the federation from other points of view and overcoming diversity blindness. Like all abilities it

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is difficult to acquire, yet it is the indispensable requirement of just multilateral negotiations and deliberation.91 Citizens must come to bracket their given viewpoints and both perceive and embrace the dazzling multiplicity of perspectives on their association, no longer demanding an overriding unity or monomaniacal coherence that could synthesize these. Instead, we must have “the courage to be sensitive when confronted with the Other’s situation. This means putting oneself in the shoes of the Other so as to understand.”92 This would require English-speaking Canadians (for instance) to transcend their embeddedness in their own federation stories, which tend to stop at what Taylor calls “first-order diversity,” i.e., provincial equality, ethnocultural pluralism, individual rights, allegiance to a formally undifferentiated model of Canadian citizenship, and a strong suspicion of any recognition of collective identities. They would have to develop and refine their empathy for such considerations as la survivance, the distinction between nationalism and separatism, the historical anxieties of Quebecers regarding the federal government, the relationship between the formal recognition of distinct identities and ideals of equal respect, the impossibility of a culturally neutral state, and so forth. As Kenneth McRoberts remarks, “the real obstacle to a successful ‘conversation’ between English Canada and Quebec is not logistical or institutional, it is intellectual.” Quebec remains wedded to the idea of Canada as formally a multinational state. “[W]ith two contradictory discourses,” McRoberts concludes, “it’s impossible to carry on a conversation.”93 Progress can’t occur until each side makes the requisite leap in awareness. Tully’s earlier formulations are quite expansive about the difficulties involved in inculcating the requisite federal abilities, the considerable demands they make of citizens.94 Canadians “not only have to recognize that there are competing visions of the federation that need to be accommodated along with their own,” he writes. “[T]his is difficult enough – but they also [must] recognize and affirm the diversity of the federation as a fundamental characteristic itself.”95 So Tully poses a multi-pronged challenge to citizens. We must stir from our “dogmatic slumber” and awaken to the presence of deep diversity; instead, for instance, of seeing Quebec nationalism as an odious deviation from the correct principles of individual right and equality of provinces, or dismissing Quebec nationalists as irrational or motivated by bad faith, we must recognize that they work from a fundamentally different vision of

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the country, as complex, philosophically rich, and historically rooted as the alternatives (albeit emanating from quite distinct narratives of history and polity). We must proceed to listen to and strive to understand the claims made on behalf of that diversity, “acknowledging” them by articulating a response that accords them full respect, if not necessarily total agreement or affirmation.96 Finally, we must both comprehend and adhere to the conventions of justification that Tully extracts from subaltern constitutional traditions in Canada and elsewhere. In all these ways, Tully’s model makes formidable demands on the imaginative, intellectual, and empathetic powers of mass publics. And it runs directly contrary to those aggregative approaches to democracy so influential in our culture, which take as fixed the extant demands, preferences, and (above all) capacities of citizens. Of course, that something is hard doesn’t make it impossible. Tully believes that a process combining practice in the arts of diversity awareness with appropriate framing and leadership by conciliatory elites will inculcate the desired abilities at the mass level.97 He is rather vague about how this is to come about, apart from endorsing a participatory process with appropriate steering by dialogically minded elites. Matthew Mendelsohn’s concept of an integrative “public brokerage,” which we also touched on in chapter 3, helps to flesh out the general approach. Observing that “the power to ratify constitutional change in Canada has shifted from elites to the public with no accompanying institutions in which to exercise this power wisely,”98 Mendelsohn seeks to transcend the established dichotomy between “elitist and integrative” and “participatory and aggregative”99 constitutional processes in Canada. He proposes an array of mechanisms, including representative public forums, civic journalism, citizen juries, and constituent assemblies, for building “deliberative majorities.”100 If widely publicized and taken seriously by elites, such processes could, he suggests, be effective, leading to much greater mutual understanding and (possibly) working agreements at the mass level. Mendelsohn’s text can be read as an effort to work out questions of practical application given in the idea of a transformative dialogue among Canadian citizens. His work, incidentally, helps to underline just how demanding the process of reconciliation through dialogue will be, requiring a sustained and multifaceted process unlike anything in Canada’s previous experiences in constitutional politics. Where Mill imagined an enlargement of citizens’ “intelligence and sympathies” through participation in the politics of their fellow nationals, participation here implies a development

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in citizens’ capacities for mutual understanding and compromise across deep divides of history, language, culture, and solidarity, through a multiplicity of procedures for intercultural and multinational dialogue.

4 dialogue as affirmation: tully’s implicit developmental ideal Tully’s thesis, which he has refined and deployed in an array of contexts since the early 1990s, helps to elaborate on the vision of dialogical democracy across diverse “ways of life” implicit in LaSelva’s model of “constitutional morality.” Indeed, among advocates of Canadian polity as a “dialogue society,” Tully has been most explicit in clarifying precisely the sort of transformation of attitudes and practices necessary for its realization. And Mendelsohn’s work stands as a valuable statement of the practical means for inculcating the sort of expansion of horizons, the “diversity awareness,” that such a model demands, even if it avoids the risky romanticism of this way of phrasing it.101 What remains to be explored is the full range of reasons why it is so important that we do this, that we master the “daunting repertoire of practical skills and virtues” Tully gathers under the rubric of “federal abilities.” What is the nature of the affirmation that urges us to take up the challenge – that can tell us why we ought to do so? Tully’s favoured answers, as should already be clear, are justice102 and stability. Indeed, the first page of Strange Multiplicity informs us that “[t]he question is not whether or not one should be for or against cultural diversity. Rather, it is the prior question of what is the critical attitude or spirit in which justice can be rendered to the demands for cultural recognition.”103 Similarly, justice seems to be the main concern in paragraphs such as this, where aspectival thinking and “rendering each its due” are interlocked: “as a Canadian I recognize, affirm, and celebrate Kanesetake as a nation, a living identity. Yet also as a Canadian I want you to see that Kanestake is a member of the larger Kanienkehaka nation and the Haudenosaunee Confederation, and is in relation to the Algonquin Nation and Oka, Quebec, and Canada. Québécois(es) live in Kanesatake, and Kanienkehaka live in Oka and Montreal. I am trying to draw your attention to this nastawganb (or labyrinth) of aspects, of modes of experience, while rendering each its due, without belittling any.”104

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If we accept the vision of polity as an inextricable diversity, a sprawling association with numerous constitutive actors, each the source of a multitude of perspectives and “federation stories,” the natural question certainly is one of how fairly to accommodate this diversity, how to “render each its due.” Tully emphasizes the extent to which cultures are interdependent and overlapping and diversity an inescapable element of politics; secessionist nationalism, based on the idea that national selfdetermination requires independent states, is thus based on a false “snooker-ball” model of culture. Furthermore, such exit-based politics invites endless fragmentation. The implication is that sharing a state is the only option and justice, therefore, the overriding question.105 The general claim that we can’t escape diversity is of course accurate, and it is equally true that most Aboriginal nations, to say nothing of other forms of diversity (polyethnic, gendered, class, etc.), cannot realistically contemplate session. But once again, Tully’s generalizations fail to speak to Quebec’s membership in Canada, where secession is a viable option and not necessarily based on a comprehensive dismissal of diversity.106 The charge of auto-destructiveness has rather more leverage against the exit-based politics of Quebec sovereigntists; but I argued in chapter 4 that the force of this charge can be considerably blunted by a careful delineation of the moral basis of Quebec’s departure. Furthermore, none of Tully’s rebuttals of separatist nationalism speak to the possiblilty of less-than-total exit, i.e., a radical decoupling from Canadian institutions falling short of total secession. For my purposes, then, the question of how we can coexist in justice is not, pace Tully, the “prior question.” The prior question is whether one should be for or against the particular manifestation of cultural diversity given in Quebec’s membership in Canada. The just terms of this membership can only be resolved after we have decided that Quebec ought to continue to practise a strong engagement in shared institutions. Tully bolsters his preference for negotiating deep diversity within the constitutional order with his claim that stability requires such processes. This desire for stability is in turn sustained by allegiance to the experiential narratives that make dialogue with specific interlocutors – in this case, Quebec – an essential part of the self-understanding of citizens. There is, however, another reason for Tully’s position here. He clearly believes that the encounter with the “strange multiplicity” of federation stories is a source of profound enrichment and an intoxicating challenge to our conceptual and empathetic powers.

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This opens up the possibility that the federal abilities are ends in themselves, freestanding goods. Fittingly, the vision of a transformative ascension to diversity awareness, and the challenges and possibilities it brings, is rhapsodically cast in Tully’s oeuvre. He calls upon Bill Reid’s impressive sculpture, The Spirit of Haida Gwaii, as an incarnation of “the difficult reversal of worldview” in question, an “ecumenical symbol for the mutual recognition and affirmation of all cultures that respect other cultures and the earth.”107 The evocation of this sculpture, it must be understood, is non-trivial. It is the central analogy for Tully’s vision of polity, and Tully describes his text as in some ways a response to the dialogical vision of Reid’s work.108 Significantly, David Owen underscores Reid’s “ethicalpedagogical role” as Tully’s exemplar, having inspired the latter to give “political expression to the ethos of intercultural dialogue achieved in The Spirit of Haida Gwaii.”109 Even more significantly, Owen interprets this in light of an Emersonian perfectionism, whereby exemplars are thought to inspire the realization that the self “can turn (convert, revolutionize itself).” Following this, “a process of education is undertaken ... in which each self is drawn on a journey of ascent to a further state of that self.”110Tully seems to write in such a spirit: The spirit of Haida Gwaii evokes a boundless sense of wonder. It is the mystical. I want to walk in silence around its overflowing spirits, letting their endless perspectives and interrelations awaken the play of my imagination from its dogmatic slumber. I know its meaning is unfathomable and my words are unworthy. Mine is a crude voice over a multiplicity of cultural voices who, if one could only learn to look and listen, speak for themselves. The sheer, manifest presence of the myth creatures [portrayed in the work] confronts and calls into question the overweening sense of superiority which, since first contact, has rendered us deaf and blind to the multiplicity of spirits who constitute this place and its ways.111 This imagery discloses a real driving force behind the dialogical ideal. It reveals the extent to which we are moved by more than a procedural desire to render each their due, or a conservative impulse to sustain a Canada we have come to love. Deep diversity, it teaches, is worth embracing independently of other considerations: it is the locus of a transformative experience. The quests for legitimate regulatory principles and stability are thus (partly) explained by the prior, heart-

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catching realization that accompanies Tully’s “world reversal,” the “boundless sense of wonder” brought forth by the confrontation with sheer cultural and perspectival diversity on the space that is ours (but only partly our own), and the exhilaration of the sensibility that embraces the challenges it poses. So it is that “[t]he overall cultural diversity [of the association] is a thing of justice and beauty, analogous to ecological diversity and just as important for living and living well.”112 Consider the way Tully develops his assertion that “[t]he requirement of unity is an illusion given by ... visions and ... linguistic expressions [which] enframe without acknowledgement.” I look up at the fireplace, then my gaze moves to the window and out to the snow-covered lawn with its cross-country ski tracks. Beyond the lawn, the ice-covered Ottawa River and people icefishing in their huts come into focus as the foreground fades. These scenes in turn become indistinct as my field of vision moves across the Ottawa to the church steeple at Oka, and then, after a spell, to the two mountains against the blue sky. My perspective is displaced yet again as it moves to the left and I see the Mohawk village of Kanesatake and the sacred Pines Forest. Now I imagine myself in the Pines looking in this direction. How would these scenes be painted by Cornelius Kreighoff, or Ellen Gabriel? A hundred thoughts rush to mind. Do I experience the inability to capture the scene in a single identifying depiction that does justice to each of its fundamental characteristics as a flaw to be reformed or as an occasion for wonder and celebration? Is the fact that the various parts of the scene are equally multifaceted troubling? Need this craving even arise?113 These long quotations help to underline what is given in the imaginative leap envisioned by Tully and the decidedly ecstatic quality – the “wonder and celebration” – that he finds there. Such exhilaration in the face of deep diversity is partly stirred by the fact that “the ability to take up one’s own ways as strange and unfamiliar, to stray from them and take up a critical attitude towards them ... open[s] cultures to question, reinterpretation, negotiation, transformation and non-identity.”114 The stance is one of critical freedom, providing “the social basis for critical reflection on and dissent from one’s own cultural institutions and traditions of interpretation.”115 The

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cultivation of the federal virtues is to be endorsed in part because it provides us with an ongoing source of critique and reinterpretation of our established practices, narratives, and self-understandings. In helping us to stand back from our cultural attachments, the better to reassess them, it deepens our autonomy as agents and citizens. Weinstock makes a similar argument on behalf of a Rawlsian state, but this is nonetheless a substantive argument about the good – i.e., the richest kind of agency, going beyond what is required simply to realize liberal justice.116 Expanded autonomy is not the only way to frame the driving affirmation at play here in any case. Refined capacities and enriched virtues do not simply empower us, they deepen and improve us, making us more fully realized selves in something akin to Mill’s sense. Multinational diversity challenges us to empathize with other national identities, to engage and understand them; and to respond to their claims, and articulate our own, in a participatory spirit, informed by an intricate ideal of justice. The citizen capable of rising to meet these demands will thus be an enriched citizen, one who has refined the federal abilities of empathy and imagination and mastered a profound and ongoing complexity across the formidable barriers of “politics in the vernacular.” As Mill argued that more traditional forms of democratic participation would develop the powers of citizens, so does the dialogical thesis add another dimension to the developmental project, carrying it beyond the liberal concern with “public reasons.” It summons us to wider vistas, to move through a “strange multiplicity” of traditions, dreams, and worlds; and thus it justifies the political sphere in terms of our intellectual and, especially, affective enrichment.117

5 conclusions: developmental ideals, multinational states, and quebec-in-canada I won’t deny the utopian or even fantastical tone of the preceding discussion. But any developmental ideal is apt to have this character. Aware of that problem, Tully reminds us that Canadian mass publics have made progress in the arts of federal dialogue when given an opportunity to engage in them. But even if we reject such optimism, a major part of my task is to identify and articulate the visions and dreams that have been woven into Quebec-in-Canada, the better to understand Quebec’s place in affirmations about this polity and thus to clarify the full range of goods at stake in secession. If developmental ideals seem a trifle overblown, that does not necessarily make them less potent as

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aspirations; nor does it make them any less important to try to understand. Otherwise put, we need to recall the developmental distinction between citizens as they are, and as they might be. The ideals canvassed above might be too hopeful, but they remain an end toward which we may aspire, if never wholly fulfill. Quebec’s departure would sunder the preconditions required even for that hope, let alone its realization. So let’s carry the analysis further. Two questions remain unresolved here. One concerns the precise relationship between this kind of developmental thesis and multinational pluralism in general, as well as the kind of multinational diversity given in Quebec-in-Canada in particular. The other asks whether the thesis implies a critique of forms of dissociation other than secession. I’ve touched on the former already but would like to take it further at this point. Developmental ideals are seldom cited only in defence of multinational pluralism. Parekh’s case for multiculturalism, for instance, has similarly developmental and transformative overtones but extends them to cover all manifestations of cultural diversity, whether multinational or ethnocultural in nature. His Rethinking Multiculturalism criticizes Rawls, Habermas, and other theorists of deliberation for what Parekh sees as their “instrumental” emphasis on decision-making and their failure adequately to heed the extent to which “[p]olitical deliberation is a multidimensional activity and serves several purposes. It deepens mutual understanding between groups, sensitizes each to the concerns and anxieties of others, leads to an unconscious fusion of ideas and sensibilities, encourages them to explore common areas of agreement, and plays a vital role in community-building. Since it requires participants to defend their views in a manner intelligible to others, it encourages them to appreciate the contingency of and thus take a critical view of their beliefs.”118 Parekh believes that this applies to all political deliberation (provided it follows basic regulative criteria, of course). Such dialogue is by nature developmental and ultimately transformative. The important thing is that Parekh extends this developmental logic in describing political deliberation in multicultural societies. These societies, he explains, require a “multicultural perspective” that accepts the “cultural embeddedness of human beings,” the internal plurality of cultures, and “the inescapability and desirability of cultural diversity and intercultural dialogue.”119 And this perspective carries further the transformative potential given in all political deliberation. “When we view the world from [a multicultural] vantage point, our attitudes to

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ourselves and others undergo profound changes. All claims that a particular way of thinking and living is perfect, the best, or necessitated by human nature itself appear incoherent and even bizarre, for the multicultural perspective sensitizes us to the fact that all ways of life and thought are inherently limited and cannot possibly embody the full range of the richness, complexity and grandeur of human existence.”120 The challenge, for the purposes of my argument, is that Parekh is speaking of all types of multicultural polity. For, as I have had numerous occasions to remark, Canada-without-Quebec would still contain a formidable array of ethnocultural diversities. And for that matter, a plethora of critical perspectives (on broad cultural matters or other topics) can be generated within the context of nationalist states, as On Liberty powerfully demonstrates; and expansions of imaginative and critical horizon are always available to citizens, at least where decent education is readily accessible. Indeed, Anthony Laden assimilates Tully’s thesis about dialogue in deep diversity into an undifferentiated model of “deliberative liberalism” – with Tully’s blessing (despite the rather obvious misappropriation of Taylor’s famous term to denote value pluralism of all sorts, rather than of a very particular kind).121 It seems as though multinationality makes no difference. What counts is pluralism per se. I can sketch some provisional rejoinders to this in the form of two broad explanations of why multinational states might be considered privileged loci for the realization of developmental ideals. One draws from the tradition we discussed earlier, which frames the presence of “multiple [linguistic and national] forums of democratic participation” as a particularly thorny form of democratic politics. The basic argument should require no extensive re-elaboration. It is enough to reiterate that integrating internal diversities within these separate forums is already a considerable challenge; debates raging around ethnocultural pluralism show this. But going further, and sustaining a richly shared institutional space across these parallel forums, with the formidable difficulties of understanding that entails, magnifies that complexity to a considerable degree. Now the greater the constitutive complexity of the polity – or, better, the deeper its diversity – the richer the demands it must place on the imaginative and empathetic horizons of citizens.122 And in train come greater opportunities for the realization of a maximally developmental vision of citizenship. So we need not deny that other sorts of pluralism (such as “polyethnic” pluralism) also offer opportunities for such expansions of horizon to concede that multina-

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tional states add a deeper dimension to the project. Tully, for instance, distinguishes between cultural, participatory, and federal orders of diversity.123 There is no conceptual difficulty, at least, in extrapolating from this to conclude that each order of diversity adds to the richness of our multiplicity of federal stories and to the opportunities for “wonder and celebration” they offer us. Furthermore, the institutional negotiation of ethnocultural pluralism – while obviously influenced by public opinion in a variety of respects – tends to unfold through conventional, representative processes rather than participatory mechanisms: that is, it is a matter of basically routine public policy.124 Major constitutional negotiations in Canada, however, now seem to entail a de facto requirement of ratification by plebiscite, and it is partly this requirement that has led to Mendelsohn’s theories of “public brokerage” and the whole idea of a dialogue across the constitutive nationalities at the mass level. Reasons of process, then, may contribute to the argument that multinationality is a privileged locus for the developmental ideal. Diversity of this order, at least in Canada, requires public brokerage to a degree that ethnocultural diversity may not. It thus demands that citizens really do undertake a developmental dialogue in a way not quite so true of other sorts of pluralism. This brings me to a second kind of explanation, which has a much stronger quality of Realpolitik. The focus here turns to the structural incentives unique to certain kinds of multinational states. If we accept that developmental ideals are goods in themselves, and proceed to establish that a type of multinational state requires, or offers structural incentives in favour of, the development of these virtues by its citizens, then we may conclude that these states serve developmental goods in a manner not true of other states. That the same goods can be pursued in other states ceases to be the point; the point is that this kind of state encourages or demands what Tully calls the “federal abilities” of its citizens. And multinational states arguably do require the development of these abilities among mass publics, once the association has moved away from a model of elite accommodation. They do this not merely as a matter of justice but of the very continuity of the state. So these polities offer more than merely opportunities for the expansion of “imagination and sympathies.” They also create built-in incentives for pursuing these goods. In a way, this claim echoes one of Trudeau’s more striking assertions, i.e., that only French and English in Canada have the power to “break the country.” It requires us to extend to mass publics the motivations

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that Lijphart attributes to consociational elites in divided societies, who co-operate because doing otherwise would “call forth the prophesied consequences of the plural character of the society.”125 Citizens, as well as elites, can come to acknowledge the same relationship between mutual accommodation and stability. The argument about structural incentives then relates this claim to all that we have said above – and particularly Tully’s thesis concerning the linkage between the successful realization of his “conventions of justice” and the long-term viability of the association. Canadians have special incentives to overcome their imprisonment within partial “federative stories” and their tragic adherence to an aggregative model of constitutional politics, inasmuch as the survival of their political community, in anything resembling its present form, seems to depend upon it. That a large and territorially coherent nationality-based unit, such as Quebec, viably can dissociate itself from the political order ratchets up the costs of failing to undertake the transformation of citizens’ imaginative horizons in a way that other sorts of polity do not. And if we take the developmental vision seriously, as an end to be pursued, then we see that this offers a strong reason to prefer polities of this kind. Such incentive structures may not apply in other sorts of multinational states or multicultural polities. At the very least, it is not clear that Aboriginal peoples have the same capacity as Quebec to “go it alone”;126 nor that their going it alone would break the country in the same shattering sense as Quebec’s departure. This is emphatically not to say that the dissociation of certain Aboriginal peoples from the Canadian framework would be other than a great loss to Canada or anything less than a dramatic historical failure. Nor does it mean that Canadians ought not to care about justice for Aboriginal peoples. Nor, finally, would I deny there may be parts of English-speaking Canada, such as British Columbia, where something very analogous to Quebec-Canada relations may be playing out between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal. All I want to suggest is that the incentives to undertake the developmental project discussed above may well be different, for the broad mass of Canadians, in the context of the Aboriginal file. These range from guilt over the ongoing repercussions of colonial abuses, to a straightforward wish to correct the intolerable and unjust conditions confronting many Aboriginal communities, to a self-interested realism that seeks to avoid the eruptions of sporadic violence that have marked relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal in recent years. None of these are interchangeable with the nature of the incentives posed by

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Quebec. We might say that, in addition to such arguments, Quebec adds a further reason to undertake just dialogue: a deep and fundamental challenge to the integrity of the polity. From a developmental perspective, this may actually be a reason to affirm such polities. They give citizens more reasons to undertake practices that would help to realize the ideal in question. Matters are perhaps clearer cut when it comes to ethnocultural diversity. Most ethnocultural communities lack the territorial concentration, institutional coherence, and resources to break the country. While it may be true that systematic, grave patterns of disadvantage and injustice can transform ethnocultural minorities into “national minorities,” with all that that entails, it is far from obvious that the failure to implement a broad policy of multicultural justice along the lines of Parekh’s Rethinking Multiculturalism, or Kymlicka’s theories, will usher in a fundamental threat to the survival of the polity. Again, this distinction in no way militates against the many arguments in favour of implementing multicultural justice. It simply says that multicultural polities lack the structural incentives for the transformation of citizenship extant in a certain type of multinational state. This, therefore, is one reason for affirming such states. It is part of what makes them valuable. A final point. We need to consider whether the developmental vision can speak to all forms of dissociation rather than simply secession. It is not obvious that it can. Laforest, for example, conceives of a QuebecCanada dialogue as a prerequisite for a confederal rather than federal regime and believes that the values of dialogical partnership would be best realized under such a framework. Tully is more agnostic about institutional outcomes, as indeed he must be; legitimacy, on his account, resides less in such outcomes than in the processes that allow for endless contestation and negotiation, following his “three conventions.”127 Nonetheless, I would suggest that that the public good of expanded horizons, dialogical challenge, and development, which I have argued are at play in Tully’s model of constitutionalism, might be more richly realized under certain institutional arrangements than others. Tully’s overarching concern with “freedom from domination” means that he can’t consider such an argument since doing so would risk foreclosing citizens’ “agonic freedom.” Because I am interested less in explicating a theory of just constitutionalism than in identifying goods realized or promoted by a certain kind of multinational state, I am free to deploy such goods as critical standards of evaluation and assess demands and outcomes in light of them. I can say that this or that

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outcome will maximize or undercut the goods in question. And this, in any case, is no real threat to Tully’s emphasis on freedom or to Rawlsian theories of justice for that matter. My goal is the articulation of goods, and I am not proposing that these goods be used to justify violations of autonomy or equal respect. So let me suggest the following. Dialogue across national boundaries will be more frequent and intense, occupying a greater space in the life of the polity and presenting correspondingly dramatic challenges to the self-understandings of the citizenry, as more institutional space is shared. The more we share – consistent with respect for our autonomy and apartness, of course128 – the more we must negotiate, argue, challenge, and constantly seek to understand one another. The more we share, the more urgently challenges to the shared framework will matter to us, engaging our deepest allegiances and identities. Hence, the more we share, the richer our possibilities for “fusing horizons” and mutual development and transformation. Proposals to disentangle Quebec from Canadian federalism, in favour of (say) some loose confederation or “sovereignty-partnership,” would certainly not foreclose all such dialogue or obliterate all shared space. But they would render it more remote from the lives of citizens on both sides of the divide. As Quebec and Canada split apart, so will they deprive themselves of the ongoing challenges of mutual understanding – and so, of the richer dreams of citizenship I have been explicating here.129 It is difficult to believe that a scheme like that of Philip Resnick, in which Canada and Quebec become largely autonomous entities while electing delegates to a wider shared superstructure, would make the same demands on citizens’ capacity for mutual understanding and compromise across national differences. Indeed, radically reducing the need for such demands is the whole point of the project.130 Dissociation may hold out the promise of an “English Canada ... free to be itself.”131 But it would sacrifice the promise of becoming something more – a dream of enrichment and transformation that has deep roots in the normative theorizing of multinational states and, perhaps, continues to resonate with us.

part two Beyond Principled Affirmations: Sketching the Experiential

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9 Quebec and Experiential Affirmation

1 introduction It remains only to round out the analysis with some final observations about the nature of solidarity in our multinational state. Previous chapters showed that a rich array of principled goods affirm, to greater or lesser effect, a strong zone of institutional sharing between Canada and Quebec. If none of these goods is fully convincing, my hope has been that, all told, they might give pause to those who question whether a radical rupture with Quebec would mark any sort of moral failure.1 There are, however, further dimensions of allegiance to polity. Recall Taylor’s theory of agency: selfhood is relational, constituted by our location in social and (especially, on his account) moral space. Thus, as the introduction showed, Taylor invites us to consider agency as embedded in and constituted by affirmations of value, as well as in particular “webs of interlocution,” more local traditions, polities, nations, and so forth. My argument has been that theory this offers a useful way of approaching such a question as “why secession matters” in terms other than economic and political inconvenience. It implies that the full meaning of secession, for agents, has to be framed in terms of our allegiance to principled affirmations such as liberty or democracy. These are tied to the constitutive commitments that make us who we are. Insofar as dissociation would undermine our capacity to realize or aspire to these, it would be a costly prospect for agents, quite apart from matters of pocketbook. And if Taylor is correct, then there is some explanatory value in understanding Quebec’s relationship to the streams of thought that affirm Canada. This can, to a greater or lesser

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degree, help to account for resistance to dissociation among Englishspeaking Canadians. Principled affirmations draw from ideals and moral sources that are civilizational in origin and often putatively universal in application. Particular polities move within this wider field of goods, derived from the “moral horizons” of the modern West, although, as we saw, certain communities may be better positioned to realize them than others. Typically, then, principled affirmations frame the particular polity in light of (more) universal ideals, and as arguments against dissociation, they say that a Canada-without-Quebec would be less likely to realize or aspire toward these general goals. This chapter explores, very tentatively, the more local aspect of political identity. It tries to develop some of the Canadian implications of Taylor’s concept of local “webs of interlocution.” For it is clear that not all our affirmations, political or otherwise, are principled affirmations. Part of what goes into our political identity, for example, is a sense of location in time and space, history and landscape. Such concepts invite a torrent of problems, but for these purposes we only need a very basic, if indispensable, set of claims about them. Without embarking upon a sustained discussion of the literature on territoriality, then, I will assert the obvious: states exist in a geographical relation to other states, and, at least for moderns, political identification is linked to territory. That great swaths of the territory may never be seen by most of its citizens does not necessarily diminish its normative salience for them; and just as the modern state creates solidarities among strangers through the device of citizenship, so does it nurture a sense of identification with its own territory by encouraging citizens to view all the landscapes of the polity as “their own,” a process made possible by the device of sovereignty – especially popular sovereignty – and reinforced by a battery of national symbols and myths.2 It follows that this interweaving of political identity with narratives about territory and landscape might be one important dimension of the ramifications, for citizens, of a radical rupture such as secession. Historical narratives offer another axis of identification. “Identity claims,” Booth remarks, “characteristically seek ... to establish the sameness, the continuity of a person or community across time and in the face of apparent change.”3 Identity is informed by an awareness that our lives unfold in relation to past events and generations, as well as the present and future; this relation carries some significance for us. Burke’s notion of a social contract across generations, for instance, is

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a memorable expression of the political implications of this idea, such that national belonging must be understood in relation to a temporal narrative. Some citizens may identify with territory and history only in the vaguest ways. A person may have practically no historical awareness and may seldom think about places beyond his immediate environs. For that matter, he may be utterly apolitical. The claim here is not that everybody locates herself and her political identity relative to an imaginative extension of landscape and history, but only that many of us do, to varying degrees.4 Thus, if we seek to explicate what is at stake for citizens in a radical rupture with Quebec, we must go beyond principled (and instrumental) affirmations and attend to these local narratives of space and time. Place – by which I mean landscape, territory, topography – and time – the history of a place and its inhabitants – are not experienced by citizens solely as contingent frameworks for the realization of instrumental and principled goods. They can also function as freestanding goods of their own, as partially constitutive of the experience of citizenship. Let’s call such goods “experiential affirmations” or “experiential narratives.” Archetypical nationalist myths of “the soil,” or cross-generational references to “the land of our ancestors,” speak to this sense of embeddedness in, and fealty to, particular places and particular histories. This sense is conceptually distinct from affirmations of polity rooted in a reflexive and principled endorsement of its potential, or its reality. And understanding how and why our political order matters to us requires that we review at least some goods of this kind.

2 shared versus overlapping narratives The relevance of myths, histories, and other such experiential materials to political identity is routinely acknowledged if seldom explored in a sustained way by political theorists.5 What is less often understood is that experiential narratives may not need to be shared in order to serve as a basis for political solidarity in deeply divided states. When Wayne Norman criticizes the idea – popular in Canada during the Trudeau years and subsequent constitutional imbroglio – that shared values are the bedrock of political solidarity, he counters, Mill-like, that shared identity is what counts, and that this in turn is nurtured by experiences and history. “[T]he usual bases of a strong national identity [are] shared myths, symbols and values arising out of a common heritage; or

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a common ethnicity, religion, language, or external enemy.”6 Insofar as shared values reinforce national solidarity, he suggests, this is because they are seen as emanations of the latter – as products of a shared history, a common achievement. Maurizio Viroli makes a similar argument in his interesting study of the republican tradition, wherein the values expressed by the polity – say, liberty and justice – are celebrated not simply as abstract goods but as the shared historical achievements of particular communities. “A purely political republic would ... generate no attachment, no love, no commitment,” he explains. “To generate these sorts of passions one needs to appeal to the common culture, to shared memories.”7 In part 1 of this book, I agreed that many principled values, such as liberty or democracy, are transferable across territories and therefore cannot offer a fully persuasive language to justify one set of borders (Quebec-in-Canada) rather than another (two states). States are, in Yack’s words, “contingent locations” for the realization of assorted ideals. At the same time, I have insisted that the capacity of Englishspeaking Canadians maximally to realize certain kinds of principled affirmation might indeed be bolstered, in various ways, by Quebec’s presence in the wider polity; so ideals and values may not be quite as free-floating as Norman implies. This is not to embrace Trudeau’s apparent belief that the recognition that citizens share values is somehow sufficient to generate solidarities across nationality-based units. Rather the argument is that interesting connections can be made between certain ideals and the kind of experience in multinationality that Quebec-in-Canada makes possible; and that, insofar as we English-speaking Canadians are moved by the ideals we canvassed, they help to explain and justify our resistance to dissociation. Yet part 1 also conceded that ideals, while an important part of the puzzle, might fall short of a fully convincing articulation of Englishspeaking Canadian resistance to a radical rupture with Quebec. The sorts of goods that Norman and Viroli emphasize – shared histories, shared memories and myths – might help to make good the gap. But once again we collide with the problem of deep diversity. For as Norman points out, “shared history is of little value if there are radically different interpretations of that history”8 or if sub-communities tell substantially different historical narratives. Of course, this bodes poorly for Canada, where assorted regions and various nationality-based units tend to spin very different readings of history.

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Faced with this dilemma, some scholars cast around for bases of solidarity other than history and shared memories. Andrew Mason, for example, proposes that allegiance to shared institutions, rather than shared values or shared memories, is an effective basis of political solidarity, especially in multinational states, where inspirational shared memories are hard to come by. He expresses the hope that “citizens might identify with their institutions even if they do not identify with the historical processes which led to their emergence, or if they do not accept the historical myths which they are told about these processes.”9 This can happen, he thinks, if “members of different cultural groups are effectively represented within the polity’s major decisionmaking bodies” and if autonomist cultural communities are granted the desired degree of self-determination.10 I have no wish to begrudge Mason his hopes, although reconciling nationalist demands for increased autonomy with high levels of participation in shared institutions – two directly contradictory impulses – is no mean feat, as debates over “asymmetrical federalism” in Canada amply show.11 More importantly, Mason’s thesis fails to explain why English-speaking Canadians might be moved to lament a scission with Quebec, since many of the “institutions” in question (e.g., Parliament) will almost certainly survive Quebec’s departure in some recognizable form. In this sense, his prescription takes as given what needs to be explained – namely, the basis of our will to share the state with another large and powerful nationality-based unit. So rather than move away from experiential narratives in our efforts to understand solidarity in a multinational state, as Mason proposes, we may be better off thinking more deeply about them and whether they may be rescued from Norman’s dismissal of their utility in the Canadian setting. One possible option here is to resuscitate the grand project of national synthesis – spinning out narratives of place and time that somehow include all Canadians and promise to bind them more closely together. Such a move would risk conflating prescription with explanation: to the extent that the synthesis is new, it could not already constitute part of our self-understanding, and so could not explain resistance to secession. Yet a really effective synthesis will present itself less as a construct and more as an articulation of some prior intuition. The author of the synthesis could thus claim to be calling forth a self-understanding that all Canadians really do share but has hitherto lacked conceptual expression. Be that as it may, it would take a Hegel to pull this off.

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A more modest strategy is to redirect attention from the substance of experiential affirmations to the processes that generate them, in the hope that the latter, more than the former, may be the real key to solidarity in multinational states. This is part of the appeal of the “dialogical” strand of thought examined in the last chapter. We saw that Jeremy Webber identifies a particular dimension of Canadian history that can serve as a unifying agent, i.e., the idea of a “shared conversation” across national boundaries, centred on shared institutions, achievements, conflicts, and challenges, which has influenced the development of all the interlocutors. “[E]ach Canadian is also, at the same time, a member of another community, one that crosses ... regional divides,” he argues. “That membership makes one Canadian.” And this identity “is manifestly not formed solely within [one] linguistic group,” but has rather been “shaped” by debates and dialogue across languages, regions, and cultures, with francophone Quebec a central player. “That history has made us. It furnishes the bank of experience and myth that gives substance to community.”12 Political identity in Canada, LaSelva agrees, is multi-levelled – nested – and at the panCanadian level we do partake of shared experiences, even if these must be filtered through the prism of deep diversity. And Tully shares this view, more or less.13 Our real allegiance, on his account, is to the ongoing and multifaceted process of dialogue itself, not to specific institutional rules, shared values, or narratives of identity, all of which are negotiated over time and highly fluid, being endlessly revised in the process of playing the “game.” Tully, however, risks carrying this concern with process over substance too far. He frames constitutional rules and political identities as part of an infinitely contestable framework that “can come up for deliberation and amendment [at any time] in the course of the game.”14 Narratives of identity are as contested and mercurial as any other facet of this “game” – part of a shifting superstructure, so to speak, of which “citizen dialogues” are the base. It is a mistake, on this view, to find in them a decisive wellspring of solidarity. “[C]itizens share ... nothing more or less than being in on the dialogues over how and by whom power is exercised which take place both within and over the rules of the dialogues.”15 Experiential narratives, contrary to Norman’s suggestion, are no more the ultimate source of solidarity than are shared values or social contracts. The game is the real locus of allegiance. Now to a certain extent, this is salutary. Identities and narratives are incontestably mutable. Peoples’ accounts of their history, and their

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relation to a territory, do change, and are always contested. Different interpretations continuously jostle for their share of the common space. However, the degree to which different narratives can themselves help to reaffirm or undercut our commitment to sustaining that dialogue can be obscured by too exclusive a concentration on the process of dialogue. Those Canadians for whom the presence of Quebec is in some strong way constitutive of their political identity will be more likely to conceive of dissociation as a shattering trauma than citizens for whom Quebec is merely one province among others or, worse, a tiresome drain on the balance of equalization payments; and it follows that, all else being equal, the former will have more reasons to undertake and sustain a dialogue with Quebec or, in Tully’s terms, to keep playing the game. Of course, this kind of solidarity can also spawn other, less constructive dynamics, as we shall see when we consider Christian Dufour’s argument about the psychological dependence of English-speaking Canada upon Quebec. But framing politics as something analogous to Wittgenstein’s language games should not require us to treat substantive visions of our community as merely ephemeral by-products of dialogue. A better account would see them as partially determinant of the success or failure of the dialogue itself, as part of what sustains it. As experiential affirmations change, so may the boundaries of what, and whom, the dialogue includes – or whether it endures at all. I want to resist, then, too radical a reduction of substantive symbols, myths, and historical narratives to processes of dialogue. Norman is correct to view the former as indispensable facets of attachment to polity. Less convincing is his suggestion that these have to be generally shared in order to be bases of solidarity. Experiential affirmations need not cut across national identities within a multinational state. The desire to live together can, instead, emanate from the largely self-contained experiential affirmations of the various constituent nationalities. Insofar as the territory of Quebec is a crucial part of English-Canadian myths and histories, secession is to be resisted as a violent rupture with established identities. Quebec may thus play an important or necessary role in “the English-Canadian imagination,” to paraphrase Northrop Frye, regardless of whether Quebecers themselves would affirm the terms of those imaginings. Similarly, lingering affinities for traditional, pan-Canadian accounts of identity might play some role in resistance to secession among francophone Quebecers, whether or not Canadians outside Quebec recognize those narratives.16 In such cases, one nationalitybased unit conceives of the territory and (perhaps) history of another

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as an indispensable ingredient in its own self-understanding; a breach with the other, therefore, would mark a traumatic break with the selfunderstanding in question. We can call these sorts of accounts – which are not necessarily shared by more than one nationality-based unit, but nevertheless encompass more than one such unit, making a particular view of the Other partially constitutive of the self – overlapping narratives. They incorporate the other, but on terms that carry no necessary resonance for it.17 So members of a specific nationality-based unit may desire to sustain the multinational state, as well as the dialogical ethos that some scholars believe to be essential to the success of such a state, because their own experiential narratives make the seceding unit indispensable. If we can articulate these narratives, then, we shall gain insight into one source of resistance to dissociation in English-speaking Canada. In a very provisional way, the following discussion seeks to do just that.

3 on essentialism, power, and experiential affirmations The project of articulating such affirmations must not be confused with some dubious quest to pinpoint the essence of the identity of Englishspeaking Canada. Nor should it be taken to deny that concepts like space and time, territory and history, are themselves constructs whose meaning can vary immensely, a point that W.H. New makes effectively in Land Sliding.18 It assumes only that English-speaking Canadians have worked out many narratives about their collective situation and that some of these have enjoyed considerable resonance. Such resonance suggests (a) that they express some widely – which is not to say invariably – shared experience or sensibility, and/or (b) that, for whatever reason, they have helped to constitute the self-understanding of many English-speaking Canadians.19 But I make no claim to comprehensiveness. There will always be more narratives to excavate, although my hope is that those identified here have been influential enough to represent more than just the idiosyncrasies of their creators. Indeed, my goal is mainly to make the case that we need to examine such narratives if we wish to have an adequate understanding of the issues at play in this book, and to show what such an examination might look like. The selected affirmations to follow are thus best understood as case studies in experiential narratives as grounds for resisting secession – or, perhaps, as part of an advance scouting mission into the question of where we

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might go from here, should we wish to delve yet more deeply into the affirmations that bind us to Quebec. A really thorough review of available narratives would, quite likely, take another book. This raises another matter. The affirmations sketched in this chapter are generally canonical accounts – with all of the biases thus entailed: they are associated with dominant regions and with hegemonic racial, cultural, and gendered identities (i.e., white, Anglo-Saxon, Central Canadian, male, etc.). My justification for isolating such “classic” themes is primarily pragmatic. There are almost infinite combinations of “subject positions” within which Quebec’s place could be analysed. Provincial identities are hardly the only relevant category. It would be hugely interesting to trace the construction of Quebec in Aboriginal discourses, or in those of ethnocultural populations, over time; or to explore class and gender as possible determinants of attitudes toward Quebec. Region, province, city, and so on, can combine with class, gender, race, and so forth, producing innumerable narratives of identity and a proliferation of contexts of identity in which Quebec may be situated. Experiential affirmations, rather more than principled ones, are legion. So we may as well start with the most historically influential narratives, even if their influence is linked to imbalances of power. Beyond this, these accounts do, arguably, articulate important loci of identity in English-speaking Canada. It is important not to be too essentialist about this: for even the most seemingly exclusionary narratives (such as those of Donald Creighton, which leave little satisfactory place for cultural and regional diversity) may resonate across categories of identity. The general thrust of the “Laurentian thesis” popularized in part by Creighton might be embedded in a set of heavily gendered assumptions about land, nature, and technology, but this in no way proves that the thesis lacked all resonance with significant numbers of Englishspeaking Canadian women, when versions of it were imbibed in elementary schools. That the grand, canonical syntheses of Canadian history in the mid-twentieth century pay insufficient heed to ethnocultural pluralism, similarly, does not obviate their importance as referents for critical discourses grounded in such awareness. A dominant culture may be worth studying precisely because it plays a major role in setting the contours of debate or, better, the context of contestation. Again, before we move to discourses that have not been hegemonic, it makes sense to try to get clear about what has been dominant. Thus, in trying to see how experiential narratives offer grounds for resisting secession, we legitimately may begin with canonical accounts.

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The problem of power is not hereby solved, of course. By focusing largely on canonical texts and currents of thought, it may be argued, this chapter tacitly reinforces whatever hegemony they continue to enjoy. I’m tempted to reply that those who think that all scholarship must “fight the power” are unlikely to have bothered reading this far. More to the point, however, critique of these affirmations arguably has mushroomed to a point where one may begin to explore them without fretting too much over the political ramifications of leaving them “unproblematized.” What person even remotely schooled in these matters, after all, would be startled by Morton’s elementary charge that the earlier versions of the Laurentian Thesis marginalized the west? Or that the whole practice of national historical synthesis occludes immense swaths of highly complex and sophisticated social history? The point here is not to deny diversity and complexity. It is just to say that canonical narratives of Canadian place and time are valid resources for an investigation of how Quebec fits into important aspects of the identity of English-speaking Canadians. They will not speak to all Englishspeaking Canadians, but we may have cautious confidence that they did resonate, and perhaps continue to resonate, with enough Englishspeaking Canadians that the effort can tell us something significant. Since I’m making no claim to comprehensiveness here, the purpose being merely to provide some case studies in experiential affirmations, that is all I really need.

4 still resonant after all these years? the enduring power of experiential affirmations But can experiential affirmations really carry the explanatory weight assigned to them above? In an interesting essay, Robert Fulford argues that such narratives, far from being constitutive of our engagement with Canada, are strangely disposable. “Most people I know,” he claims, “have little trouble making an emotional connection with Canada”; and yet “[i]n dealing with the most fundamental question of all national question – why is there a Canada? – we are astonishingly changeable, even feckless ... English-speaking Canadians, and in particular the articulate elites, are engaged more or less permanently in reinventing their own idea of Canada, simultaneously discarding outdated concepts and inventing new ones to fit current circumstances.”20 “At least a dozen” visions of Canada have been invented and discarded. Among these are imperial dreams of greatness within the British Empire, Canada as a

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redistributive alternative to the United States, and Canada as an international peacekeeper and champion of global justice. Part of the problem, Fulford thinks, is the tendency to define Canada in terms of specific policy measures, such as the welfare state or the railroads, which are prone to obsolescence. History, he claims, would be a more normal resource for constructing a shared national vision, but “[w]e have, for the most part, written off our history as unimportant,” partly for the reason cited by Norman – it is too divisive.21 Indeed, Canadians have chosen to become “deconstructionists.” “Our habit, over the generations, is constantly to ‘call into question,’ as deconstructionists say, the basis of our history, to reassess its symbols, and, finding them invalid, eliminate them.”22 Canadians embrace and dispose of national mythologies like teenagers do pop stars. A perspective that understands the historical parade of Canadian mythologies and self-understandings as little more than a series of discontinuous fads will attach experiential significance only to the latest trend (previous trends no longer being relevant). Secession, on this account, would be experientially meaningful insofar as it can be related to the myth of the moment, rather than those exposited by past generations. And even that myth would be of relatively shallow emotional resonance since it is no more than the latest in a long line of disposables. But this approach leaves unsolved the mystery of the “emotional connection to Canada” that Fulford observes all around him. A more plausible view would argue that mythologies, once rooted, die hard: rather than evaporate the instant a new interpretation appears, experiential narratives can linger over generations, sharing space with more contemporary visions. That some narratives clearly do become obsolete in no way contradicts this; and that earlier narratives attract less attention among “articulate elites” at a given moment does not prove that their relevance to the culture has disintegrated. It may be that they have simply receded into the background, continuing, perhaps, on less-thanconscious levels, to echo in the self-understandings of the actors whose identities they attempt to express. Experiential narratives may evolve more in the fashion of an old city neighbourhood than a new suburb: novel structures jostling with entrenched edifices; decrepit constructs occasionally being razed; but remaining, essentially, a kaleidoscopic space in which old and new coincide. Consider this example. The Quiet Revolution is generally thought to mark a series of decisive breaks with the nationalist mythologies of the past. Among these ruptures was the replacement of the self-

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identification of French-Canadian in favour of the designation “québécois,” and a concomitant substitution of modern, Quebec-based vision, for older mythologies. One would think that the old narratives of Henri Bourassa, of Canada as the proper inheritance of the French-Canadian people, would have lost all purchase after a generation of this. Yet as late as 1988, we find Léon Dion writing that “in a sense Canada too is my homeland: my ancestors discovered, explored, and partially occupied it as far as the foothills of the Rockies, but they were somehow robbed of their great inheritance and gradually pushed back to Quebec, which they clung to and which they multiplied in. My emotional ties with Canada are thus weaker than they are with Quebec.”23 After almost forty years of Quebec-centred nationalism, to say nothing of many generations of being “pushed back” from the wider vistas that beguiled the visionaries of New France, those ancient narratives linger on.24 They were one foundation of the elder Dion’s attachment to Canada and, presumably, of many federalists of his kind. Myths do not die so easily. And even if English-speaking Canadian culture tends, as Fulford argues, to lack historical consciousness, we should not dismiss the lesson that experiential narratives, once promulgated, may continue to resonate long after the acme of their influence among “articulate elites.”25

5 toward articulation: friesen, creighton, and frye Gerald Friesen’s Citizens and Nation sets forth a position more congenial than that of Fulford for my purposes. Arguing that genealogy, survival, frontier, and staple are the organizing principles of four “conventional interpretations of ‘settler’ history” in Canada, Friesen writes that they “have become embedded in Canadian popular culture and do offer sensible views of the pioneer past” even if they are problematic now, for a range of reasons.26 These “conventional interpretations” thus remain alive in the popular culture; indeed, Friesen makes reference less to formal academic works than to diffuse perspectives that combine scholarly origins with popularized formulations. This in turn suggests that they continue to enjoy some degree of resonance in English-speaking Canada. Friesen approaches historical narratives not simply as analytical constructs explicating the past, although empirical plausibility is an important facet of defensible narratives. He is keenly aware of historiography’s practical – indeed existential – implications, and his is a

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search for an inclusive, synthetic vision of national history which the widest possible range of Canadian citizens may comfortably use to “knit the present to the past.”27 Empirically credible synthetic accounts of Canadian history offer a diverse population “authoritative personal reasons” for identifying with that history. In our terms, he is on a quest for resonant experiential narratives, not just historical knowledge, and his four “conventional interpretations” represent the most successful previous efforts in this direction.28 Thus, Friesen’s schema offers us a broad typology of experiential narratives that may be probed for their relevance as grounds for resistance to the hypothetical departure of Quebec. The two constructs that will concern us here are the “survival” and “staples” theses – or, at least, certain expressions of these.29 Indeed, my pressing concerns are to work out some problematic relations between the two and to come to grips with Quebec’s place within them, so that we can draw out some of the consequences of dissociation. The staples account is significant inasmuch as it represents a crucial moment in historical attempts to express a vision of Canada as a geographical, historical, and political unity. Often a certain unease about the artifice given in the Canadian project, as opposed to more authentic local identities, underlies such efforts. For instance, J.M. Careless criticized his fellow historians’ propensity for national synthesis by arguing that “limited identities” are much more salient, while George Woodcock builds a defence of radical decentralization partially on the grounds that local and regional identities are more authentic than national abstractions;30 and Northrop Frye distinguishes between “unity” and “identity,” arguing that “identity is local and regional, rooted in the imagination and works of culture,” while unity is “national in reference ... and rooted in a political feeling.”31 Yet Frye’s distinction between “unity” and “identity” also allows him to resolve the dilemma by suggesting that the essence of Canada resides in the tension between them. The essential element in the national sense of unity is the east-west feeling, developed historically along the St Lawrence-Great Lakes axis, and expressed in the national motto, a mari usque ad mare. The tension between this political sense of unity and the imaginative sense of locality is the essence of whatever the word ‘Canadian’ means. Once the tension is given up, and the two elements of unity and identity are confused or assimilated to each other, we get the

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two endemic diseases of Canadian life. Assimilating identity to unity produces the empty gestures of cultural nationalism; assimilating unity to identity produces the kind of provincial isolation which is now called separatism.32 Frye held an unmitigated contempt for “separatism.” He understood it to be a defensive cultural reaction, the ultimate expression of his famous “garrison mentality.” There is thus more than a hint, in Frye’s analysis, of a “developmental” argument for national unity of the sort we explored in the previous section, such that a withdrawal from Canada necessarily implies a retreat from wider horizons and a concomitant withering of the imagination. He certainly thinks that these consequences would be visited upon any provincial sub-unit undertaking secession; whether he thinks they would apply to an Englishspeaking Canada bereft of a strong association with Quebec is unclear.33 Presumably, his answer to this question would turn on the empirical matter of whether a Canada-without-Quebec would be able to sustain the tension between unity and locality that is the “essence” of Frye’s Canada. Yet the nature of that “national sense of unity” is, on Frye’s account, bound up in the “St. Lawrence-Great Lakes axis” – derived from the staples thesis that Friesen emphasizes – of which the territory of Quebec is obviously an integral part. While Frye’s focus on the tension between local or regional identities and the national sense of unity reminds us not to reduce Canadian life to the latter, he clearly did believe that Quebec is woven into the heart of whatever experiential narratives sustain that sense of unity. Moreover, without denying that identification with Canada per se requires considerable abstraction from our immediate environs, Frye’s “identity/unity” distinction is hard to sustain, as is the whole concern with the superior authenticity of regional identity to which it responds. Following Anderson, we may say that all but the most direct forms of community are “imagined” – sustained by greater or lesser degrees of abstraction. Region is not different from nation in this sense. It might be better to argue, then, that there are many levels of identity; part of what Frye calls the “political” sense of unity itself rests on experiential affirmations that connect the Canadian state as a whole with “place in the ... usual meaning of the sights and sounds, smells and tastes, the textures of a place, the sensing of its natural landscape, its streets and buildings, its inhabitants.”34 Woodcock, for all his mistrust of abstract nationalism, at least concedes that “region-making and

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nation-making are aspects of the same process, since the special character of Canada as a nation is that of a symbiotic union of regions, as organic as a coral reef.”35 If too relentless a focus on the mythology of Canada as a transcontinental unity risks obliterating our understanding of the local, that mythology is nonetheless a valid elaboration of this point: it dramatically expresses the idea that various regional identities in Canada are organically linked. A half-century after Frye wrote, visions of the east-west axis remain the most compelling source of such experiential affirmations, indispensable to explaining what the prospect of secession puts at risk, and such narratives do go to the heart of what we recognize as questions of “identity.” They are experiential narratives, constitutive of (some of) our identities, to some degree or other, and analytically on all fours with other such narratives, whether local, regional, gendered, ethnic, and so forth. This east-west vision finds its most dramatic and influential expression in the Laurentian School of Canadian history, which held sway over a generation of historians and early Canadian nationalists.36 The nub of the story is too familiar to warrant more than a brief review. Against an understanding of Canadian history dominated by the continentalism of Goldwin Smith, according to which “Canada was basically part of a common North American community divided by political boundaries but united by geography, economics, and even world interests,”37 Harold Innis dramatically argued that “[t]he present Dominion emerged not in spite of geography but because of it.”38 His The Fur Trade in Canada explores the fundamental intertwining of European and Canadian economies – the latter supplying staples to the former – arguing, in the process, that “from the time of New France, Canada was a geographic and economic unity.”39 This “gave the Canadian nation a geographic and economic foundation it had previously been thought to lack,”40 an insight that inspired some of his most distinguished colleagues and successors, including W.L. Morton and (most importantly for our purposes) Donald Creighton. Creighton articulated in an especially visionary way the theme that Canadian history (and by extension, Canadian nationhood) is the organic extension of an underlying geographical unity, a great and logical – indeed, nearly predestined – continental whole. The St Lawrence River system is, for him, the key to what amounts to the telos of our history. The river “commanded an imperial dominion,” he writes. “Westward its acquisitive fingers groped into the territory of the plains ... from the eastern shore into the heart of the continent.” Thus it was that

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“from the river there rose, like an exhalation, the dream of western commercial empire. The river was to be the basis of a great transportation system by which the manufactures of the old world could be exchanged for the staple products of the new. This was the faith of subsequent generations of northerners. The dream of the commercial empire of the St. Lawrence runs like an obsession through the whole of Canadian history.”41 Some similar phantasm haunted even the early visionaries of New France: Talon, who began as an administrator of modest aims, soon “yielded to that instinct for grandeur, that vertigo of ambition, that was part of the enchantment of the St. Lawrence” and called forth the glimmerings of a vast western empire for his king.42 With the fall of New France, the merchant classes of Montreal became carriers for the imperial dreams that seemed, ineluctably, to emanate from the landscape of the St Lawrence. The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence documents the doomed struggle to realize these aspirations: their pursuit frustrated by obstructionist French-Canadian elites, inept Imperial policy, the rival Hudson River system and its American sponsors, and – in the fashion of archetypical tragedy – “a root defect, a fundamental weakness,” in the St Lawrence system itself – its blurred outer boundaries; its inadequate defences against invasion; its broken continuities at Niagara, the Cascades, the Cedars, and Lachine.43 Nonetheless, the essence of the vision endured. Creighton clearly frames the Dominion of Canada as its rebirth, albeit in a truncated form. This is a dramatic subtext of his remarkable biography of John A. Macdonald, in which Macdonald’s exertions are, at crucial moments, identified with the wider context of Laurentia.44 More directly, Creighton argues that “Macdonald represented Kingston; and Kingston stood at the head of the St. Lawrence River, at the foot of the vast interconnecting system of the Great Lakes ... the main task of Macdonald’s entire career was to defend and enlarge the political union which the St. Lawrence required and to realize the possibilities which it seemed to promise.”45 The fundamental project of Confederation, in Creighton’s view, is to carry forward what remains of the vast domain that properly falls to the empire of the St Lawrence. Settlement of the west, the railroads and the National Policy are all best understood as extensions of this primordial aim. Thus, in summarizing the thread of nationalism that runs through his work, Creighton tells an interviewer that “[t]he whole concept of the Canadian nation has a solidity, because it is based on a historical

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concept that goes back a long long way ... right back to its geographical organization. This country is based upon a river that leads from the east coast right into the heart of the continent ... this is an integrated East-West system.”46 And we cannot read Creighton without being moved by the scope of the vision, the fearsome beauty of the landscape from which it arises, and the strivings of the men who have defended it.47 In his work we find the most powerful expression of the “east-west unity” that Frye writes about. Of course, the use of Creighton demands some strong caveats. We may pass over the controversy about the merits of his kind of national historical synthesis, since the distinction between historical precision and mythology makes little difference from the perspective of the student of “experiential narratives.” His intense opposition to continentalism and deeply conservative allegiance to Canadian and British traditions are central to his thinking but, perhaps, need not delay us, given our own priorities. Much more worrisome is his near-total dismissal of French-Canadian nationalism as nothing more than a rearguard action against the great imperial vistas opened up by the “River of Canada.” When contemporary analysts castigate the entire Laurentian School as an “attempt to add scientific legitimacy” to Lord Durham’s unattractive interpretation of French-Canadian culture and history, the self-defined “racist” Creighton48 may well be foremost in their minds.49 Creighton’s work at least has the merit of seriously confronting Canada’s multinational nature, rather than glossing it over as part of a wider national narrative; but by presenting minority nationalism as contemptible obstructionism, his writings only contribute to what Daniel Francis has aptly labelled “the infantilization of Quebec.”50 Creighton’s unremittingly centralist reading of Confederation reflected his desire to see a single, strongly cohesive entity befitting that mighty unity of purpose he found in the geographical logic of the St Lawrence system. Indeed, rather than contemplate even the most minor tinkering with Macdonald’s constitution, Creighton proposed a clean break with Quebec: secession on very harsh terms.51 All this, of course, is completely opposed to the operative assumptions of this book, which support a moderate accommodation of Quebec nationalism and advocate a dialogical rather than zero-sum approach to relations between our constitutive identities. Yet, if we read Creighton in light of our animating question – asking what he can tell us about why we might resist a rupture with Quebec – we do discover a fundamentally important answer, one that can, in a

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pragmatic spirit, be hived away from his more reactionary preoccupations. For Creighton’s account makes the territory of Quebec – its landscape, its great river – utterly indispensable to our understanding of what Canada is and ought to be. Reading him, we are confronted with the possibility that everything that is poignant and inspiring in Canadian history would be wiped away by a break with Quebec. Secession would be the final negation of the imperial vision of the St Lawrence, that great thread binding Talon to Macdonald and continuing on into the life of the Dominion itself. Contemplating Creighton’s animating insight, if not his profound pessimism or other facets of his politics,52 we confront a bedrock experiential narrative of Quebec-in-Canada: a superb expression of the centrality of Quebec to an English-Canadian self-understanding. This is an “overlapping narrative” par excellence.53 It is such a vision that moves Bruce Hutchison to call Quebec “the Mother of Canada,” inspiring him to baroque passages that exclaim, “from your womb came we all, every man who calls himself Canadian, came this whole nation of Canada,” and to expound a historical narrative linking Cartier and Montcalm to Canada’s rise as an industrial society: “[y]our work at last bears fruit,” he exults.54 History and a landscape, rooted in Quebec and the St Lawrence, are imaginatively woven together as the very foundation of what Canada is, and all else is presented as an organic extension of that. Whatever we think of the particulars of Creighton’s or Hutchinson’s expositions, the central place of Quebec in such narratives cannot be denied; and it is at least plausible to suppose that some such idea continues to echo, helping to explain resistance to dissociation. The Laurentian Thesis sheds light on why, as Guy Laforest observes, “[m]any people in Canada see Quebec as part of the geographical and historical heart of their country,”55 and why Christian Dufour writes that “it is emotionally vital to Canadian identity that the country spread across the map from the Atlantic to the Pacific, all in one sweep.”56 Unfortunately, the existence of such narratives doesn’t mean that they are healthy. The problem is not, as we considered earlier, that these accounts are somehow inauthentic constructs. The danger, rather, is that their ultimate resonance may rest on pathologies and weaknesses of English-speaking Canadian culture. This has been a common complaint of Quebec nationalists. Dufour goes on to argue – following Michel Brunet – that the “territorial aspect” of Canadian identity, Quebec’s place in it, and indeed Quebec’s roots in the Canadian psyche writ large, go much deeper than a

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mere quest for geographical grandeur. “Not only was [Canada] built on New France (an objective reality) but it very early wanted to inherit and continue the American empire that France had founded in the seventeenth century,” Brunet explains. “The history of New France is an integral part of Canadian history. It is not a mere coincidence that the country has always called itself Canada, under the English regime as it was under the French.”57 The issue here goes beyond merely imperial purposes, i.e., England’s desire to seize the assets of a rival power. The identity of les anciens canadiens eventually became, Dufour argues, an experiential shortcut for English-Canadian nation-builders. Rather than create deep cultural roots for themselves in this place, they “could choose the easy route.” They could simply co-opt French-Canadian symbols, myths, history, and even leaders as markers of difference from the United States. The availability, because of the Conquest, of the solid collective identity of the first Canadiens and their descendents, eventually had a perverse effect on English Canada. It made it unnecessary to root its own identity in relation to the American identity ... It didn’t have to count on certain original characteristics of English Canada, such as the regionalism that was deeply ingrained and that gradually degenerated into a much less fertile provincialism ... Quebec was there at important times, sending its Cartiers, its Lauriers, its Trudeaus. From this point of view, the history of Canada can be seen as the Canadian identity’s slow yet systematic siphoning of the Quebec identity.58 The narrative overlap of English-speaking Canada with Quebec, then, may be fundamental to Canadian identity, but it is also symptomatic of a more profound problem. In essence, Dufour revises Horowitz’s claim that English-speaking Canada has never adequately expressed itself because of Quebec. Horowitz, we saw, explains this in light of Canadians’ constant need to accommodate the demands of nationalistes. For Dufour, however, the inadequacy is symptomatic of “a country built on the conquest,” a conquest which included certain experiential narratives of New France as well as its land and people. Seen from this angle, an argument such as that of Creighton, which posits an underlying unity in Canadian history – the dream of the empire of the St Lawrence, taking different forms over time, but in its essence an unbroken thread reaching back to the dawn of New France – becomes akin to cultural theft,

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the seizure of the aspirations of the original settler society. The conquerors claim its myths and history as, in some partial but meaningful sense, their own.59 The question of whether such overlapping narratives might be pathological brings us into the orbit of a set of concerns that Friesen describes as the “survival” interpretation of Canadian history.60 At play here is that current of Canadian thought – most familiar from Frye and Margaret Atwood, and also George Grant61 – that emphasizes the impact upon the settler culture of the encounter with the Canadian environment and gleans certain conclusions about “the Canadian imagination” from this. Of course, Atwood and Frye are not historians, nor are they launching a historical thesis so much as a series of generalizations about (largely, English-) Canadian literature and culture writ large. In Frye’s view, the urge for unity, of which the east-west axis is a foundational part, is beneficent, not pathological, except where it leads us to deny local particularity altogether. But it may still be the case that our sense of national unity has been underpinned by undesirable weaknesses in the culture of English-speaking Canada. Indeed, Frye offers perhaps the most sustained analysis of pathologies in the “Canadian imagination,” which can easily rebound into critiques of those narratives that he saw as foundational to the sense of unity. At issue is a condition that Ian Angus evocatively refers to as “radical homelessness.”62 “It is not a nation but an environment that makes an impact” on the imagination, Frye asserts.63 He thus builds his seminal analysis of Canadian culture on a strong environmental determinism. By “environment,” Frye means, overwhelmingly, landscape and physical space; and thus, for Frye, place is a central problem in the Canadian imagination. Of course, he is really speaking of the English-Canadian imagination, and insofar as his insights are valid, they offer much to those who would understand experiential affirmations in English-speaking Canada.64 A strong theme of Frye’s exegesis is the Canadian sense of being lost in an alien milieu, bereft of the mythologies necessary to accommodate oneself to it. Frye defined mythology, in this context, as “a framework of thematic imagery within which a literature operates” and which arises “when the mental landscape of a group of writers begins to fuse with their physical environment.”65 Insofar as Canadian literature reflects or informs Canadian experience – and it is Frye’s premise that it does – its lack of an adequate mythological framework reveals a primordial dissonance between the settler culture and its environment. The result is the sort of bewilderment expressed in Frye’s most famous epigram about

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the Canadian condition: “Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question ‘Who am I?’ than by some such riddle as ‘Where is here?’”66 Frye’s account of this plaintive failure to locate identity in space is complex, but its roots extend to English-speaking Canada’s origins as a European settlement in an alien landscape, “an egocentric consciousness locked into a demythologized environment.”67 This reading is consistent with that of George Grant, who writes that “[a]ll of us who came [to North America] made some break in the coming. The break was not only the giving up of the old and settled, but the entering into the majestic continent which could not be ours in the way that the old had been ... because the making of it ours did not go back before the beginning of conscious memory.”68 For Frye, this initial condition of alienation from place – perhaps an unavoidable consequence of immigration or conquest – was intensified by the specific character of the imported culture. Seventeenth-century Europe, he argues, brought with it “the revolutionary monotheism of Christianity, with its horror of ‘idolatry,’ that is, the sense of the numinous in nature.” Because of this, the “natural religion” of Aboriginal peoples could not be conceived as other than pagan error. Thus, the settler societies could not relate to the cultural and imaginative resources indigenous to this place.69 Or, as Grant more dramatically puts it, “[w]hen we go into the Rockies, we may have some sense that gods are there. But if so, they cannot manifest themselves to us as ours. They are the gods of another race, and we cannot know them.”70 Such estrangement was reinforced, according to Frye, by two more cultural attributes. “The Baroque sense of the power of mathematics, the results of which can still be seen in the grid patterns of our cities” demanded that mathematical order be imposed upon the wilderness, while “the Cartesian egocentric consciousness, the feeling that man’s essential humanity was in his power of reasoning, and that the nature outside human consciousness was pure extension [meant] a turning away from nature so complete that it became a kind of idolatry in reverse.”71 A culture so constituted would be unlikely to reach any easy reconciliation with the indigenous North American environment. It ensured, rather, that the Canadian wilderness would be perceived as something Other, to be mastered if possible and, perhaps, feared.

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Now such considerations might hold for any European settler culture of the time, not just that of English-speaking Canada. But Frye, perhaps more than Grant, emphasizes the peculiar intensity of the Canadian version of this condition, especially relative to the American experience.72 The Canadian settler is cast upon a different social and geographical context: comparatively isolated, locked into a harsher and more ominous environment, and lacking the cultural resources of American society. And so the essential settler experience is different here, as Frye’s famous “leviathan” metaphors make clear: “Canada has, for all practical purposes, no Atlantic seaboard. The traveller from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the Straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence ... To enter into the United States is a matter of crossing an ocean; to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent.”73 Similarly, Frye emphasizes that the mutable American frontier – first Appalachia, then the Mississippi, then the Rockies – was essentially a border to be crossed and re-crossed, but “[i]n the Canadas, even in the Maritimes, the frontier [understood as alien wilderness] was all around one, a part and condition of one’s whole imaginative being ... the immediate datum of [the] imagination, the thing that had to be dealt with first.”74 The isolated community surrounded by an inhospitable wilderness, Frye seems to say, is a primordial referent of our settler culture as for few others. “One wonders if any other national consciousness has so large an amount of the unknown, the unrealized, the humanly undigested, so built into it.”75 This is the part that Friesen gets right: the image of wilderness, nature, and landscape as threatening. Atwood’s Survival and, in a more targeted way, Strange Things, reinforce the prominence of the theme of nature-as-threat in Canadian literature.76 But that Canadian writing abounds with a sense of nature as “huge, unthinking, menacing, and formidable”77 reflects, in Frye’s view, something more profound: a “deep terror” that goes beyond the physical horrors of starvation, isolation, cannibalism, or immolation by wild animals. It is existential in the philosophical sense. “[N]ot a terror of the dangers or discomforts or even the mysteries of nature, but a terror of the soul at something that these things manifest. The human mind has nothing but human and moral values to cling to if it is to preserve its integrity or even its sanity, yet the vast unconsciousness of nature in front of it seems an unanswerable denial of these values.”78

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Canadians, Frye suggests, have made many responses to this confrontation, including churning out sizeable amounts of unconvincing rhetoric “about the challenge of a new land and the energetic optimism required to meet it.” Such “prefabricated” triumphalism jostles with a more authentic “sense of loneliness and alienation” in nineteenthcentury Canadian letters, and generally loses.79 That is hardly surprising: “the nostalgic and the elegiac are the inevitable emotional responses of” – once again – “an egocentric consciousness locked into a demythologized environment.”80 Still, one upshot of such primordial alienation was “a conquering relation to place”: a fascination with technological mastery over nature. Frye’s famous “garrison mentality” – later amended, wittily, to “condominium mentality” – is, of course, another response to the sense of being marooned in an unfriendly landscape. A third, somewhat contradictory, alternative is a pastoral myth, one facet of which is a peculiar sense of alliance between individual and nature.80 In later writings, Frye signals some promising new developments, including a move toward “becoming indigenous, recreating the kinds of attitudes appropriate to people who really belong here”81 through the absorption of Aboriginal cultural referents and the rising of a nascent environmental consciousness, both of which he reads as indicators of a “new confidence and stability.”82 Despite his late optimism, Frye seems never to have denied the ongoing salience of much his earlier analyses of the Canadian imagination.83 Nor have some other scholars. Angus reaffirms the contemporary relevance of the problem of “radical homelessness” in English-Canadian thought, although he wisely steers clear of Frye’s support for the appropriation of Aboriginal culture and endorses only the hope that an “ecological relation to the world” might offer a way out. 84 And Saul’s Reflections of a Siamese Twin strives mightily to recover a plethora of Canadian narratives from what he views as Canadians’ chronic inability to be true to their collective cultural and imaginative inheritance – arguably another, albeit subtler, symptom of alienation from “our own.” Suppose, then, that Frye’s imaginative synthesis does isolate relevant aspects of identity and culture in English-speaking Canada. The question remains as to how dissociation might relate to them. Frye himself dismissed secession as an especially egregious manifestation of the “garrison mentality,” but we are here concerned with its potential effects on the Canadian imagination as he presents it.

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At least two possibilities come to mind. One is that secession would mark a traumatic rupture with important strategies for collective “home-making,”85 narratives that Canadians use to paper over the void at the centre of their presence in this place. On some level, the departure of Quebec would thrust us back upon our own lack of foundation, wrenching us from our territorial and historical self-understandings – our best answers to the temporal and spatial dimensions of the question “where is here?” – and thus marking not only our greatest political failure but a disastrous collapse of our most fundamental attempts to ground our collective existence. It is striking, in this context, to juxtapose Creighton’s vision of the St Lawrence with Frye’s analysis of what Angus calls “radical homelessness.” Part of the secret of Creighton’s eloquence is his ability to impart a sense of the landscape as a brooding, awesome force, something that moulds us and drives us onward, “exercising an imperious domination over the northerners,” almost the geological equivalent of Hegel’s Geist impelling certain agents to fulfil its purposes.86 But this, perhaps, is part of the point: his account brings into rough harmony the settler culture, and its expression in the Canadian state, with that landscape. It shows us that we exist, in part, as an expression of its logic and that the Canadian project exists in unity with it. Far from being aliens here, we settlers are gathered up into its grandest expression. It is friendly to us – or, at least, not utterly indifferent or hostile. If this follows, then the underlying unity toward which Creighton points us and the type of experiential affirmation that I am taking his work to represent may be linked in an intimate way to some of the subtlest anxieties given in the whole project of constructing a collective “home” in the New World. Insofar as a rupture with Quebec would mark the obliteration of those narratives, it would also deprive the settler culture of one of the important ways in which it has embedded itself in this place. Quebec’s membership in Canada may, then, be part of a much wider and deeper story about the English-speaking Canadian situation, and its departure a blow of the most intimate and shattering kind.87 The second possibility is more benign: that a culture with such flimsy foundations would be unlikely to be too perturbed by their disappearance. Secession, on this account, would hardly unmoor our identity as Canadians because that identity never was anchored in the first place. It would merely reaffirm a homeless condition that is not so much tragic as routine; indeed, from what Friesen calls the “frontier” perspective,

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which emphasizes the desirability of new beginnings, secession might represent a brave new frontier. Certainly, if we accept the common complaint that Canadians lack an adequate historical consciousness, this breezier interpretation commends itself. However, I seek here to explain the real dismay that at least some Canadians feel on contemplating the possibility of a radical rupture with Quebec. And the point is that experiential narratives of the specific sort exemplified by Creighton’s history ought to be woven into our account – especially if we go further and accept the premises about the “Canadian imagination” advanced by Frye. But the question remains: if all this is based upon pathologies, as per Dufour and (indirectly) Frye, why seek to defend and sustain those narratives? Would it not be better, healthier, for English-speaking Canadians to turn inward and develop a stronger sense of collective identity, autonomously of Quebec? Would this not, furthermore, allow Canada to be more just in dealing with Quebec, more willing to acknowledge its distinctiveness because less dependent on co-opted historical and territorial narratives, and thus better able to reconcile itself to the necessity of an imaginative (and constitutionalized) border between the two identities? It’s tempting to retort that Quebec is also a society built on the conquest of indigenous peoples and that it, too, is partly constituted by overlapping narratives that encompass Aboriginal lands and (possibly) histories.88 But such tit-for-tat is not very satisfying. A more persuasive rejoinder would suggest that the desire for a really strong division between English-speaking Canadian and Québécois identities rests on the fallacy of culture and identity as akin to snooker balls, i.e., ideally, self-contained units, rather than as the messier, overlapping, and fluid constructs they certainly are.89 If we accept that identities routinely draw from multiple sources – that a stark Quebec/Canada dichotomy occludes all kinds of interactions and borrowings between the two, on innumerable levels – then the notion of overlapping narratives comes to seem less alarming. Of course, this still fails to address the problem of appropriation, the difficulty being that the claiming of French-Canadian narratives for “all Canadians” originates in an act of conquest, and the identities that rest upon such conquest remain incapable of fully affirming and accommodating the distinctiveness of Quebec Where our goal is to advocate a moderate, asymmetrical federation in which substantial institutional sharing between Quebec and the rest of Canada continues to apply, then the solution is not, as Dufour would

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have it, somehow to wean ourselves off the imaginative overlap between Quebec and Canada, in the hope that a more “mature” (because selfcontained) English-Canadian consciousness will prove more amenable to the demands of Quebec. Such prescriptions obscure the crucial point that English-speaking Canadians’ embeddedness in such overlapping narratives may be one source of whatever will to accommodate Quebec they do possess. An English-speaking Canada utterly unmoved by a sense that its own roots are intricately connected to Quebec, indifferent to the territorial and historical visions of which Quebec is an inseparable part, arguably would be far less likely to respond with empathy or generosity to the claims of moderate nationalists. It would, at least, have much less at stake in the possibility of a radical break.90 Unless principled affirmations of the sort canvassed earlier come to the rescue, the basis of future cohabitation would have to be sheer selfinterested calculation, not solidarity; and this too might prove problematic for Quebec’s aspirations. A preferable alternative is to reiterate the argument from justice. Nothing is a priori unjust about narrative overlap of the sort I have tried to document; what counts are the terms according to which each constitutive element is included in the whole. The overlapping narratives whereby English-speaking Canada has made Quebec constitutive of (some of) its own accounts of history and place would only fully be just in a context in which the boundaries between the identity of Quebec and the wider project of Canadian nation-building have been adequately recognized and affirmed. A country that is prepared formally to affirm its multinational nature in this way would cease to be “built on the conquest,” as Dufour puts it. It would instead rest on a fair-minded reconciliation with the imbalances of power at its heart. Thus, the homeless imagination described by Frye would have rooted itself in justice, and the great dreams of Creighton and other proponents of eastwest unity would remain, in their essence at least, available to us – one source of solidarity in our multinational state.

Concluding Note

A strong zone of institutional sharing with Quebec facilitates the capacity of English-speaking Canadians to realize an array of goods. But articulating these connections is a complex matter, and this complexity has impelled me to make certain conceptual distinctions that may be worth revisiting a final time. This book took its cue from Taylor’s view of identity, which argues that selfhood is to be explicated with reference to its constitutive affirmations. Its first and most important conceptual distinction suggested that these affirmations are of two kinds, principled and experiential. Neither order of affirmation can be ignored in an investigation of why Quebec-in-Canada matters to English-speaking Canadians and (inversely) why a radical rupture with Quebec – dissociation – is to be resisted. In order to sharpen that inquiry, I defined Quebec as a nationalitybased unit. It is a definitive part of what makes Canada a particular kind of experience in multinational pluralism, a kind characterized by a rich degree of institutional sharing between large and powerful “nationalitybased units.” So armed, we proceeded to trace how Quebec facilitates our capacity to realize abstract ideals such as liberalism, democracy, fraternity, a duty to serve as exemplar, and developmental citizenship, as well as how Quebec reinforces particular narratives of history and place that resonate in English-speaking Canada. The first phase of my examination of principled affirmations dismissed liberal critiques of Quebec-in-Canada on the grounds that they rest upon untenable or superficial models of liberalism. The complex tradition of democratic argument against multinational polity, exemplified in the Canadian context by Horowitz, Rensick, and Whitaker, proved a more formidable challenge. I undertook to meet it, first, by

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considering the argument that the most extreme form of dissociation (i.e., secession) might be inherently unjust unless accompanied by the principle of partition. This argument, which in any case would defend Quebec-in-Canada by default rather than by any resounding principled affirmation, can’t survive the Québécois case for secession as a remedial right only. Insofar as sovereigntists justify secession principally as a remedy for the injustices of the Canadian state, they are not impelled by consistency to extend any blanket right of partition to minorities in Quebec. Only if a sovereign Quebec deals with them unjustly would a remedial right apply. The more extravagant claims of partitionists can thus be met by a secessionist argument that defines its parameters with sufficient care. The idea that Quebec might be a positive asset to Canada’s capacity to realize the best kind of liberalism is more promising. As the tradition drawing from Lord Acton demonstrates, multinationality may be inherently advantageous for the creation of optimally liberal institutions and political cultures although, as we saw, it cannot be deemed either a necessary or sufficient condition. Indeed, each variation of this thesis is impossible to verify empirically; and this is clearly a weakness. Still, despite the prevailing tendencies of political theory, the “Actonian” current ought not to be dismissed with glib references to the theoretical compatibility of liberalism and nationalism. This holds doubly true for arguments that secession would bring illiberal consequences in its train as an empirical probability, if not as a result of a strong intrinsic connection between liberal values and multinational forms of polity; but this consequentialist argument cannot tell us why we should resist forms of dissociation other than secession. Other principled affirmations of Quebec-in-Canada move beyond the parameters of liberalism – understood as a theory concerned exclusively with equal respect and individual autonomy – and embrace more substantive notions of what liberalism in the Rawlsian tradition would call “the good.” The first of these, which affirms Quebec-in-Canada as an internationally significant experiment in diversity, enjoys a considerable presence in discourse about Canada, but suffers from a number of limitations. It fails to provide an argument against dissociation writ large, and its assumptions about how exemplars operate in international politics are unsubstantiated. Because this perspective neglects to distinguish between various categories of cultural pluralism, it also has trouble articulating what is uniquely or especially significant about the Canadian experience with diversity. For that matter, the

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values associated with our experiment might just as forcefully be exemplified in the process of breaking apart as staying together. More compelling is Samuel LaSelva’s notion of “complex fraternity.” If we extend his thesis so that it draws the necessary distinctions between kinds of experience in multinational diversity – such that the nature of the fraternity given in Quebec-in-Canada is not simply interchangeable with that expressed by relations between Aboriginal peoples and the wider Canadian state – we find therein a fully adequate principled affirmation of Quebec’s participation in a strong zone of institutional sharing. But a third argument from the good, rather than from liberal justice, is implicit in LaSelva’s account of “democratic dialogue.” This argument allowed us to come full circle by engaging the democratic critique of multinationality on its own terms. Showing that even John Stuart Mill, an exemplary proponent of that democratic critique, adhered to a developmental vision of citizenship wherein the challenges of democratic politics hold out the hope of enriched intellectual and empathetic capacities among its citizens, we asked why the same logic could not be used to defend a form of polity that asks its citizens to go beyond the limitations of their own nationality-bound discourses and imaginatively grapple with the discourses of other nationality-based units within the shared state. Such a developmental vision is, I argued, at play, if not always fully articulated as such, in the work of theorists of “dialogical” federalism such as Taylor, Webber, and (most importantly) James Tully. Indeed, because the costs of the failure of dialogue may be the integrity of the polity itself, the kind of multinational experience incarnate in Quebec-in-Canada gives citizens special incentives to undertake an empathetic dialogue across boundaries of language and nationality. If we accept the developmental vision as a freestanding end, then it offers us a strong reason to affirm Quebec-in-Canada on the grounds that it poses an ongoing and peculiarly forceful challenge to the capacities of Canadian citizens. Such, in any case, has been one powerful current of thought in defence of our polity. Experiential narratives are a necessary complement to these principled affirmations. This is partly because, while some of the latter warrant serious consideration, they all entail certain difficulties; even the developmental vision, which arguably is the noblest such affirmation, can be challenged as hopelessly utopian. Experiential affirmations help to shore up the case for Quebec-in-Canada by shifting the terms of justification away from abstract ideals and toward more particular

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accounts of identity. More importantly, however, as my theoretical framework showed, they simply are inescapable aspects of what needs to be explored in an adequate account of the meaning of a situation, for agents. A study of resistance to dissociation can’t just ignore this dimension. Thus, after elaborating on the nature of experiential affirmations and making a case for the ongoing resonance of canonical accounts of landscape and history in Canadian discourse, I identified two especially pertinent, indeed interlocked, examples of such affirmations: the eastwest vision of Canada as an organic emanation of the St Lawrence system, best expressed by Donald Creighton, and Northrop Frye’s view of Canada as a settler society haunted by its own “homelessness.” The former resolves, at least to some degree, the dilemma expressed in the latter and thus makes the territory and history of Quebec indispensable to accounts of Canadian identity that harbour considerable importance for English-speaking Canada. In this sense, the seeds of English-speaking Canadians’ commitment to Quebec are partly to be found in what I called “overlapping narratives,” i.e., experiential narratives that incorporate an Other on terms which that other would not be likely to affirm. While these narratives entail well-documented dangers, such as the refusal to recognize the otherness they subsume, I argued that they also serve as an important foundation for a just dialogue by providing strong incentives for engaging the other rather than dissociating from it. Thus, overlapping narratives are an important source of solidarity, offering reasons for the pursuit of just dialogue in a multinational state, and should not be dismissed as inherently pathological or pernicious. These are among my core findings, the upshots of a journey that has sought to uncover the richness of both the principled and experiential affirmations that inform and help to explain our commitment to Quebec-in-Canada. My intention has partly been to serve and vivify that commitment, but there is reason to suppose that whatever insights it yields may hold some value even were the “Quebec problem” to recede from the mainstream political agenda. By investigating the role of Quebec in Canada’s constitutive affirmations, I hope that I have thrown a bit of light on ongoing aspects of the self-understanding of Canadians. Perhaps more importantly, I have tried to offer some ways of approaching the question of what might be good about the kind of political community that the presence of Quebec allows us to be. The possibility of secession thus casts into relief some of the most resonant affirmations that constitute our shared experience.

Notes

chapter one 1 See, for example, Léger Marketing, “La politique provincial et Pauline Marois: rapport d’analyse.” The 2007 Quebec election marked a striking development, with the Action démocratique du Québec (A.D.Q.) under Mario Dumont surpassing the P.Q.’s totals in both seats and popular vote to become the second largest party in the Quebec National Assembly. But it is not yet certain that these results signal an enduring realignment. Nor is it obvious that the A.D.Q.’s success removes the need to think through the challenges that Quebec poses to the Canadian order. The A.D.Q. platform calls for a vague autonomisme, to be achieved through constitutional negotiations with Canada, as well as for a process of constitution-making within Quebec. The scope of autonomisme is unclear, but given that the A.D.Q. originated in a break with the Quebec Liberal Party over the latter’s willingness to compromise the very radical demands of the 1991 Allaire Report, and that Mario Dumont officially supported “sovereigntypartnership” in the 1995 referendum, we may reasonably expect autonomisme to entail a substantial uncoupling of Quebec from existing Canadian structures. Since English-speaking Canada shows little interest in accommodating such demands, it is also possible that an A.D.Q. government, were it to press ahead with autonomisme, would face a humiliating “rejection” that could well throw us back into crisis. For the likely upshot of a political process akin to that proposed in the A.D.Q. platform, see Gagnon and Iacovino, Federalism, Citizenship, and Quebec, 166–77, and especially 177: “it is likely that the roc [Rest-of-Canada] will refuse to participate from the start ... [and] it is clear that such a response will only add to Quebec’s arsenal of justifications for hastening the process of achieving sovereignty.” There are many variables at play here, but none call for smug complacency over the demise of the “Quebec problem.”

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Ibid., 174. Clarke et al., A Polity on the Edge, 280. Ibid., 275–90. Tanguay points out that the young are politically disengaged compared to older generations. But it remains true that as the latter depart, so will a disproportionate share of Quebec federalists. See Brian Tanguay, “The Stalled Realignment: Quebec’s Party System after the 2003 Provincial Election,” 95–96. Support for sovereignty as such gives no hint of the extent to which one considers sovereignty a priority, and much has been made of the “demobilization” around the national question after 1995. But we’ve seen this before (e.g., the period from 1981 to 1987); and it cannot be assumed that an electorate that is demobilized on sovereignty, but nonetheless supportive of it in principle, would vote “no” if pushed into a referendum by a determined Quebec government. Recall that things looked gloomy for the sovereigntists when Premier Jacques Parizeau doggedly went ahead with a referendum process in 1995. One these issues, see Matthew Mendelsohn, Andrew Parkin, and Maurice Pinard, “A New Chapter on the Same Old Story? Public Opinion in Quebec from 1996–2003,” esp. 28–30. 6 On Quebec nationalism, see, for instance, McRoberts, Quebec: Social Change and Political Crisis; Monière, Pour comprendre le nationalisme au Québec et ailleurs; Venne, ed., Penser la nation québécoise; and Maclure, Récits identitaires. Analyses of the possible effects of secession include Drache and Perin, eds, Negotiating with a Sovereign Quebec; Cameron, ed., The Referendum Papers; and Freeman and Grady, Dividing the House; but the seminal work in this domain is Young’s The Secession of Quebec and the Future of Canada. Young also offers a stimulating analysis of Canada’s constitutional options, as do the articles gathered in Watts and Brown, eds, Options for a New Canada, and Gibbins and Laforest, eds, Beyond the Impasse toward Reconciliation. Polemics abound, but let Bercuson and Cooper, Deconfederation, and Johnston, ed., With a Bang Not a Whimper stand for many. A Canada without Quebec has been thought through in such texts as McRoberts, ed., Beyond Quebec; Granatstein and McNaught, eds, “English Canada” Speaks Out; and Resnick, Thinking English Canada. The most important analysis of the legal issues raised by secession is that of the Supreme Court of Canada, “Reference re Secession of Quebec.” As for how Canada put itself in the position of near-rupture, see, among others, McRoberts, Misconceiving Canada; Russell, Constitutional Odyssey; and Laforest, Trudeau and the End of a Canadian Dream. 7 The more elegant “English Canada” tends to raise the dander of those who emphasize the multicultural diversity of the unit in question (but see Angus, 2 3 4 5

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A Border Within, 24–5, for a defence of the term). Alternatives such as “Rest-of-Canada” (roc) or “Canada-outside-Quebec” (coq) are even worse. Mannheim, Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology. Kymlicka, Finding Our Way, 177. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 27. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 29. Italics added. Ibid, 28. Of course, there is extensive philosophical debate about whether ethics should proceed as if “there are ... such things as intrinsic human dignity, intrinsic human rights, and an ahistorical distinction between the demands of morality and those of prudence”; or as if “there is no human dignity that is not derivative from the dignity of some specific community, and no appeal beyond the relative merits of various actual or proposed communities to impartial criteria which will help us weight those merits.” Richard Rorty, “Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism,” 329–30. Rorty calls these respective outlooks “Kantian” and “Hegelian.” Taylor’s relationship to this debate is complex; for a good discussion, see White, Sustaining Affirmation, 43–74. Taylor, Sources, 317. Two strands which receive particularly vigorous polemic are those that Taylor calls the “naturalist” and “neo-Nietzschean.” The former refers to the idea that human beings can be objectified in the same way as the material phenomena of the natural world, and thus that the observer can escape involvement in moral horizons; while the latter takes all ethical and ontological claims – including the observer’s – as power-constructs, thus implying an impossible detachment from the moral force of the observer’s own framework. Taylor, Reconciling the Solitudes, 135–9. Admittedly, “principled” affirmations receive by far the most attention. Part II, on “experiential” affirmations, amounts to a longish final chapter. Nonetheless, the categorical distinction between these orders of affirmation is sufficiently important to justify treating the last chapter as a separate part. LaSelva, The Moral Foundations of Canadian Federalism. Trudeau, Federalism and the French Canadians. Hutchison, The Unknown Country, 21–3. Coole, “The Gendered Self,” 127. Taylor, Sources, 36. The question of autonomy of the subject, relative to any specific attachment, is complex. However, we can say this much: identities are complex, because made up of multiple attachments operating in diverse contexts; and because,

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as hermeneuts argue, the self is always partially opaque. Human agents generally have the capacity to achieve critical purchase upon some (but never all) of their constitutive attachments. Consider again the “Québécois anarchist” example above. It is hard to imagine how the dissonance generated by these two (apparently) incommensurable attachments would fail to compel some sort of reflexivity, once the subject in question became aware of the tension. But this does not mean that some shadowy, pre-social self does the arbitrating. It simply means that some of his constitutive self-understandings are jostling with others. Reconciliation becomes possible through what Taylor calls an “epistemic gain” – i.e., either the arrival of some deeper realization about what one is really on about, which transcends the dissonance in question, or else the invention of some new formulation which could explain it away. See Taylor, “What is Human Agency?” in Human Agency and Language, 21–6. The term “discourse,” as used here, owes more to what the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines as “talk, conversation; dissertation, treatise ... [or] connected series of utterances,” than to any formally post-structuralist or Foucaultian usage. Taylor, Sources, 111–15. Ibid., 199. The privileging of “intellectuals” (academics, theorists) as sources here may be contentious. This book assumes, as Taylor does, a certain representative function in what intellectuals do – that their articulations are not without some resonance or relevance within the culture more broadly defined. The point is often disputed. Disjunctions between popular sentiment and elite articulation are a major theme of Sarah M. Corse’s very interesting Nationalism and Literature, for instance, as well as Hobsbawm’s Nations and Nationalism since 1780. An eloquent defence of building a broader social analysis on works of “high” culture can be found in H. Stuart Hughes’ classic Consciousness and Society, esp. 9–12. Hobsbawm suggests that the population at large may be rather indifferent to matters of polity or nation, but this is not especially troubling for my purposes. I make no pretense of representing all Canadian citizens in its discussion. The goal is to capture some of the meanings that obtain among those who are interested in these matters. Yet it should be noted that there is substantial quantitative evidence that Canadians at large are not indifferent to the unity issue. Just under 80 per cent of Canadians outside Quebec have consistently ranked “keeping Canada together” as “very important.” See cric Portraits of Canada Survey (1997–2002). Further, it’s hard to see how one can pursue understandings in any depth without having some raw materials (articulations) to work with. Those who stress the elite-mass disjunction

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merely underline the extent to which the articulation of complex self-understandings in prose is always, and necessarily, an uncertain task. This does not make it any less important. The latter component is not as daunting as it may appear. I am not seeking to shed new light on Western moral theory but rather creatively to use some of this theory in a local context – to show, in part, how the local and the civilizational intersect in a particular case. This study is less a contribution to ethics than to Canadian political studies, as will be explained shortly. For a good sketch, see Watts, “Canada’s Constitutional Options: An Outline.” “The conservative seeks to conserve existing institutions, usually recognizing that the process of conservation may include the need for evolutionary reform. The reactionary, by contrast, is at odds with existing institutions, and seeks to return to some institutional status quo ante.” Muller, “Introduction: What is Conservative Social and Political Thought?” in Muller, ed., Conservatism, 27. The likelihood of such a linkage is great. “If [a bi-national] partnership is to be an attractive alternative both inside and outside Quebec, then Canada must have the same autonomy from Quebec that Quebec has from Canada. Partnership that is not symmetrical in this respect is not a true partnership. This implies in turn that Quebec politicians would have no more influence in the internal affairs of the Canadian partner than non-Quebec politicians would have in the internal affairs of Quebec. Simply put, the chances of a Quebec resident becoming prime minister of Canada should be no greater than the chances of a non-Quebec resident becoming prime minister of Quebec.” Gibbins, “Getting There from Here,” 402. Italics in original. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 41. Some effort is made to indicate the precursors and development of various currents of thought, but the major concern is to isolate a particularly helpful articulation of the affirmation in question, usually through a close reading of exemplary texts and authors, supplemented by some creative elaboration and development, as needed. This, incidentally, is why a cluster of authors – Mill, Acton, Taylor, Kymlicka, Trudeau, Smiley, Tully, LaSelva, Resnick, Whitaker, Horowitz, Dion, etc. – resurface at different points and often in quite different contexts. The same source can, upon examination, be found to contain a number of distinct kinds of affirmation, even if these are not always clearly delineated in the primary text. Thus, one author can exemplify more than one current of thought. The work that most comprehensively tackles these questions is, of course, Young, The Secession of Quebec. For elaboration, see Taylor, Sources, 211–304.

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Courchene, “Staatsnation vs Kulturnation: The Future of roc,” 389. Ibid., 396. Ibid., 389–90. See the manifesto Pour un Québec lucide, at http://www.pourunquebeclucide. com/cgi-cs/cs.waframe.index?lang=2 (accessed 5 June 2007). Tully, “Introduction,” 2–3. Lijphart, “Self-Determination versus Pre-Determination of Ethnic Minorities in Power-Sharing Systems,” 276. Taylor, “Shared and Divergent Values,” in Reconciling the Solitudes, 182–3. Kymlicka, Finding Our Way, 141. Little is to be gained in canvassing the extensive debates over the definition of “nation.” Let the interpretation of Kymlicka and Norman suffice: “It is often noted that for any list of the defining features of nationhood, there are indisputable examples of nations that do not meet all of the conditions ... In effect, communities qualify as nations when they think of themselves as nations. And as it turns out, these groups tend to be historical communities, more or less institutionally complete, occupying a given territory or homeland, and sharing a distinct language and mass culture.” This rather sly formulation nicely retains the intuition that objective criteria are practically and analytically relevant to our understanding of nationhood, without denying its ultimately subjective nature. Kymlicka and Norman, “Citizenship in Culturally Diverse Societies: Issues, Contexts, Concepts,” 19. Italics added. Kymlicka, “Western Political Theory and Ethnic Relations in Eastern Europe,” 18. Many of the concepts summarized here find their seminal expression in Kymlicka’s Multicultural Citizenship. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 10. Ibid., 11. This is not to deny that sources both canonical and contemporary make arguments about the virtues and pitfalls of multinational pluralism. Indeed, nationalist thinkers traditionally have argued against such pluralism. The point here is simply that moral (as opposed to prudential) arguments in favour of multinational states are not nearly as prevalent as the sorts of considerations cited above. Even arguments for multinational federalism tend to concede the moral force of the nationalist argument, framing federalism as a device to satisfy demands for autonomy without sacrificing the (instrumental) benefits of cohabitation. See, for instance, Sibohàn Harty and Michael Murphy’s In Defence of Multinational Citizenship, and the helpful assessment of some of these debates in Kymlicka, “The New Debate over Minority Rights,” in his Politics in the Vernacular, 17–38.

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The ubiquitous claim – often associated with Gellner – that multinational pluralism is inextricable in the modern world, is a credible one and certainly suffices to explain why we need theories of multinational justice, stability, and so forth. But as I shall have repeated occasion to insist, this general truth does not necessarily help us to work out the more precise question of why we should wish to preserve the specific experience in multinational pluralism given in Quebec-in-Canada. Bauböck, “Why Stay Together?” 372. Carens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community, 63. Kymlicka and Norman, “Citizenship in Culturally Diverse Societies,” 20. See, for instance, LaSelva, The Moral Foundations of Canadian Federalism, 178–80. Consider Laforest, “Le Québec et l’éthique libérale de la sécession,” in De la prudence: textes politiques, esp. 172. Some might recoil at the implication that Quebec and English-speaking Canada exercise anything like comparable weight within Canadian institutions. English-speaking Canadians form an overwhelming majority (roughly 75 per cent), after all. But this merely numerical calculation wants adjustment. Quebec certainly is the weaker partner, but no one can deny that the province has enjoyed a considerable influence in Canadian federal affairs, especially since 1965 or so. The contrast with, say, the Crees of Quebec is underscored by considering whether Cree members of the National Assembly could wield an influence in Quebec’s affairs comparable to that exercised by Pierre Trudeau, Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrétien, Marc Lalonde, Stéphane Dion, or Lucien Bouchard over the last few decades – not to mention more elusive measurements, such as the extent to which Quebec’s “agenda” has driven federal politics over that span. That Quebec has exercised a significant hold over the destiny of English-speaking Canada is argued at greater length in chapter 3.

chapter two 1 More properly, “English-Canadian dissociationism” – i.e., not necessarily advocating an outright break into separate states, but certainly a massive reduction in institutional sharing. See, for instance, Resnick, Thinking English Canada. 2 The idea of concentrating on the “basic structure” draws from Rawls, A Theory of Justice. Rawls’s classic thesis fuses both autonomy and equal respect by deriving a definition of justice from the principles that rational and equal agents would choose from behind a “veil of ignorance” about their actual circumstances in life. But the above definition cannot be reduced to any one source, although it is informed by such authors as Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Will

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Kymlicka, and Charles Larmore, all of whom should find their understandings of liberalism reflected in it. Larmore’s discussion in Patterns of Moral Complexity has been especially helpful. Whether Kant, Locke, Mill, Hobhouse, and other such canonical sources can be encompassed within this definition is open to dispute, but my intentions here are purely pragmatic, not to be confused with a serious historical thesis about liberal thought. For excellent summary statements, see Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, 9–20, and Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity, 40–90. Dworkin, “Liberalism,” 190. Italics in original. See Gray, Liberalism, xii. Rawls revises his famous theory in light of the realization that it hinges on too “thick” a definition of autonomy. His Political Liberalism cleaves to a more rigid distinction between a purely “political” autonomy – the idea that the state ought not to incarnate contestable “comprehensive doctrines” about the good life – and “moral” autonomy, which is “expressed in a certain mode of life and reflection that critically examines our ends and ideals.” See Political Liberalism, xlv. The boundary between liberal and democratic principles can be blurred by those, like Dworkin and Rawls, who see the latter as an emanation of the precepts of the former. This is a valid move, but democratic goods are discussed separately, in the next chapter. A “comprehensive doctrine” includes “conceptions of what is of value in human life, and ideals of personal character, as well as ideals of friendship and of familial and associational relationships, and much else that is to inform our conduct, and in the limit of our life as a whole.” Rawls, Political Liberalism, 13. The distinction between “right” and “good” is perhaps not as perspicuous as widespread usage would suggest. The “right,” even in the thought of the archetypical theorist of a “deontological” morality (Kant), still seems to identify certain kinds of good (e.g., autonomy) as being of supreme importance. The label serves to give special status to a preferred good or set of goods. But in the end, goods still seem to be all that we are talking about. Rawls: “the state is not to do anything intended to favor or promote any particular comprehensive doctrine rather than another, or to give greater assistance to those who pursue it.” He calls this “neutrality of aim.” Political Liberalism, 191–5. “Political decisions must be, so far as this is possible, independent of any particular conception of the good life, or of what gives value to life. Since the citizens of a society differ in their conceptions, the government does not treat them as equals if it prefers one conception to the other.” Dworkin, “Liberalism,” 191.

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12 Raz, The Morality of Freedom. 13 Chandran Kukathas, for instance, is prepared to allow illiberal cultures considerable leeway within a liberal state – but also insists on an individual right of exit, thus sustaining the status of autonomy as ultimate trump. See Kukathas, “Are There Any Cultural Rights?” Kymlicka strikes a compromise by eschewing recourse to coercion, preferring instead that liberals tolerate the tiny illiberal sub-cultures that exist in modern liberal states while doing what they can to encourage the development of liberal beliefs within those cultures. Wisely, however, Kymlicka makes no bones about the nature of his proposal: it represents a compromise with liberal principles. Kymlicka, “Two Models of Pluralism and Tolerance,” 81–105. A good general review of these matters can be had in Mason, Community, Solidarity and Belonging, 67–95. 14 Allen Buchanan uses this term to describe one justification for secession: in contexts where radically illiberal movements, such as fascism or religious fundamentalism, are manipulating the freedoms of the liberal state so as to destroy it, “[a]llowing secession for groups whose values threaten the liberal framework appears to be an attractive way for liberals to avoid the allegation that they had to destroy liberalism in order to save it.” Such extreme scenarios have little resonance here, but the idea that secession might enhance or secure Canadian liberalism remains of interest. Buchanan, Secession, 34. 15 See Johnson, Le Mirage, esp. chs 21–2; Knopff, “Liberal Democracy and the Challenge of Nationalism in Canadian Politics”; Cook, Canada, Québec and the Uses of Nationalism; and Trudeau, Federalism and the French Canadians. 16 Bercuson and Cooper, Deconfederation, 8. 17 This is a compression of premises shared by Beruson and Cooper and Scowen, Time to Say Goodbye. 18 The image is from Balthazar, “The Faces of Québec Nationalism,” 2–17. 19 Bercuson and Cooper, Deconfederation, 15. 20 Ibid., 16. 21 Ibid., 13. 22 Ibid., 16. 23 Ibid., 6. 24 Ibid., 16. 25 Ibid., 168–9. 26 This is Taylor’s derisive term for this kind of liberalism. See Taylor, Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition,” 39–40. 27 Kymlicka’s landmark contributions – to say nothing of his prolific writings in journals and collections – are, of course, Liberalism, Community and Culture and Multicultural Citizenship. 28 Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture, 165.

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29 Ibid., 166. 30 Kymlicka, ibid, passim; see also Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship. Tamir’s “Theoretical Difficulties in the Study of Nationalism,” 81, nicely sketches many of Kymlicka’s classic arguments. 31 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 111–15. 32 Ibid., 10. 33 Ibid., 186. 34 Carens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community, 12. 35 Ibid., 13. 36 This distinction between Kymlickian arguments from autonomy and arguments from self-respect echoes Moore in The Ethics of Nationalism, 52–73. 37 Taylor, “Why do Nations have to become States?,” in Reconciling the Solitudes, 48. 38 Ibid., 54. 39 Ibid., 50. 40 Laforest, Trudeau and the End of a Canadian Dream, 164 41 See Taylor, Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition,’” 40, n16. What counts for Kymlicka is that living individuals have the conditions of their autonomy respected; if assimilation were to happen slowly, over a number of generations, such that its costs were minimal for specific individuals, he presumably would have no objection. A related limitation seems to affect Margaret Moore’s effort to redefine the locus of moral concern from “culture” to “identity,” on the grounds that the substance of culture changes over time, while the sense of distinctive identity remains constant. Moore insists that what matters is that “groups ... see the change as one internal to the group, as one that in some sense they have made.” But this would seem to deprive us of resources to express the tremendous importance Quebec nationalists have placed on the survival of their language. It is not clear that such nationalists would recognize themselves in Moore’s account. See Moore, The Ethics of Nationalism, 71. 42 Taylor, “Reply and Re-articulation,” 251. There is, indeed, a great deal to be said about the nature of la survivance as a political good and the kinds of challenges it poses to liberal theory and assorted efforts to justify nationalism. One question is whether “receiving societies” (i.e., those that take in and seek to integrate large numbers of immigrants) can fully justify this integration without recourse to some such notion of collective, trans-generational survival. If it turns out that they can’t, then even-handedness clearly prevents us from condemning policies designed to sustain that good. Quebec is merely securing for itself a good that all receiving societies (including English-speaking Canada) depend on, whether they have articulated this need or not. The matter cannot be resolved here, however.

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43 This is not to deny that Taylor supports a substantially decentralized, asymmetrical federalism. But the general tenor of his work on Canada, and his willingness to endorse the moderate Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords, suggest that his most urgent concern has been with recognition per se. For a discussion, see Laforest, “Philosophy and political judgement in a multinational federation,” 194–209. 44 Margalit and Raz, “National Self-Determination,” 449–51. 45 See their collective statement, “Afterword: Liberal Nationalism Both Cosmopolitan and Rooted,” 579–662. 46 Carens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community, 60. 47 The 2006 parliamentary declaration that “the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada” marks an interesting step in this direction. One of the puzzling aspects has been the generally positive response in Quebec, so different from the apathy or scorn that greeted the Chrétien Liberals’ analogous declaration in 1995 that Quebec is a “distinct society” (see Young, The Secession of Quebec, 347). It is surprising that, after all the sound and fury of the past forty years, a mere declaration of little apparent legal or constitutional significance could assume such psychological heft. Part of the answer may be verbal – “nation” being a more resonant term that the ill-starred “distinct society.” Contemporary demobilization around the national question may also play a part. It is conceivable, as well, that the declaration profited from its consistency with the general rhetorical practice of the Harper Conservatives. Prime Minister Harper, with his plausible promises of “open federalism” and broadly accommodating tone, seems to have been more successful that his immediate predecessors in positioning himself as respectful of Quebec’s autonomy and collective dignity. Thus, Quebecers may be provisionally satisfied that this government offers the kind of convincing reassurance of a right to difference that is at the root of demands over recognition. What is not clear is how durable the apparently positive effects of this ad hoc moment of recognition will prove to be. In theory, certainly, a full-blown constitutional statement would offer a more permanent and enduring form of affirmation. 48 Scowen, Time to Say Goodbye, 84. 49 Ibid., 85. Italics in original. 50 Ibid., 95. 51 Ibid., 35. 52 Ibid., 32. 53 Ibid., 149. 54 Ibid., 147. 55 No denial of the expressive, indeed constitutive, role of language in human agency is implied here. The issue is not the ontology of language but whether,

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in institutionalizing a given language, we necessarily are institutionalizing a “thick” ascriptive identity. The answer is “no,” because language can be an instrument of communication rather than the expression of a narrowly defined set of cultural referents; otherwise, anyone would become a FrenchCanadian simply by uttering a few words of French. See, for instance, Green, “Are Language Rights Fundamental?,” 639–69. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 11–15. This raises certain problems. Kymlicka has reasons for replacing “cultural structure” (the favoured term in 1989’s Liberalism, Community, and Culture) with “societal culture” (1995’s Multicultural Citizenship). These must include the emphasis that the latter concept places on institutional completeness. Kymlicka seems to have moved from the somewhat amorphous position that the “context of choice” required for autonomy is given in “culture,” vaguely defined, toward the more precise stance that autonomy is given in a comprehensive institutional framework grounded in culture. He has therefore refined his central concept. But the two terms are used synonymously here, partly for variety but also because the emphasis on “structure” is, ironically, more evocative for the purposes of this exposition. The term “societal cultures” seems a step removed from the character/structure distinction so central here. See Allen Buchanan, “What’s So Special About Nations?,” 288 n7. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 76–7. The distinction is introduced in Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, 163–70. Vipond, “From Provincial Autonomy to Provincial Equality,” 109. See Gagnon and Iacovino, Federalism, Citizenship, and Quebec, 46–7. See, for instance, Taylor, “Shared and Divergent Values”; Webber, Reimagining Canada, ch.7; and Cairns, “Constitutional Change and the Three Equalities,” 86. It should be said that the mere acceptance of the principle of asymmetry does not mean that all forms of asymmetry are equally unproblematic. Vipond, “From Provincial Autonomy to Provincial Equality,” 110–11. Many Quebec nationalists naturally argue the reverse, but those arguments are almost invariably overblown. The prescriptions just mentioned are supported by such authors as Dion, “Explaining Quebec Nationalism,” esp. 120–1, and Lenihan, Robertson, and Tassé, Canada: Reclaiming the Middle Ground. An incisive refutation of nationalist tropes can be found in André Pratte, Aux pays des merveilles. It is important not to construe the concept of a “constitutional order” too narrowly, though. Take my presentation of the rhetoric and (to a lesser extent) practice of the Harper government in endnote 47, above. It is conceivable that the Harper government is establishing a template – that of respectfully approaching Quebecers as “nation,” and explicitly repudiating a project of

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undifferentiated pan-Canadian nation-building – that future Canadian governments will consistently emulate. Over time, such a pattern could coalesce into an imperfectly codified but nonetheless binding “constitutional” precept. And at that point it might make sense to say that the injustice of non-recognition has been alleviated in our constitutional system. The assumption here is that we have not yet reached this point.

chapter three 1 Mill, “Representative Government,” in Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty, Representative Government, 361–2. Mill here suggests a two-pronged critique of multinational states: they work counter to the effective operation of representative government and they pose a threat to liberty by reducing citizens’ vigilance vis-à-vis that government. The first might be called a properly “democratic” concern (notwithstanding a certain relationship between liberal rights and democratic governance), and it is our primary concern for the moment. 2 “A portion of mankind may be said to constitute a Nationality if they are united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and any others – which make them co-operate with each other more willingly than with other people, desire to be under the same government, and desire that it should be government by themselves or a portion of themselves exclusively.” And, more strikingly, “Where the sentiment of nationality exists in any force, there is a prima facie case for uniting all the members of the nationality under the same government, and a government to themselves apart. This is merely saying that the question of government ought to be decided by the governed.” Ibid., 360–1, italics added. For a critique in light of Canadian dilemmas, see Cameron, Nationalism, Self-Determination, and the Quebec Question, ch. 5. 3 Mill, “Representative Government,” 360. 4 LaSelva, Moral Foundations, 122. See also Smiley, “Is there a basis for political community in Canada?,” Canada in Question: Federalism in the Eighties, esp. 288–9; and Cameron, Nationalism, Self-Determination, and the Quebec Question. 5 Recall: “Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the workings of representative government, cannot exist.” 6 Mill, “Coleridge.” Dissertations and Discussions; Political, Philosophical, and Historical, 420. 7 Miller, On Nationality, 98. On the other hand, the claim that the presence of more than one “societal culture” might make democratization impossible is

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advanced by Ernest Gellner and, perhaps, Robert Dahl. See Stepan, “Modern multinational democracies: transcending a Gellnerian oxymoron,” 219–39. A characteristic discussion of these terms can be found in Cohen, “Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy,” 95–119. There are other ways of formulating the distinction; Daniel Weinstock uses the term “pluralist” rather than “aggregative,” while Iris Marion Young prefers “interest-based,” but all gesture toward the same idea. See Weinstock, “Saving Democracy from Deliberation,” and Young, “Communication and the Other.” Stephen L. Elkin, cited in Atkinson, “What Kind of Democracy Do Canadians Want?,” 725. Atkinson, “What Kind of Democracy Do Canadians Want?,” 724. Stein, “Tensions in the Canadian Constitutional Process,” 95. Ibid. Weinstock, “Saving Democracy from Deliberation,” 78. Elster, “Introduction,” 5. Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” 29. Gutmann and Thompson, “Why Deliberative Democracy is Different.” Italics added. Their seminal exposition is Democracy and Disagreement. Interestingly, these authors propose that accountability extend beyond a decision-maker’s political constituents to include anyone affected by her decisions. See Democracy and Disagreement, 169. On Rawls’s importance, see Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” esp. 18–20. While the idea of “public reasons” owes much to Rawls, it is hard to determine the extent to which Rawls warrants the label of “deliberative democrat.” Benhabib, for instance, is at pains to distinguish her own model of deliberative democracy from Rawls’s “liberal conception of public dialogue.” Yet her model deploys the same basic idea of public reasoning, the core elements of which are inclusivity and the offering of reasons, requiring us to “think of what would count as a good reason for all others involved.” Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,” 72. See Rawls, Political Liberalism, xxxvii-lxii, 212–54. Habermas’s relevance to this debate is explored in Elster, “The market and the forum.” Atkinson, “What Kind of Democracy Do Canadians Want?,” 724. This seems different from Stein’s “integrative bargaining” in the weight it gives to the deliberative refashioning of preferences. Miller, On Nationality, 97. Ibid., 57. One of the more perplexing aspects of deliberative theory has been its hankering after consensus – a legacy, no doubt, of Habermas’s propensity to believe in some optimally “rational” discourse. Of course, deliberative

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democrats allow that unanimity may not be possible; but they sometimes do this for what seem to be the wrong reasons – e.g., time constraints – instead of an admission that goods may not always be compatible or reconcilable. In any case, whether we agree that there is somehow an “objective” or “rational” public good which deliberation brings out or remain open to the possibility of an array of credible definitions, the point is that agents should conduct themselves in light of some notion of the public weal. Consider the special significance Mill attaches to language as an agent of solidarity. Moore, “Liberal Nationalism and Multiculturalism,” 184. Miller, On Nationality, 97. See, for instance, Taylor, “Democratic Exclusion (and its Remedies?),” especially 267. Contrast this with Andrew Mason’s argument that a sense of shared nationality is not required in liberal states, as long as citizens have a sense of belonging to the polity’s “major institutions and some of its central practices and feel ... at home in them.” The argument developed here suggests that even where allegiance to shared institutions cuts across national identities within a state, cohabitation may still impose democratic costs. See Andrew Mason, “Political Community, Liberal-Nationalism, and the Ethics of Assimilation.” Miller, On Nationality, 97. Atkinson, “What Kind of Democracy Do Canadians Want?,” 725. See Craig, ed., Lord Durham’s Report, and Ajzenstat, The Political Thought of Lord Durham. Smith, Canada and the Canadian Question, 168–9. Ibid., 169. Underhill’s analogy misses the fact that Tocqueville produced an extraordinary contribution to democratic theory, while Siegfried’s work is primarily of parochial interest – a seminal analysis of Canadian politics. See Underhill’s “Introduction to the Carleton Library Edition,” in Siegfried, The Race Question in Canada. Siegfried, The Race Question in Canada, 113. Ibid., 114, Ibid., 113. Ibid. Ibid. A typical example is Morin, Quebec vs. Ottawa. Lévesque, An Option for Quebec, 26. Miller, On Nationality, 95.

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42 According to a poll from May 2005, 75 per cent of Quebecers are “proud to be Canadian.” Léger Marketing, Le journal de Montréal and The Montreal Gazette, “Quebec Survey.” 43 See Moore, “Liberal Nationalism and Multiculturalism.” 44 Arend Lijphart defines democracy as Dahl’s polyarchy – i.e., an aggregative conception of democracy. Democracy in Plural Societies, 4. This is not the place for a detailed discussion of traditional mechanisms of bi-national brokerage and accommodation within the Canadian system or of the larger pattern of Canadian political parties to function as agents of “brokerage” rather than ideology. See, for instance, the classic discussions by McRae and Noël in McRae, ed., Consociational Democracy, 235–68. McRae’s “The Meech Lake Impasse in Theoretical Perspective” is also very interesting. 45 Most deliberative democrats envision a highly engaged citizenry, and there is plenty of room in aggregative models for participation as well (notwithstanding theories of “demand overload”). But we can also imagine a democracy that conforms to basic requirements of public deliberation – e.g., reciprocity among interlocutors, publicity, and accountability – where the exchange of public reasons occurs largely at the elite level (in Parliament, say), and the public generally defers to its elected representatives. Gutmann and Thompson make the point that “deliberative democracy should not be confused with civic republicanism ... [and] supports representative democracy.” “Why Deliberative Democracy is Different,” 177. Joshua Cohen, more grudgingly, also concedes the possibility that deliberative democracy could be reconciled with highly indirect forms: “Perhaps an ideal deliberative procedure is best instituted by ensuring well-conducted political debates among elites.” Cohen, “Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy,” 107. 46 Underhill, The Image of Confederation, 47–8. 47 Stein, “Tensions in the Canadian Constitutional Process,” 97. 48 Resnick, Parliament vs. People, 56. 49 The central text for our purposes is “Creative Politics,”14–15, 28; but Horowitz’s position cannot be fully understood without “Mosaics and Identity,” 17–19, and “On the Fear of Nationalism: Nationalism and Socialism, A Sermon to the Moderates,” 7–9. Extracts can be found in Forbes, ed., Canadian Political Thought, 362–8, although the argument suffers somewhat in this attenuated form. Horowitz’s debt to Porter is clear: see The Vertical Mosaic, 372, 379–85. 50 Horowitz, “Creative Politics,” 14. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 15. 53 Ibid.

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Ibid. Ibid,, 15–16. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 1–9, 25. Resnick, Parliament vs. People, 47. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 16–17. In particular, Letters to a Québécois Friend, 58; Toward a Canada-Quebec Union; and Thinking English Canada. Resnick, Toward a Canada-Quebec Union, 15. Whitaker, “Quebec and the Canadian Question,” 287. The details of this claim are not especially novel. Whitaker implies that Quebecers’ primary allegiance is to the Québécois nation rather than Canada as a whole; that, therefore, Quebec advocates a more massively decentralized or asymmetrical federalism than English-speaking Canadians; and that English-speaking Canadians’ attitudes to individual rights in general, and the rights and nature of official language minorities, are markedly distinct from those of Quebecers. Whitaker’s work is interesting, rather, for its consistent deployment of democratic theory in the context of our unity crises. See A Sovereign Idea, esp. 165–328. Whitaker, “Quebec and the Canadian Question,” 286. Italics added. See, for instance, Cairns, Charter versus Federalism. Russell, Constitutional Odyssey. Atkinson, “What Kind of Democracy Do Canadians Want?” Ajzenstat, “Constitution Making and the Myth of the People,” 112. See also Ajzenstat, “Decline of Procedural Liberalism,” 120–36. Nevitte, The Decline of Deference. Of course, this assumes that the limited forms of popular engagement given in the Charlottetown process are satisfactory. They still fall short of Resnick’s call for a constituent assembly, for instance. For example, voters in the Rest of Canada were massively opposed to the Charlottetown Accord’s recognition of Quebec as a “distinct society,” with 69 per cent describing this arguably watered-down and qualified revision of the Meech Lake provisions as going “too far.” Johnston, Blais, Gidengil, and Nevitte, The Challenge of Direct Democracy, 80. Similarly, the recognition of Quebec as a “unique society” in the Calgary Declaration remained significantly less popular than other aspects of that package. On the other hand, Matthew Mendelsohn cites data indicating English Canadians’ willingness to accept “recognition of Quebec’s unique character” and an asymmetrical distribution

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of powers: “Public Brokerage,” 259. I am inclined, however, to give considerable weight to his qualifier about “the inadequacy of a survey instrument to measure ... the intensity of opinion that would be mobilized at the time of an actual decision.” Emphasizing the special intractability of the Quebec/Canada cleavage in no way implies homogeneity of views in the Rest of Canada. Michael Lustzig adroitly carves “roc” into three distinctive “mega-constitutional orientations”: the Trudeau vision of shared values expressed in central institutions; the Western emphasis on decentralization, provincial equality, and intrastate federalism; and the “minoritarian” orientation which seeks to enhance the constitutional status of “nonterritorial collectivites.” Michael Lusztig, “Constitutional Paralysis,” 752–60. Ibid., 751. Ajzenstat, “Constitution Making and the Myth of the People,” 126. Noël, “Deliberating a Constitution,” 78. Indeed, if the Charlottetown model is followed, a majority in every single province must approve. The Chrétien government wisely tried to soften this precedent in 1996 with Bill C–110, which “lent” Ottawa’s veto over constitutional amendment to Quebec, Ontario, British Columbia, and blocs of Western and Atlantic Canadian provinces. Lusztig, “Constitutional Paralysis,” 748. Horowitz, “Creative Politics,” 15. Ibid. Ibid. See Porter, The Vertical Mosaic, esp. 382. Horowitz writes: “The ethnic and regional particularisms of English Canada are neither powerful nor selfsustaining; they are artificially stimulated by self-seeking politicians; they are almost wholly parasitic growths on the genuine, deeply-felt, self-sustaining autonomist impulse of Quebec.” “Mosaics and Identity,” 18. Contrast with Elkins and Simeon, Small Worlds; but see also Alain C. Cairns, “The Governments and Societies of Canadian Federalism.” Horowitz, “Mosaics and Identity.” Horowitz, “Creative Politics,” 15. Hence his bizarre claim that “the official discourse of Canadian politics has been permeated with reification. ‘Quebec,’ ‘Canada,’ ‘Ontario,’ ‘Alberta’ appear as collective actors, leviathans whose constituent parts – individuals, classes, genders, ethnic groups, cultural and religious communities – have often been given scant attention.” It is one thing to say these constructs have received disproportionate attention, quite another to dismiss them as

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“reifications” (as though gender or class were not). See “Quebec and the Canadian Question,” 290. Ibid., 290, italics added. Ibid. Ibid., 322–3. Ibid., 287. Neither position is necessarily participatory in Horowitz’s richer sense, although a participatory democracy could be either aggregative or deliberative (some blend of both, most likely) depending on its practices and underlying ethos. For the details of Resnick’s proposal, see Toward a Canada-Quebec Union, 77–119, especially the helpful chart on 117. Whitaker, “With or Without Quebec?,” 27–8. It is worth pointing out the massive oversimplification here (perhaps understandable in a polemical piece): for example, Ontario is liable to share Quebec’s resistance to “a more regionally responsive set of institutions”; it is not clear that Quebec’s concern for the flourishing of its societal project need be construed as a threat to liberal rights; a multi-ethnic society is perfectly consonant, at least in principle, with the idea of building a mainly French-language society, just as it is consonant with the ongoing construction of a mainly English-speaking society in the rest of Canada; and Aboriginal aspirations can be read as categorically similar to those of Quebec nationalists, notwithstanding the very large differences between the two. This is not to deny, however, very broad cleavages between Quebec and English-speaking Canada, taken as a whole, on elemental matters of polity. Ibid., 27. In fairness, Whitaker’s excesses here are consistent with the genre of the popular essay that characterizes “English Canada” Speaks Out. But the genre has the advantage of offering an aggregative critique in an undiluted form. Whitaker, “Federalism and Democratic Theory,” 198. Whitaker, “Quebec and the Canadian Question,” 286. Taylor, “Democratic Exclusion (and its Remedies?),” 267. This is an outrageously reductive account of democratic legitimacy, of course, but sufficient for the purpose, which is to establish that solidarity must be part of what undergirds polity. A different account of legitimacy can be found, say, in Rawls, where legitimacy consists in the justice of the “basic structure.” There is no need to deny a profound connection between justice and legitimacy; but if justice were all there is to it, then we could not explain or justify the existence of a plurality of states cleaving to roughly the same account of justice.

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Notes to pages 69–73

Another way of putting this is to say that a political community might not feel wholly “free” if it were incorporated against its will into an alien polity, even if that incorporation represented a net gain in liberal justice. Solidarity is a crucial part of what determines the boundaries of the community of interlocutors with whom we desire to deliberate and negotiate in justice. A classic analysis of the intricate relations between collective self-government and (something like) liberty can be found in Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, 39–47. The necessity of prior solidarity to Rawlsian liberalism is a major point of Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Forsey, “Canada, 1967,” in his Freedom and Order: Collected Essays, 290. Resnick, Toward a Canada-Quebec Union, 72–3. For an excellent argument to the contrary, see Couture, “Some Ways of Talking,” 89–94. Whitaker gives us the nicely terse formulation: “Quebec nationalism, in both its traditional péquiste form and its new neo-liberal market face, is the enemy of Canadian nationalism.” Whitaker, “No Laments for the Nation,” 12. By this I mean a solidarity that yields an effective spirit of reciprocity. The dissociationism of English-speaking Canada has many interesting threads, including a nascent nationalism most clearly on display in Thinking English Canada. There is also a venerable redistributive critique of Quebec-inCanada, its claim being that Quebec’s autonomist ethos prevents the level of centralization needed for social democracy. For a classic rebuttal, see Trudeau, “The Practice and Theory of Federalism.” An interesting variant on this thesis is Brym’s “Some advantages of Canadian disunity.” Brym suggests that Quebec’s departure would enable Canada to develop a coherent industrial plan, presently impossible because of decentralizing pressures. Whitaker, “Quebec and the Canadian Question,” 311. There is little profit in arguing these points here. What matters is that the election was perceived (at least in English-speaking Canada) as a watershed. Resnick, Letters to a Québécois Friend, 58. Whitaker, “Quebec and the Canadian Question,” 310. Johnston, Blais, Brady, and Crête, Letting the People Decide, 15. Italics in original. Resnick, Letters to a Québécois Friend, 57. Whitaker: “Quebec opted overwhelmingly for the Tories and free trade. It was unmistakably their votes [sic] which made the difference in electing a Tory majority.” “Quebec and the Canadian Question,” 315. Resnick, Letters to a Québécois Friend, 57. Whitaker, “Quebec and the Canadian Question,” 315. Resnick, Letters to a Québécois Friend, 70.

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113 Note that the general proposition remains credible even if we take issue with these authors’ interpretation of the 1988 campaign. We might deny, for instance, that free trade has made much difference to Canada’s ability to resist Americanization; or that Quebec was as crucial to the election results as Resnick and Whitaker imagine. But if their interpretation of the nature of Québécois political discourse is accurate, then some such scenario will remain a real possibility for any future moments of historic, democratic decision. 114 That is, the formal recognition of Quebec as a nationality-based unit within Canada will not be possible until English-speaking Canadians accept that Quebec’s distinctiveness means something, that its people cannot be included in some undifferentiated conception of Canadian citizenship. This demands at least some recognition of Quebec’s “otherness.” 115 LaSelva, The Moral Foundations of Canadian Federalism, 120. Much more is said about LaSelva in chapter 7. 116 Latouche, “Betrayal and Indignation on the Canadian Trail,” 112. Granted, Latouche also claims that Quebecers who did know of English Canada’s anguish “either do not care or have little sympathy.” But since he agrees with Resnick that “[m]ost Quebecers knew nothing” of this anguish, such abysmal indifference cannot be attributed to the population as a whole. Of course, Latouche’s real point is to argue that Quebecers voted like poltroons, trying to “be on the side of the winners,” but the entire Resnick-Latouche exchange is so impressionistic that one hardly knows where to hang one’s interpretive hat. The more scholarly Letting the People Decide does not seem to bear out the analyses of Resnick and Whitaker. Its authors argue that, while Quebec was indeed consistently more pro-Tory than the rest of Canada (except Alberta), Quebec voters’ reaction to the debates exactly paralleled that of their anglophone compatriots, and that Quebecers may well have attended to the broader Canadian discourse. Johnston, Blais, Brady, and Crête, Letting the People Decide, esp. 29–33. Of course none of this proves that Quebecers did this in a spirit of reciprocity rather than, say, self-interested calculus. But Latouche raises an alternate reading of the free-trade debate, which is all I need here. 117 This opens a bit of a Pandora’s Box. Suffice it to say that a common reaction to Québécois demands for extreme asymmetry is to insist that Quebec’s representation in Parliament be diminished accordingly. Eugene Forsey was an early tribune for this view; a contemporary restatement can be found in Gibbins, “Getting There from Here,” 401–2. 118 Stein, Cameron, and Simeon, “Citizen Engagement in Conflict Resolution.” 119 Mendelsohn, “Public Brokerage,” 258.

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120 Noël, “Deliberating a Constitution,” 78. 121 In this respect, secession is an extraordinary problem for political theory.

chapter four 1 On these matters, see Scott Reid’s adroit Canada Remapped, 37–66. 2 Buchanan, Secession, 104–14. Actually, two other arguments might seem apropos: the “minimization of strategic bargaining” and the “threat of anarchy.” The former suggests that it is wrong to recognize a legal right of secession because doing so will give certain units a powerful bargaining chip with which to “blackmail” the wider state. Strictly speaking, though, what is immoral under this scenario is not secession per se, but the blackmail itself. Federalists have long accused Quebec of trying to extort concessions from Canada through the threat of secession, but this fails to prove that secession illegitimate; it simply enjoins the wider community to call the bluff. The “threat of anarchy” raises the reductio ad absurdum: secession cannot be universalized as a principle of political practice and is, therefore, morally wrong. This chapter will explore various ways of restricting the moral case for secession so as to escape this implication. 3 Ibid., 105. 4 Ibid., 110. 5 Ibid. 6 Actually, Buchanan questions the validity of both Quebec’s and Canada’s claims to most of Quebec territory, since they seem to originate in unjust acquisitions (whether they be the conquest of New France by the English or the seizure of Aboriginal lands in the name of New France itself). This is a “‘no clear title either way’ situation,” in his view. It is worth noting that, on his account, this ought to generate a prima facie argument against the morality of the secessionists’ claims, given his preference for continuity. See ibid., 111, 113. 7 See Albert and Shaw, Partition, Varty, Who Gets Ungava?, 27, Hodgins, “The Northern Boundary of Quebec,” 141–9, and Hogg, “Principles Governing the Secession of Quebec,” 44. 8 Varty, Who Gets Ungava?, 27. 9 Monahan, “Cooler Heads Shall Prevail.” 10 This perspective understands Quebec’s territorial integrity to be guaranteed under the Canadian constitution – specifically Sec. 3 of the Constitution Act (1871), and Sec. 43 of the Constitution Act (1982), which guarantee the integrity of provincial borders – until its ascension to statehood. Thenceforth, it would be guaranteed under international law by the principles of

Notes to pages 86–7

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“effectivity” (effective control over territory) and uti possidetis. For a pithy summation, see National Executive Council of the Parti québécois, Quebec in a New World, 49–50. See also Brun, “L’intégrité territoriale d’un Québec souverain”; and the much-cited five-expert report for the Quebec National Assembly, Franck, Higgins, Pellet, Shaw, and Tomuschat, “L’intégrité territoriale du Québec dans l’hypothèse de l’accession à la soveraineté.” Such sources take sovereignty as a fait accompli, simply ignoring Aboriginals’ claims that their right of self-determination demands their inclusion in the process of negotiating Quebec sovereignty, when borders, along with just about everything else, could be on the table. Of course, one is free to argue, as many sovereigntists would, that Canadian law is itself unjust and the Canadian constitution illegitimate. If true, this would sabotage any Canadian application of Buchanan’s argument. I concede that the constitution is at least partially unjust, specifically in its refusal to affirm Quebec’s distinctiveness, but decline to admit the total illegitimacy of Canadian law; and so I doubt very seriously that the imperfections of our constitution defuse all obligations to work within legal norms, especially when those norms explicitly include a process for negotiating secession. For further clarification, see n61, below. In any case, as mentioned earlier, the main thrust of my argument asks only that we assume justice and rule of law to be synonymous at one point: Section 35 of the Constitution Act of 1982. See Monahan, “Cooler Heads Shall Prevail,” 30–2. Supreme Court of Canada, “Reference re Secession of Quebec,” pgh. 84. Ibid., pgh. 96. See Varty, Who Gets Ungava? Scott Reid assesses the dubious merits of this argument in Canada Remapped, 53–4. Perhaps the most disconcerting aspect of this position is that it would, if carried to its logical conclusion, invalidate Quebec’s claim even to the territory of New France, which was ceded to the Crown by France itself in 1763. Buchanan doubts that a state may justly barter away its territory, given its duties to preserve its inheritance for future generations. But this seems to have some rather unbelievable implications for the legitimacy of many existing states, given the extent to which land has been bartered back and forth between sovereign powers. In any case, the Secession Reference indicates that Canadian law, for better or worse, allows for such bartering. The spectre of violence is perhaps most thoroughly canvassed in the debates printed in Morrison, ed., Divided We Fall. See, especially, Desmond Morton’s contributions. However, it is not being argued here that Canada’s moral duty to uphold the principle of partition, if there is such a duty, would extend to the use of force.

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17 On the possible international significance of the reference, see Tully, “Introduction,” 7–33; and Young, “A Most Politic Judgement.” 18 Joffe, “International Practice, Quebec Secession and Indigenous Peoples,” 125. 19 Ibid., 126. 20 The legal requirement to negotiate in good faith suggests that a blanket refusal to cede at least some territory would be non-starter. It should not be assumed, incidentally, that a hard-line position in favour of large-scale partitions would be in the interests of a remainder Canada. Young argues that a quick and peaceful settlement would better serve all parties (save, perhaps, partitionist minorities within Quebec) and that insisting on large swaths of Quebec’s territory would be unlikely to promote either a swift or a peaceful resolution. Young, The Secession of Quebec, 181–3. See also Freeman and Grady, Dividing the House, 70–105, and Gibson, Plan B. 21 Rule of law remains pertinent, inasmuch as some arguments for a remedial partition hinge on treaty rights and Canada’s fiduciary obligations to Aboriginal peoples, as we shall see. Furthermore, were good-faith negotiations to fail, Quebec’s only remaining means to achieve sovereignty would be an unconstitutional U.D.I. So in the end, we still need to know whether any credible argument exists that could extirpate sovereigntists from the potential limitations that the rule of law places on their aspirations. 22 This occurs when the Grand Council argues that the secession of Quebec would represent a “fundamental breach” sufficient, in itself, to empower the Crees to choose the state of which they wish to remain a part. But unless the Council is also arguing – which it denies – that the Crees’ right of self-determination extends to the power to redraw the borders of the polity (including secession), and therefore that they enjoy an ultimate claim to sovereignty that can trump that of the Canadian constitution, it is unclear where this “right to choose” comes from. See Grand Council of the Crees, Never Without Consent, esp. 50. 23 Remedial-right only theories include Buchanan in Secession and his “Theories of Secession”; Brilmayer, “Secession and Self-Determination”; and Birch, “Another Liberal Theory of Secession.” The primary right position finds voice in Philpott, “In Defense of Self-Determination”; Beran, “A Liberal Theory of Secession”; Wellman, “A Defense of Secession and Political Self-Determination”; Walzer, “The New Tribalism”; Nielsen, “Liberal Nationalism, Liberal Democracies, and Secession”; Tamir, Liberal Nationalism, esp. ch. 3; and Gauthier, “Breaking Up: An Essay on Secession.” Moore, ed., National Self-Determination and Secession contains many essays that deepen the debate.

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24 This reflects a wider distinction in political theory between “choice” and “nationalist” versions of a primary right of secession. See Moore, “Introduction: The Self-Determination Principle and the Ethics of Secession,” 5. 25 Reid, Canada Remapped, 49. 26 Ibid., 36. 27 Moore, The Ethics of Nationalism, esp. 165–201. 28 Among those sources defending partition on grounds of Aboriginal self-determination are Turpel, “Does the Road to Québec Sovereignty Run through Aboriginal Territory?”; Sanders, “If Quebec Secedes from Canada, Can the Cree Secede from Quebec?”; Joffe, “International Practice, Quebec Secession and Indigenous Peoples”; Hodgins, “The Northern Boundary of Quebec”; and Grand Council of the Crees, Never Without Consent, and Sovereign Injustice. 29 Grand Council of the Crees, Never Without Consent, 41. 30 Debate abounds over the precise meaning of “self-determination” for indigenous peoples in international law, but the view that it refers to internal rather than external self-determination – i.e., autonomy within states, rather than the creation of new ones – is well established. For an important argument that self-determination bestows neither a right of secession nor partition for Aboriginal peoples, but only a “successfully negotiated adaptation to a new political framework,” see Falk, “The Relevance of the Right of Self-Determination of Peoples.” Contrast with Niezen, “Recognizing Indigenism.” 31 Monahan and Bryant, with Coté, “Coming to Terms with Plan B: Ten Principles Governing Secession,” 292. 32 Hodgins, “The Northern Boundaries of Quebec,” 148. 33 “On peut en effet prétendre que les peuples autochtones ... ne sont pas en nombre suffisant pour remplir les conditions exigées par le droit international pour l’exercise du droit à l’autodétermination externe.” Woehrling, “L’évolution et le réaménagement des rapports entre le Québec et le Canada anglais,” 135, n120. But we are here entitled to inquire into the principles that could make sense of such norms. See, in this regard, Michel Seymour’s characteristically well-reasoned argument that Aboriginal communities do possess the necessary qualities to enjoy whatever rights accrue to nations. Seymour, “Le nationalisme québécois et la question autochtone.” 34 What is not entirely clear is the extent of this obligation and whether or not it is a full-blown requirement of justice (the “right”) or “merely” a claim from the good. On the one hand, Canada’s duties here seem to me to be more than trivial and to go beyond tut-tutting moralism (“how dare you countenance hypocrisy!”). The point with these scenarios is that on the sovereigntists’ own accounts of justice, as with the demand for a primary right to secessionist

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“national self-determination,” the fundamental rights of at least some partionist minorities in Quebec would be denied. Since such minorities would remain citizens of Canada until the moment that sovereignty is successfully negotiated, Canada would have a direct interest in, and obligation toward, the just treatment of these minorities. And yet complexities remain. What if English-speaking Canada, as a unit, adheres to a different conception of political justice, one that does not entail a primary right of secession (and therefore a primary right of partition)? The Secession Reference, for instance, ultimately seems to imply only a right to negotiate secession, not an absolute primary right to the thing itself. So Canada might well concede Quebec’s independence for political and other reasons, without agreeing that a primary right is at stake; and therefore it could, with full consistency, view partitionism in an analogous way, as a demand rather than as a right. (That demand might still be a reasonable and fair one, of course). In that case, the moral burden on English-speaking Canada would seem to deflate from an obligation imposed by justice to a preference emanating from a view of the good (e.g., sense of fair play). And partition would thus be better cast as a principle that Canada should support on grounds of compassion or sympathy – not wishing to see recalcitrant minorities being victims of a manifest double standard – but not as a hard-and-fast extension of its understanding of justice proper. Perhaps Canada could, therefore, justly abandon the cause of partition, even if it has to hold its collective nose over the distasteful double-dealing faced by partitionist minorities at the hands of their erstwhile government. At least, this reasoning might hold for the demands of non-aboriginal partitionists. But no matter what we make of the above, the problem of Canada’s constitutionally mandated treaty obligations to Aboriginal peoples on Quebec territory, explored in the next subsection, would continue to pose an exceedingly weighty argument in favour of hard-and-fast Canadian support for Aboriginal demands for partition. Defeating this challenge requires some additional argument, as we’ll see. Will Kymlicka has, in generous correspondence, pressed me hard to try to clarify my thoughts on these matters. While I can’t presume wholly to have succeeded, I am in his debt. 35 Buchanan, Secession, 40. 36 Buchanan suggests that recognizing a right of secession may be an attractive way to undercut the justification for revolution, at least in certain circumstances. Secession and revolution obviously are related concepts, in that both present fundamental challenges to the authority of a state, though, of course, “the secessionist’s primary goal is not to overthrow the existing government,

Notes to pages 90–4

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nor to make fundamental constitutional, economic, or sociopolitical changes within the existing state. Instead, she wishes to restrict the jurisdiction of the state in question so as not to include her own group and the territory it occupies.” Ibid., 10; see also 34–5. Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations, 70. Buchanan, Secession, 37. Ibid., 30. For a seminal discussion, see Vipond, Liberty and Community. Latouche, Plaidoyer pour le Québec, 43–71. Silver, The French-Canadian Idea of Confederation, 218. Latouche, Plaidoyer, 51. Laforest has since moderated his prescriptions to accommodate Buchanan’s claim that secession is only an acceptable remedy as a last resort. Thus, instead of secession, he currently argues for (a) a referendum asking Quebecers whether they support the 1982 constitution. He anticipates a massive “no,” which in turn would generate a new round of constitutional talks; and (b) a legal challenge by the Quebec government designed to strike down the 1982 constitution. He concedes that such a challenge is unlikely to succeed; and given his own analysis of post-Charter political culture, constitutional negotiations are no more likely to yield mutually satisfactory outcomes than in 1990 or 1992. So the distinction between these proposals and outright support for sovereignty hinges on a belief in their workability that flies in the face of his empirical assessment of the situation. The most probable outcome of either scenario is another “rejection” of Quebec’s demands and, thus, the reinforcement of the legitimacy of a remedial secession. See Laforest, “The Need for Dialogue and How to Achieve It,” 413–27. Laforest, Trudeau and the End of a Canadian Dream, esp. 38–55. Ibid.,148–9. Ibid., esp. 125–50. Ibid., 149. Ibid., 52. Laforest, “Fédéralisme et morale,” 103. Laforest, Trudeau and the End of a Canadian Dream, 194. See Prévost, “Locke, Laforest et le problème constitutionnel canadien,” and Laforest’s reply in “The True Nature of Sovereignty.” Laforest now agrees that his Lockean framework was too radical but continues to deny any meaningful distinction between procedural and substantive grievances: “[i]n constitutional matters, process becomes a part of substance.” Ibid., 303–4. This is another oversimplification, but a sustained debate with Laforest cannot be undertaken here.

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53 See Seymour, La nation en question; Monière, Pour comprendre le nationalisme, 125–41; Couture, Nielsen, and Seymour, “Afterword.” 54 Seymour, La nation en question, 155. 55 Ibid., 171. 56 Buchanan, “Theories of Secession,” 49. 57 Part of Buchanan’s quarrel with proponents of a primary right of secession is their supposed failure to think through the institutional ramifications of their theoretical arguments. However appealing a permissive theory of secession appears on a speculative level, its application in international law would, in his view, be disastrous. 58 Ibid., 55. 59 Norman, “The Ethics of Secession as the Regulation of Secessionist Politics,” 40. 60 Seymour, La nation en question, 147–62. 61 As noted in n11, I do not accept that the “remedial right” argument would relieve Quebec of any legal obligation to negotiate secession in good faith with its Confederation partners. That our constitution is imperfectly just does not translate into carte blanche against all respect for constitutionalism and rule of law. This would be so only if we accepted Laforest’s polarized way of thinking, according to which, speaking crudely, a constitution is either perfectly just or total rubbish. Better to say that, since our constitution is not fully just, it should not be taken to have an absolute value over all other moral considerations at play. And I should not be read as implying here that Canada is morally required to roll over meekly in those negotiations, making no (reasonable) demands of its own, as required for the present and future welfare of its own citizens. No, the implication is rather that, in the state of affairs as we find it, our insistence on the rule of Canadian law has to have decent limits. We ought not to push it so far as to deprive Quebec of its right, as a nationality-based unit, to seek dignity by other means if it cannot find it within our constitution. Thus, invoking “rule of law” against a U.D.I. that followed failed secession negotiations would be – given the view of multinational justice outlined in chapter 2 – decidedly unjust. The same would not necessarily be true for a U.D.I. that pre-empted a reasonable effort at negotiation, as mandated by the Secession Reference. 62 Ibid., 157. 63 Russell and Ryder, “Ratifying a Postreferendum Agreement on Quebec Sovereignty,” 337. The authors go on to argue that section 35 itself could not be amended without Aboriginal consent: “Amending section 35 without Aboriginal consent, to enable the abrogation of treaty rights without Aboriginal consent, would ... violate both the Crown’s fiduciary obligations embodied in Canadian domestic law, as well as emerging international norms.” Ibid., 338.

Notes to pages 97–100

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Subsequent agreements between Quebec and its Aboriginal peoples, such as the 2002 “Paix des Braves” with the Crees and the “Sannarutik” agreement with the Inuit of Nunavik, do nothing to change these legal dynamics – if anything, they merely compound them. See the somewhat jaundiced discussion in Frances Widdowson, “Inventing Nationhood,” as well as Salée, “The Québec State and Indigenous Peoples,” in Gagnon, ed., Québec: State and Society, 3rd ed., 97–124. McNeil’s argument is that Canada’s title is no more valid than that of Quebec and that, therefore, the negation of treaties would cause title to revert to the indigenous inhabitants. See his “Aboriginal Nations and Québec’s Boundaries.” Such matters are also probed in Turpel, “Does the Road to Québec Sovereignty Run through Aboriginal Territory?”; Varty, Who Gets Ungava?; and Morse, “How Would Secession Affect Aboriginal Peoples and Aboriginal Rights?” Grand Council of the Crees, Sovereign Injustice, 278. The consensual amending formula is explicitly stated in Gouvernement du Québec, James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement and Complementary Agreements, Sec. 2, 2.15. That much is clear from the Secession Reference. Morse, “How Would Quebec Secession Affect Aboriginal Peoples,” 123. The otherwise perceptive Daniel Turp seems to suggest this: “the Inuit, Crees, and Naskapi nations no longer have any territory of their own; by agreement, they gave up any rights they had over their land, and they cannot simply reappropriate it on the grounds that they are exercising their right to selfdetermination.” Daniel Turp, “Quebec’s Democratic Right to Self-Determination,” 119; Gourdeau’s “La soveraineté,” 93, makes the same mistake. While sovereigntists can always, as I noted earlier, deny the legitimacy of the Canadian constitution in general terms, it seems difficult to argue that the legal fiduciary obligation of Canada to Aboriginal people has no independent moral force. Nor does injustice in other areas of the constitution invalidate this specific constitutional duty. On this question, justice and rule of law do seem to run together. Hogg, “Principles Governing the Secession of Quebec,” 44. Predictably, the Crees agree, as does Monahan, “Cooler Heads Shall Prevail,” 10. Young, The Secession of Quebec, 220. Falk, “The Relevance of the Right of Self-Determination,” 62. “We do not think a separate Quebec State could do the job, could not [sic] provide the same range of protections or opportunities for the exercise of our rights and interests. At the moment, the distribution of federal-provincial powers safeguards us against the intrusive actions of provincial governments. In an independent Quebec there would no longer be another level of

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government to act as a check.” Grand Council of the Crees, Never Without Consent, 188–9. 74 Some sort of statute of limitations conceivably could be attached to this condition, of course. 75 Monahan and Bryant, with Coté, “Coming to Terms with Plan B,” 292.

chapter five 1 Note that redistributive arguments are, somewhat arbitrarily, set aside here. 2 Chennells, The Politics of Nationalism in Canada, 212. 3 “Even if Canadian federalism eventually fails, it would not have been a moral failure. On the contrary, I would argue that it has been a success, regardless of what happens with Quebec, since it has enabled Canadians to achieve prosperity and freedom with an almost complete absence of violence, Moreover, federalism has made possible the development of strong liberal and democratic traditions within both English and French Canada. As a result, should federalism fail, the result would almost surely be two peaceful and prosperous liberal democracies where there used to be one. Multination federalism in Canada may prove to be simply a transitional phase between British colonization and the birth of two independent liberal-democratic states, but if so, it will have been a good midwife.” Kymlicka, “Minority Nationalism and Multination Federalism,” 119. Note that the only thing Kymlicka is prepared to recognize as a “moral failure” is a failure to be liberal. Other goods simply are assumed away. This says a lot about the limitations of liberal theory in the Rawlsian tradition, a point developed in the next chapter. 4 Yack, “The Myth of the Civic Nation,”105. 5 It may, however, serve a valuable role as a supplement to other arguments, none of which might be fully convincing but which, all told, may form an impressive battery against dissociation. 6 See Cook, “The Canadian Dilemma”; Kennedy, “Nationalism and Self-Determination”; Smiley, Canada in Question, ch. 9; Massey, On Being Canadian, esp. 18; Morton, “Clio in Canada,” 49; Holmes, “Nationalism in Canadian Foreign Policy”; Brady, “The Meaning of Canadian Nationalism.” 7 Smith, “Metaphor and Nationality in North America,” in Smith, Canada: An American Nation? 152. 8 See McRoberts, “Canada and the Multinational State.” 9 A related complication is that authors in the nineteenth century threw around the concept of “nationhood” more freely than do contemporary theorists and often took “nationality” to be interchangeable with what we would consider “ethnocultural” or “polyethnic” diversity. Thus, Acton can likewise

Notes to pages 107–10

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be read as defending all forms of ethnic pluralism within states, rather than what we would recognize as a properly multinational form of polity, although this does not seem to be how most interpreters have read him. For our part, this book proceeds armed with Kymlicka’s categorical distinction between polyethnic and multinational diversity and, for better or worse, takes Acton’s arguments to be applicable to this. LaSelva, The Moral Foundations of Canadian Federalism, 159. Ibid., 162. Ibid., 158. This is not to endorse or overlook the elision of federalism and multinationality. Indeed, this raises some difficulties for his followers, as we’ll see This is not a big leap. Daniel Elazar accepts the Actonian argument that sociological or national pluralism within a state enhances liberty, but adds the obvious point that such pluralism is more secure if it has institutional guarantees (of jurisdictional autonomy, etc.). Federalism is thus positioned as a logical extension of Acton’s argument. See Elazar, Federalism and the Way to Peace, esp. 1–34. LaSelva, Moral Foundations, 162. Acton, “Nationality,” 156. It should be remembered that “race,” in this context, almost certainly entails more than biology – often serving in nineteenth-century discourse as something close to what we now call “culture.” Ibid.,147. “The co-existence of several nations under the same State is a test, as well as the best security of its freedom. It is also one of the chief instruments of civilisation ... Where political and national boundaries coincide, society ceases to advance, and nations relapse into a condition corresponding to that of men who renounce intercourse with their fellow-men.” Ibid., 160–1. “Freedom” and “civilisation” (meaning intellectual, cultural, commercial, and political development) are distinct threads. Remember, we are not considering theories of distributive justice here. Otherwise any resemblance between Acton and Rawls would be remote indeed. Ibid., 159. Ibid., 168. This would result, Mill thought, from various nationalities conceiving of the state as a tool to be marshalled against their rivals. Without the deep solidarity that only national bonds provide, a state risks degenerating into an instrument of oppression deployed by warring factions of the citizenry. Mill, “Representative Government,” 361–2. Acton, “Nationality,” 160. Ibid.

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Vernon, “The Federal Citizen,” 11. Italics added. Ibid., 11–12. Morton, “Clio in Canada,” 49. Trudeau, “Federalism, Nationalism, and Reason,” in Federalism and the French Canadians, 182–90. 29 Trudeau, “New Treason of the Intellectuals,” in ibid., 155–9. 30 This reading – which positions Trudeau as prepared to take nationalism as a given and work to minimize the harm it inflicts – is certainly tenable. But Jocelyn Laclure, in his admirable Récits identitaires, esp. 144, rightly draws attention to Trudeau’s oscillations. These are especially pronounced in “New Treason of the Intellectuals.” On the one hand, Trudeau there takes nationality as “a reality of our time,” an ineradicable raw datum in any useful modern political theory (177). Yet he simultaneously informs the reader that nations “belong to a transitional period in world history” (ibid.) and that “the history of civilization is a chronicle of the subordination of tribal ‘nationalism’ to wider interests” (ibid., 156). Indeed, it sometimes seems that Trudeau’s project is not simply about managing nationalism, but transcending it altogether. “There is, or will be, a Canadian nation in so far as the ethnic communities succeed in exorcizing their own respective nationalisms. If, then, a Canadian nationalism does take form, it will have to be exorcized in its turn, and the Canadian nation will be asked to yield a part of its sovereignty to a higher authority.” Ibid., 155, n8. So stated, Canadian federalism is a way of exorcising the nationalisms of French and English-speaking Canada – as part of a wider project of global federation leading, ultimately, to a wholly cosmopolitan world. Some interpreters place great emphasis on this substantive conception of progress: “Trudeau looks forward to a world beyond emotionalism and nationalism where a new technocratic elite will coolly and wisely guide the affairs of men” and propounds a “new morality” in which the “emotional masses” will be “guided firmly by wiser men to the point where they can exercise reason.” Laxer and Laxer, The Liberal Idea of Canada, 94–5. The question thus arises as to whether Trudeau’s critique of nationalism is best understood as an outgrowth of his concern with liberal justice – the assumption being that nationalist passions, once politicized, risk sweeping justice before them – or whether it mainly emanates from some substantive ideal of maximally rational human agency. If the political order exists above all to promote such agency, then Trudeau was a “perfectionist,” seeking to subordinate the state to this particular vision of the good life. This goes beyond liberalism as we have defined it. All this may reflect nothing more than the difficulties inherent in trying to cram Trudeau into a framework (neutrality/perfectionism) that became de 25 26 27 28

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rigueur only after he had abandoned the academy (and it is interesting that Trudeau’s elision of reason and liberal justice parallels that of Rawls himself in A Theory of Justice, elements of which Rawls later rejected as too perfectionist because too grounded in a Kantian view of reason). What really counts is that the upshot of his political prescriptions is a mainstream procedural liberalism that seeks to carve out fair rules of contestation in which autonomous individuals may freely pursue their ends. “A constitution of free men must be free from bias,” Trudeau writes, and “a human being in the privacy of his own mind has the exclusive authority to choose his own scale of values.” Thus, “a good constitution is one that does not prejudge any of these questions, but leaves citizens free to orient their human destinies as they see fit” (“Quebec and the Constitutional Problem,” Federalism and the French Canadians, 11–12). This sounds very much like, say, Dworkin. On this matter, see Hiemstra, Trudeau’s Political Philosophy, esp. 1–29; and Whitaker, “Reason, Passion and Interest,” in Whitaker, A Sovereign Idea, esp. 139–40. The literature on Canadian unity has often taken “federalism” and Quebec-in-Canada to be synonymous, thus collapsing federalism and multinationality. It is interesting, if somewhat anachronistic, to ask whether the classic texts on federalism in the history of ideas display a similar elision. Alain-G. Gagnon seems to imply as much, marshalling Proudhon and Montesquieu in a defence of asymmetrical federalism that doubles as an argument for multinational states. Gagnon’s case is grounded on three values: the protection of pluralism, which federalism sustains by offering jurisdictional autonomy to minority peoples; a Kymlickian understanding of equality of persons which includes the equitable treatment of communities, accommodated by asymmetry in a federal structure; and deliberative democracy, which is best realized in small communities marked by solidarity, viz., provinces. See Gagnon, “The moral foundation of asymmetrical federalism.” It is revealing, incidentally, that Gagnon’s arguments overwhelmingly emphasize the merits of decentralization. None of the above assertions could independently justify the union of such jurisdictions and the partial surrender of sovereignty to a central authority. Gagnon simply takes such union as given. We may safely assume that, for Gagnon, as for many Quebec nationalists, the arguments for union (unlike those for decentralization) are largely instrumental. And this is inadequate. We need an explanation of why nations ought to want to share a polity, quite apart from the conveniences that accrue to those that do. Trudeau, “Nationalist Alienation,” Federalism and the French Canadians, 146. Trudeau, “Foreword,” ibid., xxii. Young argues that a centralizing dynamic may ensue but also that the reconstitution of Canada will unfold with the minimum possible constitutional

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amendments – thus ensuring the perpetuation of federalism. See The Secession of Quebec, esp. 75–86, and 213–34. Actually, there is a way of affirming Quebec-in-Canada via a liberal defence of federalism. First, we would need to show that federalism promotes liberalism or some demonstrably “liberal” value (e.g., tolerance, liberty, respect for rights, rule of law, etc.). Then we would need to demonstrate that Quebec has been, and continues to be, a crucial force in sustaining a federal system in Canada. If both points could be established, we would have an indirect liberal argument for Quebec’s ongoing participation. It happens that each position has, indeed, been made; but I’m dealing here with more direct arguments. Trudeau, “New Treason of the Intellectuals,” 169. Note, however, that Trudeau is either subtler or less consistent on this front than his opponents generally perceive. He elsewhere concedes the point that nationalism might not be innately intolerant, writing that for “some people who call themselves nationalists,” nationalism is like “a dream which inspires the individual and motivates his actions, perhaps irrationally but not necessarily negatively. I cannot, of course, quarrel with people merely because they wish to drain two centuries of history out of a definition. I can only say that it is not about their nationalism that I am writing.” In other words, nationalism might not be a priori illiberal, but as a matter of historical fact, it is. “Federalism, Nationalism, and Reason,” 190. See also “New Treason of the Intellectuals,” 175. Trudeau, “New Treason of the Intellectuals,” 162–3. An exclusively English-Canadian nationalism might nowadays seem unlikely, given the multicultural diversity that has marked the self-understanding of Canada outside Quebec over the last half-century. In terms of the modified argument from intrinsic consequences derived from Acton by Trudeau, this is not the point. Only if a given manifestation of diversity is sufficiently powerful to “break the country” can it be thought adequate to the purpose of creating structural barriers to illiberal nationalism. Assorted ethnocultural diversities might or might not fit this bill, but la nation canadienne-française certainly does. But more is said about the prospects for illiberal nationalism in a Canadian remainder state in the discussion of arguments from extrinsic consequences against secession, below. In any case, it can plausibly be argued that English Canada continues to harbour a flourishing nationalism. See, for instance, Alain Dubuc’s contribution to Saul, Dubuc, and Erasmus, The LaFontaine Baldwin Lectures, Volume One, 55–86; Lee and Cardinal, “Hegemonic Nationalism and the Politics of Feminism and Multiculturalism in Canada”; or Millard, Riegel, and Wright, “Here’s Where We Get Canadian.” Whether that nationalism is liberal is not,

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from the modified version of Acton deployed here, particularly relevant, since all nationalism is thought to have the potential for excess. Trudeau’s work habitually treats words like “region” and “ethnic group” as interchangeable with “nation.” This follows from his definition of nationhood as “being little more than a state of mind.” Any cleavage can serve as a basis for nationhood. But the important consideration is the Weberian relationship between nationhood and statehood. “[W]hen a tightly knit minority within a state begins to define itself forcefully and consistently as a nation, it is triggering a mechanism which will tend to propel it towards full statehood.” “Federalism, Nationalism, and Reason,” 188. The mere fact that English-speaking Canada has its own important ethnocultural and regional scissions does not make it a multinational entity. Only if those sub-units conceived of themselves in explicitly “national” terms would this hold. Therefore, Canada, in Trudeau’s thought, requires Quebec if it is to be a multinational state (Aboriginal peoples being marginal to his writings). Trudeau, “Federalism, Nationalism, and Reason,” 192. Whitaker, “Reason, Passion, and Interest,” 145. Trudeau, “Federalism, Nationalism, and Reason,” 192. Ibid., 194. Mathie, “Political Community and the Canadian Experience,” 10. “French and English are equal in Canada because each of these linguistic groups has the power to break the country.” Trudeau, “Quebec and the Constitutional Problem,” 31. Consistent with his Hobbesian tendencies, Trudeau declined to assume that political actors are motivated by justice per se. This means that nations could only count on just treatment if it were in the interests of state managers to pursue it. As a consequence, smaller national groups can take no comfort in Trudeau’s contractual federalism; only those with the “power to break the country” have sufficient leverage to ensure neutrality of treatment. LaSelva explains Trudeau’s quest for justice, in the form of a Charter, in part as an attempt to address this lacuna. See the very interesting discussion in his The Moral Foundations of Canadian Federalism, chs 4 and 5. Trudeau, “Federalism, Nationalism, and Reason,” 193. At least, “in cases where there is a real alternative” to the existing arrangement. Ibid., 192. This poses certain difficulties because Trudeau is so adamant about the “auto-destructiveness of nationalism” that his reader is left wondering whether secession is ever a “real alternative.” It can be said that Trudeau exaggerates this auto-destructive aspect because he defines “nationality” in a highly subjective manner, such that any group,

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regional or ethnocultural, can qualify as a nation if it chooses. In short, he refuses to admit any difference between nationalist theories of secession, which offer some objective criteria in addition to self-definitional criteria for determining which units are nations, and pure “choice” theories. So it is hardly surprising that secession seems self-evidently a Pandora’s Box. Yet, despite all this, a case could be made that Trudeau did come to think that independence is a “real alternative” for Quebecers. “I do not doubt for one instant that [Quebecers] would be capable of making Quebec an independent country,” he writes. “A Reply to Lucien Bouchard,” Against the Current, 289. Certainly he argues that secession would entail great costs but does not necessarily denounce the option as unavailable or “unreal.” Mathie, “Political Community and the Canadian Experience,” 10. Ibid., 9. Trudeau, “Federalism, Nationalism and Reason,” 195. This is one reason for the divergence between Mathie and Whitaker, who see Trudeau as accepting the unavoidability of nationalism and seeking only to manage it, and those such as Hiemstra, Maclure, and Laxer, who give more weight to Trudeau’s cosmopolitan leanings and see his anticipation of a world state as central to his outlook, rather than as somewhat idle speculation. In fact, Trudeau did occasionally indulge in thoughts of a cosmopolitan future, but his real interest lay in creating a Canada that could serve as a model of polyethnic pluralism and justice for the developing world. This is not necessarily the same thing; for such a project in no way requires us to take the next step and champion cosmopolitanism. For Trudeau, of course, such abuses were inevitable. According to our modified view of nationalism, they are only a risk involved in nationalist politics, not an inevitability. Note that this reasoning can provide a critique of forms of dissociation other than the secession. The less institutional space is shared between constituent nationalities, the less effective each is likely to be as a check on the other. Some radically decentralized “Canada-Quebec partnership,” in which each national partner functions largely as a sovereign unit save for some carefully delineated and limited set of shared concerns, would minimize the array of institutions that are proofed against monolithic nationalism. See, especially, Cook, Canada, Quebec, and the Uses of Nationalism. “Separatist Counter-Revolutionaries,” Federalism and the French Canadians, 204–12, must be the most virulent example. Note that Trudeau did not deny that provincial jurisdictions offered a locus in which national minorities could practice the arts of democratic governance. He eschewed, however, any absolute identification of Quebec state and French-Canadian nationality. Quebec

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was a jurisdiction in which French Canadians could be a majority but must not be conceived as the expression of an exclusively French-Canadian national identity. Nemni and Nemni, “A Conversation with Pierre Trudeau,” 99. Trudeau’s influential broadside against the Meech Lake Accord argued overwhelmingly from the “dynamics of power,” the theme of the formal equality of individuals being much less in evidence. See Johnston, ed., With a Bang, Not a Whimper. Consult also Cook, “Quebec: Federalism or Independence?,” in Cook, The Maple Leafs Forever, 94. Institutionalist scholars such as Donald Smiley and Alan Cairns have made similar arguments. See Smiley, Canada in Question, 294; and Cairns, “The Fragmentation of Canadian Citizenship,” in his Reconfigurations: Canadian Citizenship and Constitutional Change. This is a hard dispute to arbitrate. Many assertions about the likely effects of a given constitutional change on stability, being largely speculative, amount to little more than ballast for a pre-given ideological position, whether sovereigntist, nationalist, or federalist. Wayne Norman makes this point in “Justice and stability in multinational societies.” Yet the proposition that decentralization breeds a self-perpetuating dynamic of fragmentation is a respectable one in comparative politics; c.f., Tarlton, “Symmetry and Asymmetry as Elements of Federalism” and Meadwell, “Institutional Design and State Breaking in North America.” Enric Fossas usefully reviews the debate in “National Plurality and Equality.” The present author would settle for prescriptions such as those contained in the Meech Lake Accord, which arguably strike a plausible balance between accommodating (very) moderate nationalists and containing the dynamic of fragmentation. Saul, Dubuc, and Erasmus, The LaFontaine-Baldwin Lectures, 68. Ibid. Trudeau, “New Treason of the Intellectuals,” 177. See, especially, ibid., 155–9. “With the ebbing of religious belief, the suffering which belief in part composed did not disappear. Disintegration of paradise: nothing makes fatality more arbitrary. Absurdity of salvation: nothing makes another style of continuity more necessary. What then was required was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning ... [f]ew things were (are) better suited to this end than an idea of nation. If nation-states are widely conceded to be ‘new’ and ‘historical,’ the nations to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past, and, still more important, glide into a limitless future. It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny.” Anderson, Imagined Communities, 11–12. See also Tamir, “Pro Patria Mori! Death and the State.”

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64 Trudeau, “New Treason of the Intellectuals,” 175. 65 Cameron, Nationalism, Self-determination and the Quebec Question, 78–9. 66 The underlying problem implicit in Trudeau’s account is how to ensure that the managers of a state are adequately rational. He offered no solution to this puzzle, save to describe the logic of the multinational state and, eventually, run for office. 67 The efficacy of bills of rights in the service of liberal values is, of course, open to dispute. Knopff and Morton, for instance, attack the Charter as incompatible with the best kind of liberal-democratic values. But it seems more interesting to accept the basic assumption of this modified Actonian thesis and see how far it can take us rather than regurgitate debates over the merits of rights-based judicial review. See Knopff and Morton, The Charter Revolution and the Court Party. 68 Trudeau, “There Must Be a Sense of Belonging,” With a Bang, Not a Whimper, 25. This is not to deny that Trudeau was also moved by an authentic allegiance to liberal justice, quite apart from any other considerations. On the Charter as a multifaceted weapon in Canada’s unity conflicts, see Cairns, “The Political Purposes of the Charter”; and Russell, “The Political Purposes of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.” 69 Trudeau, “A Constitutional Declaration of Rights,” 54. 70 Mathie, “Political Community and the Canadian Experience,” 11. 71 Trudeau, “There Must Be a Sense of Belonging,” 31. 72 It is true that Canada might never have adopted a bill of rights had Quebec not posed a fundamental challenge to its stability. And it may not be wholly irrelevant that institutionally similar states lacking comparably powerful national minorities – e.g., Britain and Australia – have yet to entrench a charter. 73 It might amend the Charter in various ways, of course. Sections 23–4 would be obvious targets. See Young, The Secession of Quebec, 222–31. 74 Acton, “Nationality,” 165. 75 Ibid., 164. 76 Trudeau makes a rather notorious claim about the possibly tempering effects of the federal/multinational states on their citizens. He speculates that the experience of living out a multinational federalism might lead people – whether leaders or citizens – to overcome their fixation on the very ideas of national self-determination and sovereignty. “[T]here will flow more good than evil from the present tribulations of federalism if they serve to equip lawyers, social scientists, and politicians with the tools required to build societies of men ordered by reason.” And “[i]n the world of today, when whole groups of so-called sovereign states are experimenting with rational forms of integration, the exercise of sovereignty will not only be divided within federal states;

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it will have to be further divided between the states and the community of states. If this tendency is accentuated the very idea of national sovereignty will recede and, with it, the need for an emotional justification such as nationalism ... Thus, there is some hope that in advanced societies, the glue of nationalism will become as obsolete as the divine right of kings; the title of the state to govern and the extent of its authority will be conditional upon rational justification; a people’s consensus based on reason will supply the cohesive force that societies require; and politics both within and without the state will follow a much more functional approach to the problems of government. If politicians must bring emotions into the act, let them get emotional about functionalism (Trudeau, “Federalism, Nationalism, and Reason, 196)!” In other words, we may reach a point in which borders cease to be based at all upon “emotion” and rest wholly with practical considerations, bounded by law. And the experiment in multinational federation may be a bridge to this icily technocratic horizon. This is another manifestation of the debate over reason and liberal neutrality in Trudeau’s thought, canvassed in note 30. In any case, this fancy of Trudeau’s has no direct link to the argument from liberty. It is better understood as a variant on the Actonian thesis about progress, which we shall revisit later. Of greater interest here is the possibility that the experience of multinational federalism could alter the contours of a political culture. This insight can be, and has been, connected with arguments from justice in interesting ways. Smith, “Metaphor and Nationality in North America,” 154. Saul, Reflections of a Siamese Twin, 13. On the significance of Careless’s essay, see Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 261–2; and Shore, “Introduction,” 25; also 195. Bell, The Roots of Disunity, 191. Ibid., 187. Powe, A Canada of Light, 152. Ibid., 140–1. Saul, Reflections, 81. Fulford, “A Post-Modern Dominion: The Changing Nature of Canadian Citizenship.” See also Smith, “First Nations, Race, and the Pluralist Idea,” Canada: An American Nation? esp. 225–7; Gilbert, “Mounties, Muggings, and Moose”; Gwyn, Nationalism Without Walls, 243–53; and Fleras and Elliott, Unequal Relations, 382–5. The degree to which Canada’s supposed postmodernism has become a mainstream trope is illustrated by Paul Martin, Jr.’s breezy assertion: “[w]e are the first postmodern country.” Bauch, “Martin boasts of fiscal record.” For a contrary view, see McRoberts, “Canada and the Multinational State.”

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86 This is how Gilbert puts it: “To view national identity as something which can be categorized, that has absolute signifiers, is to suppose a teleology which ... is not authentic to Canadian experience.” “Mounties, Muggings, and Moose,” 179. The apparent contradiction between authenticity and indeterminacy appears to trouble Gilbert not at all. 87 See Lyotard, “The Postmodern Condition.” 88 Of course, serious “critical” theorists would scorn the idea that Canada approaches anything like this. See, for example, Day, Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity. 89 Fulford, “A Post-Modern Dominion,” 118. The quotation marks are no doubt meant to express the author’s remove from the ideals he is encapsulating. 90 Of course, one can be “liberated” from a meta-narrative only to be cast adrift, unable to make sense of one’s life, which is hardly empowering in any recognizable sense. 91 Powe, A Canada of Light, 104. 92 Hutcheon, “As Canadian as ... Possible ... under the Circumstances!,” 341. 93 See, for instance, Powe’s own elegiac portrait of Trudeau in retirement: “Pierre Trudeau: The Elusive I.” 94 Powe, A Canada of Light, 151. 95 Smith, “Metaphor and Nationality in North America,” 133. 96 Powe, A Canada of Light, 20. 97 Saul, Reflections, 81. 98 Smith, “First Nations, Race, and the Pluralist Idea,” 227. 99 Mirchandani and Tastsoglou, “Towards a Diversity beyond Tolerance,” 49. When Trudeau proclaims that”[t]olerance and moderation are found in this country perhaps in larger measure than anywhere else,” (Trudeau, Conversations with Canadians, 191), or Vincent Massey writes that “in no country in the world does tolerance mean more than in ours” (Massey, On Being Canadian, 24), they articulate a standard trope. 100 It can be related to his cosmopolitan and rationalist preoccupations, however. Christian and Campbell represent Trudeau as arguing that federalism “not only gives nationalist feelings an outlet at a level where the harm they do is minimized, but in the long run teaches toleration, and works towards the elimination of nationalism.” Christian and Campbell, Political Parties and Ideologies in Canada, 70. Italics added. 101 Berger, Fragile Freedoms, xvii. 102 Ibid., 263. 103 See, for instance, Melzer, Weinberger, and Zinman, eds, Multiculturalism and American Democracy. 104 For a good thumbnail sketch of debates around multiculturalism, see Fleras and Elliott, Unequal Relations, ch. 9.

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105 Of course, a battery of criticisms has been levelled against multiculturalism in Canada, ranging from laments for its role in fragmenting the country to charges that it is fatally superficial and/or outright duplicitous in co-opting radical claims for a redistribution of power. The former critique is well expressed by Bissoondath, Selling Illusions; the latter, most impressively by Kallen, “Multiculturalism: Ideology, Policy and Reality.” Multiculturalism has also been framed as a way of constituting and reproducing subjectivities that have their origins in relations of social power. Day’s Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity is on the leading edge of this Foucaltian critique. 106 Kymlicka’s allegiance to the neutral state is bracketed in various ways. He does not propose to tolerate manifestly illiberal practices, and he is comfortable endorsing official languages and political institutions that are the legacy of specific cultures. This seems sensible: if we grant the precept that it is good to have a society in which people can communicate and partake of shared instruments of common decision, then there is no point in attacking such structures as irredeemably and unjustly biased simply because of their origin in a particular culture. The question is not whether these institutions are exactly like those of the societies from which newcomers have arrived; given that Canada draws immigrants from scores of different cultures and countries, insisting on these immigrants’ right to have full access to comprehensive replicas of the institutions of their countries of origin would be to deny the desirability of a shared society. The proper question is whether Canadian institutions can accommodate such newcomers without imposing unreasonable costs on either the institutions or the newcomers. 107 Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism. 108 Reitz and Breton, The Illusion of Difference, 14–15. 109 Day, Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity, 148–9. 110 Eva Mackey cites the Beaudoin-Dobbie Report to this effect in her The House of Difference, 24. 111 See Porter, “Ethnic Pluralism in Canadian Perspective,” and Bissoondath, Selling Illusions. 112 Again: multiculturalism obviously had to do with more than national unity. It no doubt reflected a heightened awareness of the reality of ethnocultural diversity in Canada – as represented by advocates of the “Third Force,” such as Senator Paul Yuzyk. Straightforward electoral politics were another likely factor since multiculturalism helped to reinforce ties between ethnocultural groups and the Liberal Party. See Evelyn Kallen, “Multiculturalism: Ideology, Policy and Reality,” esp. 57. 113 The classic rebuttal is that of Rocher, “Multiculturalism: The Doubts of a Francophone.” Other Quebec nationalists, such André Burelle, offer a more

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general critique of multiculturalism as incompatible with the project of building a coherent and sufficiently unified society. See Burelle, Le mal canadien, 79–82. The tensions are clearly expressed in Canada Ethnocultural Council, “A Dream Deferred” and Evelyn Kallen, “The Meech Lake Accord: Entrenching a Pecking Order of Minority Rights.” Alan C. Cairns broke much of the ground in exploring the conflicts between “Charter Canadians,” including multicultural groups, and Quebec nationalists. It forms a major theme of the essays gathered in such collections as Reconfigurations, Disruptions and Charter versus Federalism. That is to say, the zero-sum dichotomy between “multiculturalism” and “biculturalism” removes the distinction between multinational and ethnocultural diversity. See McRoberts, Misconceiving Canada, 117–36. There is no doubt that Trudeau deployed multiculturalism partly as a way of occluding this categorical distinction, but neither the evolving policy file of multiculturalism nor the wider ideals that inform it should be reduced to Pierre Trudeau’s proclivities. Claude Ryan, “Canada: Bicultural or Multicultural?,” 150. Italics added. Ryan is here taken to be arguing that we should maintain the categorical distinction between polyethnic and multinational diversity while also striving fully to be just in integrating immigrants and coping with polyethnic pluralism. In substance, if not in nomenclature, then, this accords with Kymlicka’s position. Dion, “Francophone Communities outside Quebec: At the Heart of the Canadian Ideal,” Straight Talk, 152. This is not quite identical to saying that secession would inaugurate a backlash against the institutional accommodation of cultural difference in Canada – although that is a plausible scenario, as I discuss later on. What is being asserted here is the possibility that Quebec-in-Canada is inherently valuable to multicultural goods, “the most solid and most durable basis of an acceptance policy towards other cultural values,” as Ryan puts it. Quite apart from its potential to spark a homogenizing backlash against diversity in English-speaking Canada, secession would extirpate one of the foundations for multiculturalism in our political culture. The interesting contingent connection between secession and multiculturalism – especially the idea that Quebec’s departure could plausibly be expected to spawn a backlash against the institutional accommodation of multiple forms of cultural diversity – is explored in sub-section eight, below. Reitz and Breton, The Illusion of Difference, esp. 27–89. Manzer, Public Policies and Political Development in Canada, 13.

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121 The superior liberal tolerance of governing elites in divided societies is a major theme of Chennells, The Politics of Nationalism in Canada. Frank Underhill makes a succinct case for the pivotal historical role of such leadership in The Image of Confederation, 47–58. 122 Walter Berns, “Constitutionalism and Multiculturalism,” 92. One study argues that “the development of multiculturalism in Australia differs significantly from the Canadian process. Australia adopted the name and rhetoric of multiculturalism from Canada, but employed the policy for different purposes ... It was, in essence, a policy that tried to adjust Australia to changing immigration patterns, rather than adjust Australia to a culturally diverse population ... it did not overtly challenge the status quo of Anglo-conformism” to the same extent as the Canadian policy. Osiowy, Multiculturalism Policy in Canada and Australia, 45. 123 Hawkins, Critical Years in Immigration, 217. Karim H. Karim personalizes the matter even more emphatically: “the Australian immigration minister, Al Grassby, visited Canada in 1973 and discovered multiculturalism. He took the idea back to Australia, which also adopted the policy.” “Multiculturalism in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom,” 137. Of course, one could argue that the two states faced similar kinds of challenges with ethnocultural diversity and would likely have concocted similar coping strategies independently of one another. But that Canada was at least innovative in this domain seems to be generally agreed. 124 Mazurek, “Defusing a Radical Social Policy,” 17. 125 It may be worth reminding the reader that, by “radical,” I mean any comprehensive transformation of the basic structure of the Canadian state – e.g., sweeping constitutional reform. It is a bizarre pathology of Canadian politics that we have tended to see demands for massive constitutional overhauls as something other than radical. 126 It is also assumed that actors will be able to implement their illiberal ends. 127 On this, see Mackey, The House of Difference, 14–16. 128 Parts of Bill 101 are almost certainly illiberal even on the generous reading of liberalism that could make room for la survivance – especially some of the provisions under chapter 5. See, for instance, Chennells, The Politics of Nationalism in Canada, 196–200. 129 Besides, attacking the legitimacy of la survivance may bring undesired consequences – at least if we believe that some sort of argument from la survivance is necessary to justify the integration of immigrants into a wider societal culture. I am inclined to think it is, but the point cannot be argued here.

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130 See Laforest, “Identité et pluralisme libéral au Québec”; and Maclure, Récits identitaires, esp. chs 2 and 4. Of course, the movement is not monolithic; the articles gathered in Venne, ed., Penser la nation québécoise offer an interesting cross-section of nationalist thought, and some of the essays (most strikingly, Serge Cantin’s “Pour sortir de la survivance”) are clearly written at some remove from liberal ideals. Most, however, grapple with questions of pluralism in a generous way. 131 It should also be noted that a sovereign Quebec might have a strong vested interest in convincing the international community of its liberalism. In this case, the (supposedly) exclusionary dispositions of sovereigntists might be trumped by a hard-headed realism. 132 Balthazar, “The Faces of Quebec Nationalism,” 16–17; see also Breton, “From Ethnic to Civic Nationalism: English Canada and Quebec,” and Salée, “Quebec’s Changing Political Culture.” 133 Covell, Thinking about the Rest of Canada, 2. 134 Derriennic, Nationalisme et démocratie, 22. 135 Ibid., 25. 136 Ibid., 39. 137 Stéphane Dion, “Canadian Diversity and the Recognition of Quebec,” Straight Talk, 145. Italics added. It should be noted that, despite this passage, Dion is not above arguing that sovereigntists actively are illiberal. 138 This, of course, is the tension: if Quebec nationalism already is fully liberal, how can it be argued that sovereignty will enhance its liberalism? See Gagnon and Rocher, “Pour prendre congé des fantômes du passé.” 139 Ibid., 475. 140 Ibid., 474. 141 Webber, “Just How Civic is Civic Nationalism in Quebec?,” 95. 142 Ibid. 143 On this, see Muller, “Introduction,” and Christopher Berry, “Conservatism and Human Nature.” 144 Young, The Secession of Quebec, 98. 145 Ibid., 196. See, however, Legault, “Les dangers d’une charte des droits enchâssée pour un Québec indépendant.” 146 Bercuson and Cooper, Deconfederation, 3. 147 “Canadians outside Quebec ... hardly would be in the mood for building a new and amicable relationship with a sovereign Quebec.” Indeed, “[o]penly confronting Quebec and even seeking vengeance for its ‘betrayal’ of Canada might help to solidify Canadians in their shaken sense of national community.” McRoberts, “After the Referendum,” 408–9. Denis Stairs discusses a possible “politics of rage” toward Quebec after secession in his “Canada and

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Quebec after Quebec Secession,” 35. See also, for instance, Banting, “If Quebec Separates,” 80; Young, The Secession of Quebec, 245–6; and Covell, Thinking about the Rest of Canada, 27. Cairns, “Looking into the Abyss,” 215. Ibid., 216. The imperturbable Robert Young puts it like this: “a Yes vote will cause profound uncertainty throughout the country. It implies precisely the kind of changes in calculations and attitudes and lifestyles that individuals make when the company they work for is taken over and the probability of keeping their jobs is reduced.” Young, The Secession of Quebec, 158 Banting, “If Quebec Separates,”167. Ibid., 170. Ibid. Ibid. Young, The Secession of Quebec, 160. Banting, “If Quebec Separates,” 224. Cairns, “Looking into the Abyss,” 219. See, for instance, Thorburn, “Disengagement,” 210; and McRoberts, “Protecting the Rights of Linguistic Minorities.” Young, conversely, maintains that “[t]here will be no formal, detailed treaty about minority rights.” The Secession of Quebec, 196–7. Gibbins, “Speculating on a Canada without Quebec,” 271. Ibid. The claim cannot be that Quebec nationalists have been major backers of Canadian multiculturalism; as previously noted, they have, if anything, been suspicious of the idea. Gibbins recognizes that the policy of multiculturalism has been intimately woven into the “Quebec question,” one offshoot of Trudeau’s determination to sever language and culture and thus repudiate “biculturalism” in Canada. Of course, Canada could already be thought wanting in this regard. But the point is not that Canada is, as it stands, the perfect expression of liberalism. Rather it is that secession could make matters worse. Kymlicka, Finding Our Way, 31–40. Of course, Kymlicka’s argument is contestable. Consider, for instance, Meghji, “Multiculturalism in the New Canada.” Peter Leslie implies as much in analysing Canada’s prospects after a UDI: “Remove Quebec, and the ROC would break apart under its own regional strains.” “Options for the Future of Canada,”134. See also Covell, Thinking about the Rest of Canada, 25–6. See, for instance, Banting, “If Quebec Separates,” 169.

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chapter six 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

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Acton, “On Nationality,” 160–1. Italics added. Smiley, The Canadian Political Nationality, 130. Ibid. Ibid., 135. Ibid., 130. Ibid., 132. Nye, “The American Sense of Mission,” in Nye, This Almost Chosen People, 164–207. Anthony D. Smith, “Chosen Peoples: Why Ethnic Groups Survive,” in Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, 125–47. On the former, see Laflèche, “The Providential Mission of the French Canadians”; for the latter, consult Berger, The Sense of Power, 217–32. McNaught, “The National Outlook of English-speaking Canadians,” 63. John Holmes writes: “[w]e [Canadians] cannot argue that we have a divine or racial mission, that we were created for a predestined purpose. We exist; therefore we think.” “Nationalism in Canadian Foreign Policy,” 219. See also Conway, “An ‘Adapted Organic Tradition.’” Conway, “An ‘Adapted Organic Tradition,’” 388. See Bell, The Roots of Disunity, Seymour Martin Lipset, Continental Divide, and Gad Horowitz, “Conservatism, Liberalism, and Socialism in Canada.” For an interesting analysis, see Mackey, The House of Difference, 50–70. This seems to be a fair reading of A Theory of Justice even if Rawls later concedes that the theory reflected a culturally bound set of intuitions. Things are much simpler if we adopt instead the bounded claims of Political Liberalism or those of any duly contextual account of liberal ideals, which accept from the outset that those ideals might be culturally and historically specific. The inspirational value to other cultures of our understanding of justice thus becomes purely incidental to the main purpose, which is to sort out how we think about justice and to ask what sort of polity we want to live in. For a spectacularly blunt defence of a liberalism that is nevertheless understood to be culturally relative, see various writings of Rorty, such as “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism” or “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” in Rorty, Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3, 167–85. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 13. Ibid., 148–9. One of the background conditions giving rise to the need for a theory of justice is that “many individuals coexist together at the same time on a definite geographical territory.” Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 126.

Notes to pages 157–64

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19 This does not imply that it contravenes liberal precepts, only that it is not reducible to them. 20 See Buchanan, Secession, 87–125; “Theories of Secession”; and “Democracy and Secession.” 21 Buchanan, “Theories of Secession,” 36. 22 Buchanan, Secession, 137. The Canadian constitution, as described in the Secession Reference, clearly meets this requirement. 23 Buchanan, “Theories of Secession,” 56–9. 24 See note 3, chapter 5. The quotation seems sufficiently useful to revisit here, encapsulating as it does the limits of liberal argument in this context. 25 This qualifier is needed because goods other than equal respect and autonomy might be thought to be involved in the Canadian endeavour, such as those canvassed in the next two chapters. 26 Trudeau, “New Treason of the Intellectuals,” 154. 27 Ibid., 179. 28 Office of the Prime Minister, “Notes for Remarks by the Prime Minister to a Joint Session of the U.S. Congress.” Trudeau is usually cited as having said “crime against humanity,” which suggests that such was his actual delivery, even if his notes use the less precise term “humanism.” 29 Office of the Prime Minister, “Transcript of the Prime Minister’s Address on National Television and Radio.” Italics added. 30 Norman, “The Ideology of Shared Values.” 31 Christiano, “Federalism as a Canadian National Ideal,” 256. 32 Ibid., 260. 33 Ibid., 257. 34 Forbes, “Trudeau’s Moral Vision,” 34. 35 Ibid., 31. 36 Powe reports that as of 1998 “for better or worse, we were still in the grip of Trudeau’s concept of country. No idea or concept, story or myth, had fully succeeded his dream.” Powe, “Pierre Trudeau: The Elusive I,” 407. 37 Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging, 147. 38 MacLennan is quoted in Kilbourn, “The Peaceable Kingdom Still,” 27. 39 Hutchison, The Unfinished Country, 307. 40 Cook, “Who Belongs Where?,” Canada, Quebec, and the Uses of Nationalism, 21. 41 Dion, “Canadian Diversity and the Recognition of Quebec,” 144. 42 Ryan, Regards sur le fédéralisme canadien, 214. 43 White, Non-territorial Federalism, 3. 44 Lamont, Breakup, 243. 45 Kymlicka, Finding Our Way, 3–4. 46 LaSelva, The Moral Foundations of Canadian Federalism, 167.

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Taylor, “Shared and Divergent Values,” in Reconciling the Solitudes, 183. Tully, “Introduction,” 7. Webber, Reimagining Canada, 32. Holmes, “Nationalism in Canadian Foreign Policy,” 219. For a related argument, see Lamont, Breakup, 239–40. It is perhaps unsurprising that a country so imbued with a sense of its own mission would tend to interpret the experience of other countries in a similar light. Clinton, “Address by William Jefferson Clinton,” 23. Lamont, Breakup, esp. 239–45. Doran, Why Canadian Unity Matters, 41. Ibid., 5. Italics in original. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 226. Ibid., 225. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 63. Doran grants that Canada, the U.S., and Mexico (which he includes, somewhat off-handedly, within this framework) represent distinct manifestations of democratic pluralism and explains this with reference to the debatable conceits of “mosaic” and “melting pot.” Despite such differences, he thinks that the continent as a whole projects “its singly most poignant message,” namely “a tolerance across linguistic-cultural, ethnic, and religious communities [that] has been hard-fought, mixed with backsliding but on the whole remarkable in its progress.” Ibid., 41. One can only imagine what a Noam Chomsky or Edward Said – or anyone contemplating America’s various military ventures over the past century – would make of this concept of “soft power.” Indeed, the notion seems particularly incongruous given the bellicose practices of the Bush administration, whatever else we think of these. Ibid., 63–4. Ibid., 251. Ibid., esp. 159–61. This is arguably a fin-de-siècle echo of the old “Domino Theory” of communism, but that is neither here nor there. See, for instance, Knox, “Sri Lanka peace deal forged on Canada’s federal model.” Note that “besides Canada, the federal systems of Australia, Germany and India are under study,” as well as that of Switzerland. See Doran, Why Canadian Unity Matters, ch. 5. Ibid., 34. See also Lamont, Breakup, 243.

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70 Richler, Barney’s Version, 386. 71 All the more so, if we accept Seymour’s strategies for containing partition, examined in chapter 4. 72 Carrier, “O Canada.”

chapter seven 1 LaSelva, The Moral Foundations of Canadian Federalism, xiii. 2 This recalls Aristotle: “if men are friends, there is no need of justice between them; whereas merely to be just is not enough – a feeling of friendship is necessary. Indeed the highest form of justice seems to have an element of friendly feeling in it.” Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 205. 3 LaSelva, The Moral Foundations of Canadian Federalism, 26. 4 Ibid., 23. 5 Ibid., 187. 6 Ibid., 159. 7 Ibid., 27. 8 See ibid., esp. 99–118. 9 Ibid., 5. 10 Ibid., 4. 11 Ibid., 187. 12 Ibid., 29. 13 Ibid., 172. 14 Ibid., 120. 15 E.g., ibid., 11, 28, 30. 16 Ibid., 180. 17 Cited in ibid., 8. 18 Ibid., 120. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 134. 21 Ibid., 134–5. 22 Ibid., 134. 23 Plato, Symposium and the Death of Socrates, 44–5.

chapter eight 1 Most developmental arguments in political theory retain a certain utopian air, looking as they do toward horizons of possibility more than realized fact. 2 See, for instance, Scott, “Political Nationalism and Confederation,” esp. 34. 3 Waite, ed., The Confederation Debates in the Province of Canada/1865, 51.

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Notes to pages 187–90

4 Cameron, Nationalism, Self-Determination and the Quebec Question, 77. Point (a) seems the stronger of the two, however. We do not have to deny that “creative ‘progressive’ relationships obtain among members of the same nationality” in order to claim that such relationships with be enhanced by additional contacts with other nationalities. Thus, Acton’s point about the value of cross-national fertilization retains some merit. The phrase “tradition of a situation” is taken from Taylor’s article of the same name in Reconciling the Solitudes, 135–9. 5 John Stuart Mill, “State of Society in America,” Collected Works of John Stuart Mill: Essays on Politics and Society, 94. 6 John Stuart Mill, “Representative Government,” in Utilitarianism, Liberty, Representative Government, 364. 7 Ibid., 364–5. 8 Ibid., 363. 9 Ibid., 362. 10 See ibid., 377. 11 Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, 78. 12 Ibid., 47. 13 The more equal the balance of power and numbers between the composite nationalities, the less the likelihood of a successful “blending.” See Mill, “Representative Government,” 364–6. 14 Carl Berger, The Sense of Power, 131. 15 Ibid., 144. 16 Lawren Harris, cited in Berger, “The True North Strong and Free,” 21. 17 Bruce Hutchison, The Unknown Country, 4. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 105. 20 Cited in Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 125. 21 Lower, “Two Ways of Life: The Primary Antithesis of Canadian History,” in his History and Myth, 60. 22 Ibid. 23 Lower, “Two Nations or Two Nationalities,” in ibid., 211. 24 Ibid., 204. 25 If Lower surrendered his dreams of racial fusion of French and English, the same was not true of his assimilationism vis-à-vis ethnocultural groups. See, for instance, “Immigration,” in ibid., 251–63; and “National Policy ... Revised Version,” in ibid., 166–75. 26 Conlogue, Impossible Nation, 155. 27 Innis, Bilingualism and Biculturalism, 36. 28 Ibid., 56.

Notes to pages 191–4

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29 This refers to the idea that “a culture is separate, bounded and internally uniform,” and perhaps also to “the desire to base nationality on objective cultural characteristics.” The “snooker ball” theory is now out of favour, supplanted by a view of culture as marked by innumerable borrowings, overlaps and interactions with other cultures, and by internal fissures, tensions, and contradictions. See Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 10; Moore, The Ethics of Nationalism, 57–9; and Maclure, Récits identitaires, 181–204. 30 Famously, “[i]t is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” Mill, “Utilitarianism,” in Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty and Representative Government, 9. The quotation on “elevated faculties” is from Fred Berger, cited in Donner, The Liberal Self, 119. 31 Ibid., 92–117. 32 Sharpless, The Literary Criticism of John Stuart Mill, 183. 33 Mill, “Autobiography,” in Mill, Essential Works, 104. Italics added. Elsewhere, “We have ... a twofold division of the merit which any set of political institutions can possess. It consists partly of the degree in which they promote the general mental advancement of the community, including under that phrase advancement in intellect, in virtue, and in practical activity and efficiency; and partly of the degree of perfection with which they organize the moral, intellectual, and active worth already existing ... A government is to be judged ... by what it makes of the citizens, and what it does with them.” Mill, “Representative Government,” 195. 34 Mill, “On Liberty,” in Essential Works, 264. 35 Mill, “Representative Government,” 217. 36 Mill, “Representative Government,” 277. 37 This criticism was directed against his “intuitionist” enemies, who sought to infer moral theory from human nature, but applies equally to Bentham’s levelling claim that pushpins is as good as poetry. 38 Berger, cited in Donner, The Liberal Self, 120. 39 Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, 40–7. 40 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 226. 41 Cohen, “Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy,” 100. Recall the discussion of deliberative democracy, and its working contrast with aggregative alternatives, in chapter 3. 42 Charles Blattberg propounds a model of “patriotic” citizenship in which a rich and empathetic dialogue takes for granted that a shared life – the “common good” – is desirable, and excludes any mention of the possibility of radical rupture. A truly patriotic politics, on his account, is impossible where the integrity of the polity itself is in question. Thus, it is a fatal mistake to ask the

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Notes to pages 195–200

question that animates this book – namely, what is the nature of our common good and what ideals might a shared life allow us to realize? But Blattberg may be closing the barn door here. To demand that we stop asking the question is simply unrealistic in a community that contains a powerful secessionist minority. It is also strikingly at odds with the goal that animates Blattberg’s own work – namely, an expressive harmony between constitution, polity, and citizen – inasmuch as the question “why stay together?” has been a fundamental facet of our politics for at least four decades. Deliberate, if selective, amnesia hardly seems compatible with a true expressive unity, at least if we take authenticity to be required for a satisfactory expressive reconciliation; in other words, if I deny fundamental facets of my political existence (such as the grave challenge that Quebec has posed to Canadian unity), I am not “expressing” it authentically. Blattberg is very fond of citing the lyrics of the Tragically Hip, but Elvis Costello’s “20% Amnesia” might be a more fitting pop anthem for his argument on this front. See Blattberg, Shall We Dance?, especially 32–6. Conlogue, Impossible Nation, 85. Ibid., 147. Webber, Reimagining Canada, 314. Ibid. Ibid., 315. Italics added. Kymlicka, “From Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism to Liberal Nationalism,” in Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular, 213. Ibid., 213–14. Taylor, “Shared and Divergent Values,” 182–3. Underhill, The Image of Confederation, 48. Ryan, Regards sur le fédéralisme canadien, 216–17. Meisel, “J’ai le gout du Québec but I Like Canada,” 294. Taylor, “Reply and Re-articulation,” 255. He cites Jeremy Webber on this point. Taylor, “Shared and Divergent Values,” 183. Ibid. Taylor, “Impediments to a Canadian Future,” in Reconciling the Solitudes, 200. Ibid., 199. Taylor, Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition,” 26. Ibid., 67. In a very interesting article, Daniel Weinstock argues that Taylor’s idea of “strong evaluation” – i.e., that all human agents acknowledge that certain aspirations and goals are “qualitatively higher” than others – is “a normative thesis, describing the manner in which human beings deliberate practically at their best, when they are fully instantiating some potentiality latent within all

Notes to pages 201–2

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humans.” Weinstock, “The Political Theory of Strong Evaluation,”172. On this interpretation, Taylor’s central purpose is to defend a “type of practical deliberation which will give rise to our being able to come up with better overall accounts of our good [and] is paradigmatically dialogical.” Ibid., 189. Weinstock proceeds to argue that the Rawlsian neutral state will better realize this ideal than any alternative. “The self-consciousness which is necessary for strong evaluation is most likely to occur in conditions of moral and cultural plurality” of the sort liberal neutrality defends. Ibid., 187. Weinstock is both on- and off-target. He helpfully identifies those elements in Taylor’s thought that connect dialogue across moral and cultural pluralism to a teleological ideal of individual development. On the other hand, Taylor himself insists that “strong evaluation” is not principally a normative concept. Rather it describes a fundamental attribute of all but the most pathological human agents, namely, the need to affirm some goods as qualitatively higher than others. See Taylor, “Reply and Re-articulation,” 249. While we have no reason to doubt that Taylor would welcome the mass dissemination of an ethos of reflexivity, he does not consistently claim that a commitment to such an ethos makes one a more fully human agent. Even the least reflexive among us is, on Taylor’s theory, constituted by moral sources and “strong evaluations,” whether or not these have been articulated. With the notion that a Rawlsian state is best for realizing the range of ideals given in “transformative” or “developmental” visions of the dialogical polity, we need not quarrel, except to note that this remains a case from goods other than liberal justice. Tully, “Introduction,” 20. “To achieve such a politics, the members of every Canadian community need to see themselves as connected, to some degree, with each other, which is to say that each must be sensitive to the single public common good that they all share.” Blattberg, Shall We Dance?, 79; see also 136. We need to see what we all do share. Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 183. Tully, “The Agonic Freedom of Citizens,” 170. Ibid, italics added. Ibid., 171. Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 205. Hence, the collapse of the “partnership between many English-speaking Canadians and Québécois ... would be an irreparable loss, like the loss of a close friend.” Tully, “Aboriginal Peoples: Negotiating Reconciliation,” 428. Webber, Reimagining Canada, 30. Ibid., 31.

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Notes to pages 202–6

Ibid. Kymlicka, Finding Our Way, 176. Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 1. James Tully, “Diversity’s Gambit Declined,”161. Ibid. Tully assumes a strong correlation between his criteria of legitimacy and stability. Thus, were Canadians to embrace his three conventions, the threat of radical rupture would recede. See, especially, Tully, “Introduction,” 25. See Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 30, 125; “The Agonic Freedom of Citizens,” 168 and 174–6; and the interesting elaboration of these core insights in “Introduction.” Tully, Strange Multiplicity, xi. Tully, “Diversity’s Gambit Declined,” 158. Ibid., 160. Tully, Strange Multiplicity, passim. Tully, “Diversity’s Gambit Declined,” 166. Tully can’t advocate any final or definitive constitutional settlement since, on his account, settlements must always be provisional, open to further contestation in accordance with his three conventions. Ibid., 25. Note that this is more than simply the acknowledgment that other viewpoints exists: it requires that we make an empathetic leap and see the association “through” those lenses, inhabiting the conceptual space of the other. Ibid., 19. Tully, “Diversity’s Gambit Declined,” 166. Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 24. Tully, “Diversity’s Gambit Declined,” 184. Ibid., 152–4. Ibid. Italics added. Guy Laforest, “Standing in the Shoes of the Other,” 52. McRoberts, “Why We Can’t Talk: The Lost Language of Canadian Politics,” 88. He may have toned down this element. In “Aboriginal Peoples: Negotiating Reconciliation,” 419, he stresses that the transformation he envisages is no more radical than, say, the reimagining of Canada from colony to “selfgoverning confederation” or from a dualist to a multicultural polity. This is hardly self-evident, since the concept of “federal abilities” implies an expansion of empathetic and imaginative powers not given in, say, the move from a British to a North American vision of Canada. Ibid., 196.

Notes to pages 207–12

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96 Demands for the recognition of substantive identities are always partial and contestable. See Tully, “Introduction,” 5, and James Tully, “Struggles over Recognition and Redistribution,” 469–82. 97 Tully, “Diversity’s Gambit Declined,” 152–3. 98 Mendelsohn, “Public Brokerage,” 271. 99 Ibid., 261. 100 Ibid., 266–71. 101 Public brokerage models “do not deny the realities of power and competing interests, or simply wish them away; constitutions define the relationship between institutions, and between institutions and citizens, and are therefore, inevitably, about competition, power and conflicting principles of justice.” Ibid., 271. Of course, developmental models needn’t deny these elements; but they must emphasize the expansion of citizens’ capacities that will be forged by a sustained, dialogical process. 102 In later texts, Tully prefers to emphasize “freedom from domination” over “justice” inasmuch as theories of justice traditionally involve the definitive outlines of a society’s basic structure, while Tully seeks only to ensure that the conditions of association are always open to contestation and revision by its constitutive members. See Tully, “Struggles over Recognition and Distribution,” 269, and “Introduction,” esp. 4–6. 103 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 1. 104 Tully, “Diversity’s Gambit Declined,” 165. 105 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 7–11. 106 Or such, at least, is an animating premise of this book. 107 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 21. 108 On this, see David Owen, “Political philosophy in a post-imperial voice,” 538–42. 109 Ibid., 540. Italics in original. 110 Ibid., 542. 111 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 22. 112 Ibid., 26. 113 Tully, “Diversity’s Gambit Declined,” 165. 114 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 206. 115 Ibid., 207. 116 See note 60, above. Charles Blattberg, as noted earlier, argues against asking the question “why stay together?” because to ask it is to undercut the dialogue that allows us to articulate the “common good” and thus achieve the expressive harmony that he thinks we crave. Deep down, we just do want to stay together; thus, the shared polity is simply a freestanding good requiring no further justification. He does add, however, that dialogue can help us to

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Notes to pages 212–15

arrive at superior answers to common questions, and more compelling articulations of constitutive goods. So he too gestures toward a “developmental” conception although his real emphasis seems to be on expressive harmony rather than transformation or expansion of horizons. See Shall We Dance?, esp. 85. See also his version of the “missionary” argument in ibid., 139. Laforest captures both the ideal of dialogue and a sense of the difficulty of getting there, in writing that “conversation and dialogue represent the desire to understand – to understand oneself and to understand the other ... [t]his means putting oneself in the Other’s shoes so as to understand. This is easier said than done, though, in a political climate such as ours where the dominant language is neither that of friendship nor partnership.” “Standing in the Shoes of the Other Partners,” 52. It should be noted that Laforest writes here of dialogue both as an end in itself – born of a “desire to understand” – and as a means to “[t]he triumph of friendship and the spirit of partnership” which, he argues, both federalists and sovereigntists seek to realize. As with LaSelva, the themes of fraternity (or “partnership,” “friendship,” “solidarity”) and development or transformation (arriving at a genuine understanding the Other and the forging of a “new language”) are interdependent. My claim has been that the latter element needs to be hived off, understood as the locus of a distinct set of affirmations. But I wouldn’t deny the interrelatedness of the two themes in practice. That Laforest, an advocate of dissociation, can simultaneously position himself as among the theorists of dialogical reconciliation demonstrates how institutionally open-ended the “dialogue” thesis is. This point is addressed, along with its implications for my critique of dissociation, at the end of this subsection. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, 307. Ibid., 338. Ibid. Italics added. Anthony Laden defines “deep diversity” as “a view of human diversity that is not thought to stop at some common core of human nature.” Laden, Reasonably Radical, 1. Conversely, Taylor uses the term to denote multiple ways of belonging to a polity. For Laden on Tully, see ibid., 195–9. This might seem an open invitation to massive fragmentation and endless institutional differentiation, on the grounds that these will “magnify complexity” and thus maximize citizens’ capacities. Obviously, the developmental ideal needs to be balanced off against other goods, such as the capacity to sustain democratic solidarities and political stability. Few goods are absolute. Tully, “The Agonic Freedom of Citizens,” 173.

Notes to pages 215–22

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124 Of course, this implies a focus on law-making and institutions, as opposed to more diffuse understandings of politics as a comprehensive matrix of social discourses and relations. 125 Lijphart, Democracies, 100. 126 On this point, see Cairns, Citizens Plus, and Borrows, “‘Landed’ Citizenship.” 127 “A free and democratic society will be legitimate even though its rules of recognition harbor elements of injustice and non-consensus if the citizens are always free to enter into processes of contestation and negotiation of the rules of recognition.” Tully, “Struggles over Recognition and Distribution,” 477. 128 This caveat needs emphasis. The vision advocated here is a genuinely federal one, in which nationality-based units enjoy a sphere of secure and meaningful autonomy. 129 Of course, one is also free to cite the venerable observation that confederal states tend to be unstable and that such visions of “partnership” would amount to little more than way stations on the path to independence or, at least, toward the kinds of relations that pertain among sovereign states nowadays. 130 Resnick, Toward a Canada-Quebec Union, esp. ch.10. Of course, this sort of thing is a routine trope of Quebec nationalism, ranging from schemes of “sovereignty-association,” “sovereignty-partnership,” and frequent pining after the model of European Union. See, among others, Gouvernement du Québec, Québec-Canada: A New Deal. 131 Resnick, Toward a Canada-Quebec Union, 116.

chapter nine 1 As observed in chapter 1, the project of invoking principled affirmations can be defended in another way. For such arguments represent some of the richest currents in what Webber calls the ongoing “conversation” across and within our constitutive national identities. Even if we ultimately reject many of the arguments explored above, our encounter with them may instill an affinity and respect for the tradition of principled engagement with Canada’s nature as a multinational state. 2 Good general statements on these matters can be had in Herb, “National Identity and Territory” and Billig, The Banality of Nationalism. Anthony Smith explores such connections in his Myths and Memories of the Nation, for instance, while an interesting effort to interpret Canada’s constitutional debates in terms of myth is Franks, The Myths and Symbols of the Constitutional Debate in Canada. The centrality of history and place to nationalism is well stated in Scruton, “In Defence of the Nation,” and Billig, Banal Nationalism.

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Notes to pages 222–6

3 Booth, “Communities of Memory,” 264. 4 This is not to deny the strong ontological claim that agency is embedded in history and (perhaps) place. We are all historical products. But not all of us consciously identify with the social history that created us and made possible our lives as we know them. Since solidarity is our quarry here, and since solidarity is a matter of conscious allegiance, such ontological claims matter less than self-identification. 5 These understandably tend to be more interested in regulatory principles than in a sustained engagement with narratives whose structure bears little resemblance to philosophical argument. Anthony Smith’s “ethno-symbolist” approach examines the ways in which nationalist narratives are dependent on older cultural motifs in specific societies, and may be the most developed attempt to systematically pursue “experiential” accounts of nationhood. Rogers Smith’s Stories of Peoplehood marks another noteworthy attempt to theorize how such narratives are generated and sustained. But normative theories of multinational states have tended to underplay the extent to which the bonds of shared solidarity in multinational states depend on narratives of this kind, despite the fact that the nature of such bonds has tasked many leading thinkers in the area. As I suggest below, key lacunae in important accounts of such solidarity can be addressed by considering what I call “overlapping narratives” of history and territory. 6 Norman, “The Ideology of Shared Values,” 149. 7 Viroli, For Love of Country, 13. John Gray works from quite a different tradition, but he also insists on conceiving of political ideals as essentially embedded in particular institutions and traditions rather than as arid thought exercises in the manner of Rawls. See, for instance, Enlightenment’s Wake. 8 Norman, “The Ideology of Shared Values,” 148. 9 Mason, “Political Community, Liberal-Nationalism, and the Ethics of Assimilation,” 281. 10 Ibid., 282–5. 11 This book has, of course, assumed that it is possible to strike a reasonably working balance between Quebec’s ongoing participation in a strong zone of institutional sharing and the recognition of Quebec’s distinctiveness as a nationality-based unit within Canada. Mason’s formulation, however, is far too glib to be satisfactory although, in fairness, his primary aim in the article cited is not to devise a comprehensive theory of group rights. 12 Webber, Reimagining Canada, 32–3. 13 Recall: “[c]itizen identity is not generated by ... shared values [or] understandings”: it is a general truth that “[p]articipation in dialogues over how and by whom power is exercised over us constitutes our identities as ‘citizens’

Notes to pages 226–32

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and generates bonds of solidarity and a sense of belonging to the political association (the ‘people’) that comes into being and is sustained by this (game-like) activity.” Tully, “Agonic Freedom,” 170. Ibid. Ibid. Michel Brunet argues that the British conquerors co-opted French Canadian symbols and that this allowed some canadiens to delude themselves that Canada was somehow “theirs.” Partly for this reason, many French Canadians “have kept, deep down within themselves, some vestige of the imperial dream their ancestors cherished when they dominated the whole of North America from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi” and thus have clung to pan-Canadian ideals. Brunet, “Canadians and Canadiens,” 290. In other words, lingering experiential narratives explain part of the resistance to Brunet’s radical nationalism. Since our focus is on English-speaking Canadian narratives, we need not ask whether such myths still hold any sway in Quebec. Jean Chrétien’s notorious invocations of the Rocky Mountains in the 1980 referendum campaign clearly plugged into these residual dreams; but things seem to have changed a great deal. Of course, this raises the spectre of appropriation, since it seems to subordinate others to the purposes of our own identities. The question is addressed, with somewhat desperate brevity, later on. An archetypical, if tragic, example of an overlapping narrative is the Serb account of Kosovo, which was “the core of Serbian territory in the Middle Ages,” yet now is 90 per cent Albanian. Many Serbs continue to view Kosovo as “‘sacred lands’ of Serbian national history,” a resonant chord which, of course, has played some role in the atrocities that unfolded in the region. Herb, “National Identity and Territory,” 20. New, Land Sliding, esp. 3–20. A naïve realism should not be read into the argument. We need not believe that a given narrative resonates because it explicates the reality of anyone’s situation. The narrative may instead help to constitute that situation as a result of its influence in discourse – an influence that can, in turn, be explained in a range of ways. All that interests us is the fact of its influence. Fulford, “A Post-Modern Dominion,” 109–10. Ibid., 116. Ibid., 118. Dion, “The Mystery of Quebec,” 288. A popular expression arguably can be found in Daniel Lanois’s remarkable song, “Death of a Train,” on his For the Beauty of Wynona (Warner Bros. Records Inc, 1993).

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Notes to pages 232–3

25 Another case in point: Noah Richler, in his very interesting This is My Country, What’s Yours?, would classify most of the narratives I am about to explore as belonging to the “Age of Mapping,” an earlier phase in Canadian literature, long since outmoded in favour of the “Age of Argument.” But what happens to the narratives developed in the earlier phase if the psychological and experiential (to say nothing of the actual cartographical) maps upon which they are predicated are radically altered? Surely they don’t shuffle serenely along as before, unaltered and unperturbed? 26 Friesen, Citizens and Nation, 58. I am not claiming that Friesen gives an adequate account of historical method or that he offers a comprehensive set of categories for Canadian historical writing. The use of his typology is, again, entirely pragmatic: it clearly does identify a set of influential Canadian experiential narratives. 27 Ibid., 81. 28 Of course, Friesen also argues that none of his four “conventional interpretations” is fully adequate to this existential purpose. They are either empirically defective or insufficiently general in resonance, or both. But obviously this does not mean that they have been or continue to be wholly irrelevant in Canadian culture; and since there is no pretense that the experiential narratives isolated here will resound with equal force among all Canadians, the absence of universal appeal is not really a problem. We are interested in important and influential, not necessarily all-encompassing, accounts. Indeed, the whole project of “articulating this [emotional] connection [to Canada] in a way that permanently attracts a rough consensus among [our] fellow citizens” (Fulford, “A Post-Modern Dominion,” 106) seems, at least to this author, an utter chimera. But this does not mean we have no languages, experiential or otherwise, with which to articulate resistance to Quebec secession. The mistake is to assume that the desire for a degree of national unity requires uniformity of thought or vision. 29 A “genealogical” approach denotes a conception of history as a generational chain directly linking past and present: it assumes that “each generation descended literally – as children and grandchildren – from the founding fathers and mothers.” Friesen, Citizens and Nation, 63. It offers narratives of ancestors, our ancestors, and the normative premise is that we identify with history insofar as it tells the story of our direct forebears: ibid., 63, 67. The “frontier” interpretation emphasizes Canada’s nature as a “new society,” posits egalitarian origins, and implies “that everyone started out on terms of equality, that the fittest survived, and that Canada’s institutions of government were made more democratic as a result of the pioneers’ protests.” Ibid., 72. The “survival” and “staples” theses are developed below.

Notes to pages 233–6

30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44

311

Friesen’s solution to the purported inability of any of these visions to speak to all Canadians involves a vision of Canadian history that centres on the lives of “ordinary citizens/households” as they grapple with changes in the social/ economic/technological construction of space and time. Our affinity with the “ordinary” struggles of those who preceded us in this space – rendered relevant to us, not by virtue of the uniqueness of the formations, but by (a) the accumulated decisions made by our predecessors, which continue to shape our own context, (b) institutional continuity, and (c) personal narratives that help to render more concrete the abstraction – may be the basis of a shared historical vision. George Woodcock, The Meeting of Time and Space. Frye, “Preface,” in The Bush Garden, iii. Ibid. See ibid., v-vii, and Frye, “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada,” in his Mythologizing Canada, 74. Cook, “‘A Seeing and Unseeing in the Eye,” 217. Woodcock, The Meeting of Time and Space, 22. The degree to which many Canadian historians of a certain era saw themselves as nurturing a national consciousness is illustrated in Cook, ed., The Craft of History. Cook, “La Survivance English-Canadian Style,” in his The Maple Leaf Forever, 145. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 393. Cook, “La Survivance English-Canadian Style,” 145. Ibid., 146. Creighton, The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence 1760–1850 (Toronto 1937), 6. The determinism is quite explicit: the river is, for Creighton, a “force in history.” Ibid., 7. Creighton, The Dominion of the North, 69. Creighton, The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, 7. The first passage of the biography presents the Macdonald family being carried by the St Lawrence into the Kingston area; its first volume ends on 1 July 1867, the acme of Macdonald’s achievement, with the Parliament buildings illuminated “boldly against the sky; and far behind them, hidden in darkness, were the ridges of the Laurentians, stretching away, mile after mile, towards the north-west” – back to the rock of Quebec. The biography ends, of course, with its protagonist being laid to rest in Kingston, beyond which, Creighton concludes, “lay the harbour and the islands which marked the end of the lowest of the Great Lakes; and beyond the islands the St. Lawrence River began its long journey to the sea.” These constructions are not arbitrary. See

312

45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59

60

Notes to pages 236–40

Creighton, John A. Macdonald: The Young Politician and John A. Macdonald: The Old Chieftan; and also J.M.S. Careless, “Donald Creighton and Canadian History.” Cited in Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 224. The presentation of Creighton’s ideas offered here owes much to Berger’s excellent analysis. Cook, The Craft of History, 115–17. They are, of course, all men. Creighton was no “social” or progressive historian. Charles Taylor, Radical Tories, 24. This is not to say that the critique makes sense on its own terms. Creighton, for instance, was anything but a “scientific” historian. But see Courville, Robert, and Séguin, “Space and Identity.” Francis, National Dreams. Creighton, “Beyond the Referendum” in his The Passionate Observer, 47–55. Journalist Charles Taylor, for one, finds a clear break between Creighton’s earlier and later concerns. See his Radical Tories, 33. That is, it incorporates Quebec, but on terms that Quebecers themselves would be unlikely to recognize or affirm. Note that, in his insistence that Canada retain rights to the St Lawrence Seaway and (possibly) to a protective zone on either side of it should secession occur, Creighton sought to preserve some shred of the original vision. But the foundational unity unquestionably would be in tatters, more irreparably shattered by secession than even by the Treaty of 1783 (see The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, 78–115). The whole point of Creighton’s analysis is that polity, economy, and landscape are – or ought to be – organically entwined around the great theme of the river as part of “the natural development of the Canadian commercial state.” Ibid., 79. Secession simply is incompatible with that telos. Hutchison, The Unknown Country, 21–3. Laforest, “Standing in the Shoes of the Other,” 67. Dufour, A Canadian Challenge, 55. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 59. Of course, Creighton was well aware of massive ruptures as well as continuities. His elegy for the end of the fur trade, “the first unity of the St. Lawrence,” is among the most poignant passages in his oeuvre. See The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, 200–02. For a broader analysis of English-speaking Canada as a culture built on the co-option of pre-existing identities, see Mackey, The House of Difference. Unfortunately, Friesen seems to conceive this in a very narrow way, as the early pioneer experience with sheer “physical challenge and narrow escape”

Notes to pages 240–1

61

62 63 64

65 66 67

68

313

in a forbidding climate (Friesen, Citizens and Nation, 68–72). And so he rejects the survival myth on the grounds that “it exaggerates the conflict between pioneer and environment”: many Canadian settlers were “stronger and healthier than their European contemporaries” (ibid., 72). This criticism is only made possible by his reinterpretation of the “survival” theme into a purely historical thesis about the physical challenges faced by settlers. But Frye’s observations are part of an elaborate set of claims about the ongoing psychological and imaginative impact of the collision of European settler culture and the Canadian milieu. This collision, Frye argues, marked Canadian culture in profound ways, many of which continued to haunt us into the late twentieth century. Whether or not settlers lived comparatively cozy lives has little necessary connection with the cultural impact of the encounter. See Atwood, Survival and to a lesser degree Strange Things. The classic collections of Northrop Frye’s writings on Canadian culture are The Bush Garden and Divisions on a Ground. However, Mythologizing Canada is an admirable distillation of the best essays from those collections, along with some important additional works, and this discussion of Frye leans heavily upon it. Grant gives his fullest exposition of what it means to be a settler culture in “In Defence of North America,” in his Technology and Empire, 15–40. Note that Friesen emphasizes W.L. Morton’s contribution to the “survival” tradition (Citizens and Nation, 68–9), while Cook recruits Arthur Lower into the tradition of “La Survivance English-Canadian Style,” 147–9. Angus, A Border Within, especially 111–34 and 170–204. Frye, “Preface to an Uncollected Anthology,” in Mythologizing Canada, 47. “[E]very statement made ... about ‘Canadian literature’ employs the figure of speech known as synecdoche, putting a part for the whole. Every such statement implies a parallel or contrasting statement about French-Canadian literature.” Frye, “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada,” 66. Thus, Frye makes no sustained pretence that his “Canada” is more than English-speaking Canada. Frye, “Haunted by Lack of Ghosts,” Mythologizing Canada, 189. Frye, “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada,” 68. Frye, “Haunted by Lack of Ghosts,” 125. Frye’s basic point is that “the Christian, Baroque, Cartesian attitude that the white invaders brought from Europe helped to ensure that in Canada the sense of being imprisoned in the belly of a mindless emptiness would be at its bleakest and most uncompromising.” Ibid., 129. It is the intersection of these attitudes with Canada’s physical environment that gives such a theme special resonance here – which is not to deny that it does resonate elsewhere (e.g., in Europe, or America). Grant, “In Defence of North America,” 17.

314

69 70 71 72

73

74 75 76

77

Notes to pages 241–2

Frye, “Haunted by Lack of Ghosts,” 120. Grant, “In Defence of North America,” 17. Frye, “Haunted by Lack of Ghosts,” 120. “[S]ocial developments in a country which has amassed a huge population and become an imperial power may have a quite different imaginative resonance” than they do in Canada. Ibid., 117. In the first place, the Canadian relation to history is different. The history of this settler culture suffers from a “foreshortening” that has prevented it from finding a cultural foothold. “There must be a period,” Frye speculates, “of a certain magnitude ... in which a social imagination can take root and establish a tradition.” The United States enjoyed this between its revolution and civil war, he claims, but Canadian history has lurched rapidly from one social, political, and cultural condition to another: “first a part of the wilderness, then a part of North America and the British Empire, then a part of the world. But it has gone through these revolutions too quickly for a tradition of writing to be founded on any one of them” (ibid). Technological revolutions continue to alter the Canadian context at breakneck speed, resulting in an ongoing “preoccupation with the theme of strangled articulateness” that he identifies in Canadian letters: “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada,” 68. Ibid., 66. Frye’s imagery is unforgettable, but its dated nature must be noted. He writes of sea-faring immigration from Europe, no longer a given in an age of air travel and when immigrants to Canada are overwhelmingly not European. Relatedly, his assumption is that “entering Canada” is a matter of moving from east to west. This makes sense in historical terms but, again, is no longer as resonant. Entry into Canada from its Pacific coast would suggest a very different experience, much more akin to the historic American movement across a linear frontier – in Canada’s case, the Rockies rather than the Appalachians – and out into open space – the Prairies. None of this necessarily devalues Frye’s observations, however. He is identifying the origins of certain patterns in “the Canadian imagination,” and these may become to some extent self-perpetuating; also, his portrait may continue to resonate in some parts of Canada, if not the far west. Ibid., 69. Ibid. Australia might be a good bet to rival Canada in this regard. Atwood’s analysis also implies the homelessness central to Frye’s argument, for the struggle merely to survive in a place seems antithetical to feeling at home in it. Atwood’s haunting final question – “Have we survived? And if so, what happens after Survival?” – draws, in the end, from the same source as Frye’s “where is here?” See Atwood, Survival, 246. Frye, “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada,” 73.

Notes to pages 243–6

315

78 Ibid. 79 Frye, “Haunted by Lack of Ghosts,” 124. 80 On the garrison mentality and pastoral myths, see “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada, 72–9 and 85–95. Where the garrison was “social but not creative” – reflecting a highly defensive, conformist, and beleagured frame of mind – the “condominium mentality” is “neither social nor creative,” being an outgrowth of a stultifying and atomizing urban sprawl. “Levels of Cultural Identity,” in Mythologizing Canada, 199. 81 Frye, “Haunted by Lack of Ghosts,” 131. 82 See ibid., especially 130–5; and “Levels of Cultural Identity,” esp. 200–5. 83 In 1989 he wrote, “[t]he silence of the eternal spaces remained at the bottom of the Canadian psyche for a long time, and in many respects is still there.” “Levels of Cultural Identity,” 199. Italics added. 84 Angus, A Border Within, passim. 85 Angus’s phrase; ibid., 198–204. 86 See the magisterial introduction to The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, 1–21. 87 More moderate forms of dissociation might not bring such severe consequences. Nonetheless, they would weaken the institutions to which these experiential narratives are tethered. A decisive break with our tradition of strong institutional sharing, even if a handful of “confederal” structures continued in place, surely would make it harder to identify with the east-west vision that incarnates “nearly everything that is heroic and romantic in the Canadian tradition,” according to Frye (“Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada,” 66). 88 For a fine exploration of this, see Salée, “Identities in Conflict.” 89 C.f. chapter 8, n29. 90 The alternative interpretation is that because English-speaking Canadians have so much at stake, existentially, in Quebec-in-Canada, they cannot respond with greater generosity to Quebec’s demands. Both arguments may harbour some truth, although it is worth observing that the greatest degree of hostility to any notion of “special status” for Quebec seems to emanate from those regions of the country that, arguably, exhibit the least degree of narrative overlap with Quebec (e.g., Alberta, British Columbia).

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Index

Aboriginal peoples: language, 23; as nations, compared with Quebec, 23–4, 216;”stolen territory” argument, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88; treaty rights, 84, 89–90, 96–7; and Tully’s “diversity awareness,” 205. See also Cree people; James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement (1975); treaty rights Acton, Lord: on benefits of multinational state, 152, 187, 248; influence of, 118–22; LaSelva’s critique of, 106–8; on liberty, 109, 110; nation, definition, 109; nationalism, definition, 109; on nationalism, as detrimental to liberty, 110, 111, 118; on nationalism and religion, 120; “Nationality” essay, 106, 109, 111; on progress, 109, 186 affirmations. See affirmations, of Quebec-in-Canada; experiential affirmations; principled affirmations affirmations, of Quebec-in-Canada: assessment of Lord Acton, 118–34; Lord Acton on multinational states, 106–9; Lord Acton’s successors’

views, 109–18; political-cultural arguments, 134–7; Quebec’s contribution to Canadian multiculturalism, 130–4 agency: and experiential affirmations, 221–3; and identity, 7–10; as interaction between moral and local affirmations, 9–10; Taylor’s theory of, 7, 9–11, 221–3 aggregative democracy: arguments for dissociation, 59–74; definition, 47–8; and paralysis, between conflicting views, 61–2, 66; vs. deliberative democracy, 47–8 Ajzenstat, Janet, 60 Anderson, Benedict, 120 anglophones. See English-speaking Canada Aristotle, on the state and citizen’s virtue, 153 associative-group argument for secession, 88–90 Atkinson, Michael, 49, 60 Atwood, Margaret: impact of settler culture on Canada, 240; and “survival” interpretation of Canadian history, 242

342

Index

Australia, multicultural policy, 136 Bell, David, 126 Bercuson, David, 33–4 Berger, Carl, 188–9 Berger, Thomas, 129 Bill 101, 37 Bill C-20 (Clarity Act), 140 Bissoondath, Neil, 132 Blattberg, Charles, 201 Bouchard, Lucien, 18 Brady, Alexander, 106 Brunet, Michel, 238–9 Buchanan, Allen: “lost investment” argument, 84–5; restrictive approach to secession, 157; on territorial integrity, 95; “theft of territory” argument, 84, 85 Cairns, Alan: anticipated effects of Quebec secession, 143–4; on “citizens’ constitution,” 60 Calgary Declaration: and popular consultation, 60; and “provincial equality,” 43 Cameron, David: on liberty and the multinational state, 121; on nationalism and the multinational state, 186–7 Canada: English and French racial fusion, theories of, 188–90; history, conventional experiential narratives of, 232–3; incorporation by US, as possible effect of Quebec secession, 147; “liberal purity” argument for Quebec separation, 32–4; multinational vs. polyethnic pluralism (Kymlicka), 21, 22; nationality vs. territorially-based units (Kymlicka), 21; as “post-mod-

ern dominion,” 127; sense of mission, compared with US, 154–5; tolerance of diversity, 128–9, 133, 135–6. See also Constitution Act (1982); English-speaking Canada; federalism; multiculturalism; Quebec; Quebec-in-Canada A Canada of Light (Powe), 126 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: as bulwark for liberal values in Canada, 121; critique of process as undemocratic, 58; and shift in English-Canadian political culture, 93. See also Constitution Act (1982) The Canadian Political Nationality (Smiley), 153 Careless, J.M.: on lack of Canadian national consciousness, 126; on “limited identities,” 233 Carens, Joseph, 36–7 Carrier, Roch, 174 Cartier, G.E., 186 Charlottetown Accord (1992): as precedent of national referenda on constitutional change, 60; rejection of, 61; voting process, as restriction on Quebec, 93 Charter of Rights and Freedoms. See Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms Chennels, David, 104 Christian and Campbell, 125 Christiano, Kevin J.: critique of Trudeau’s view of federalism, 161; and Trudeau’s liberal justice, 125 Cité libre, 111 Citizens and Nation (Friesen), 232–3 “class politics,” 57–8, 62–3 Clinton, Bill, 166

Index

The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence (Creighton), 236 “complex fraternity,” and Canadian federalism, 175–83 Confederation, and French-English relations in Canada, 52–3 Conlogue, Ray: on French-English fusion, 190; on lack of communication between English and French Canadians, 195 consociational theory of democracy: and elite accommodation, 197; shift in Canadian political culture away from, 60; view of multinational state, 54–6 Constitution Act (1982): critique of process, as driven by elites, 58; lack of endorsement by Quebec, 4, 94; Lockean contract theory and restrictions on Quebec, 92–3; and public consultation, 60; and radically incompatible constitutional perspectives, 60–1; Section 35, protection of Aboriginal treaty rights, 96–8; silence on Quebec’s central relationship to multinational polity, 44. See also Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; constitutional process constitutional process: as atypical of everyday functioning of democracy, 70; ethic of reciprocity absent from popular participation in, 61; miniconstituent assemblies preferable to referenda, 78; paralysis, due to lack of shared shared solidarity and reciprocity, 69; and public participation, 65; ratification by plebiscite, 215. See also Constitution Act (1982)

343

Conway, John, 154 Cook, Ramsay: on Canada’s sense of mission, 165; on Judt’s views of Canadian federalism, 163; and views of Lord Acton, 106 Cooper, Barry, 33–4 Courchene, Thomas: ignoring of Quebec’s national consciousness, 19; on implications of Quebec secession, 17, 18 Couture, Jocelyne, 94 Covell, Maureen, 139–40 “creative politics,” 56–7, 62–3 Cree people: on membership in federalism over sovereign Quebec, 100; right of partitition, based on national self-determination, 89; on secession and partition, 88, 89; on self-determination, and secession from Quebec, 89; and treaty rights in Quebec, 97, 98. See also James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement (1975) Creighton, Donald: centralist view of Confederation, 237; settlers’ relationship to Canadian landscape, 244; on St Lawrence River system’s importance to Canada (“Laurentian thesis”), 229, 235–8, 350 culture. See also multiculturalism: and dignity, 37–9; and liberal political philosophy, 34–9; structure/ character distinction, 41 Dalberg-Acton, John Emerich Edward. See Acton, Lord Day, Richard, 131 “deep diversity”: and bases of solidarity, 224–5; and developmental model of polity, 197; and equal

344

Index

respect, 200; of Quebec nationalism, 21, 60–1, 206–7; vs. “difference-blind” liberalism, 165 deliberative democracy: arguments for dissociation, 65; definition, 47; and elite accommodation, 55–6; and engaged citizenry, 266n45; and mutual intelligibility, 76; and reciprocity, 48, 71, 75–6; vs. aggregative democracy, 47–8 De l’urgence (Laforest), 93 democracy: aggregative, 47–8, 59–74; complicated by multinational diversity, 75, 77; consociational theory, 54–6; deliberative, 47–8, 55–6, 65, 71, 75–6, 266n45; and “integrative bargaining,” 48, 53; majority rule, 68; and Mill’s “principle of sympathy,” 50, 51–2, 54; participatory, and multinationality in Canada, 56–9; “public brokerage,” preferable to referenda, 78; and public debate, in different languages, 195–6. See also aggregative democracy; deliberative democracy Derriennic, Jean-Pierre, 140 developmental model, of polity: Parekh, on multiculturalism, 213–14; proponents of, 198; and reconciliation across deep diversity, 197; Tully, on dialogue and deep diversity, 208–12 dialogue, in multinational state: across diversity, 201–4; as affirmation, 208–12; and identity, 198–208. See also narratives, of Canadian history Dion, Léon, 232

Dion, Stéphane: on Canada’s sense of mission, 165; on Canadian ideal of federalism, 163; on destructive aspects of secession, 140; on linguistic diversity and tolerance, 134 dissociation: aggregative democratic critique, 65–71; definition, 12; deliberative democratic critique, 71–4; inherent consequences, 19; participatory-democratic critique, 62–5. See also secession, of Quebec diversity: blindness to, 204; cultural, 215; ethnocultural groups, lacking territorial concentration, 217; federal, 215; participatory, 215. See also “deep diversity”; multiculturalism Donner, Wendy, 191 Doran, Charles F.: on “city on a hill” ideal of North America, 167, 168; on democratic pluralism, 166–7, 170, 172, 173; on implications of failure of Quebec-in-Canada, 167–8; Why Canadian Unity Matters, 166 Dubuc, Alaln, 119 Dufour, Christian: on Canada’s roots in New France, 238, 239; on psychological dependence of English- speaking Canada on Quebec, 227 Durham, Lord: on assimilation of French Canadians, 52; skepticism over Canada’s aggregative democracy, 54 Durham Report, 188 election (1988): democratic mobilization of English-speaking Canada, 72; impact of Quebec vote on, 72–3

Index

345

elite accommodation: and consociational theory of democracy, 197; decline of, in Canada, 59–62; and deliberative democracy, 55–6; removal of, and development of “federal abilities” by public, 215 elites. See also elite accommodation: domination of debate at federal level, 196; as driving 1982 Constitution process, 58 Elliott, J.L., 127 English-speaking Canada: democratic mobilization over 1988 election, 72; and lack of meaningful recognition of Quebec’s distinctive identity, 76; opposition to free trade overridden by Quebec vote, 72–3; principled affirmations, bolstered by Quebec’s presence, 224; Quebec as part of identity, 227; support for Quebec’s secession, 138 equality, of provinces under federalism, 42–4 experiential affirmations: definition, 10, 223; enduring power of, 230–2; essentialism, 228–30; Quebec, and historical Canadian narratives, 221–46; and Taylor’s theory of agency, 221–3

Forbes, H.D.: on dissociation as failure of Canadian experiment, 162; on Trudeau’s liberal justice, 125; on Trudeau’s “pluralism,” 161–2 free trade debate (1988): and lack of solidarity between Quebec and English-speaking Canada, 71; Quebec view of, 76 French Canadians. See French language; Quebec; Quebec-in-Canada French language: and Bill 101, 37; and “societal culture” of Quebec (Kymlicka), 22. See also language Friesen, Gerald: Citizens and Nation, 232–3; on secession as a “new frontier,” 244–5; on “survival” interpretation of Canadian history, 240, 242 Frye, Northrop: on Christian view of Aboriginal religion, 241; distinction between unity and identity, 233–4; on settlers and environmental determinism of Canadian culture, 240–3, 250; view of secession and its effects, 234, 244 Fulford, Robert: on Canada as “post-modern dominion,” 127; on English-speaking Canadian elites’ visions of Canada, 230–1 The Fur Trade in Canada (Innis), 235

federalism: as fragmented, due to accommodation of Quebec, 63; and LaSelva’s “complex fraternity,” 175–83; and liberalism, 42–3; moral foundations, 175–83 “Federalism, Nationalism, and Reason” (Trudeau), 115, 121–2, 124 Fleras, Augie, 127

Gilbert, Reid, 127 government. See also democracy: decline of elite accommodation, in Canada, 59–62; and multinationality in Canada, 56–9 Grant, George: on immigration as break with old world, 241; impact of Canada on settler culture, 240 Gwyn, Richard, 127

346

Index

Habermas, Jürgen, 49 Harris, Lawren, 189 Hodgins, Bruce, 85 Hogg, Peter W.: on fiduciary duty to Aboriginal peoples, 98; on partition, 85 Holmes, John: and Acton’s views on multinational state, 106; on Canada’s “taming [of] nationalism,” 165; comparison of Canada’s vs. US’s sense of mission, 154 Horowitz, Gad: on “creative politics,” 56–8, 62–3; on English-speaking Canada’s accommodation of Quebec nationalism, 239; on Quebec and ethnocultural minorities, 131–2 Hutchison, Bruce: on Canada’s sense of mission, 165; “experiential affirmations” and Quebec, 10; on Quebec as “Mother of Canada,” 238; on “working duality” in Canada, 163, 189 identity: and agency, 7–10; Canadian, built on Quebec identity, 239; of English-speaking Canadians, after secession of Quebec, 144–5; and historical narratives, 222–8; and moral frameworks, 7–10; sovereignty, and territory, 222 Ignatieff, Michael: on Canada’s sense of mission, 165; on Canadian federalism, 170; on nationalism and federalism, 162 indigenous peoples. See Aboriginal peoples individual rights: guaranteed by federal government, 122–3. See also

Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms Innis, Harold, 235 institutional sharing, between Quebec and Canada: affirmation of, 221, 247, 249; and developmental ideals of Quebec-in-Canada, 190; and federal institutions, 13, 245, 247; liberal objections to, 29, 44; and “missionary” ideals of Canadian federalism, 162; as specific kind of experience in multinational pluralism, 22, 24, 247; and unintended consequences of secession, 139. See also federalism; multinationalism; multinational state; Quebec-in-Canada institutions, as basis of solidarity, 225 “integrative bargaining,” 48, 53 Inuit people, and treaty rights in Quebec, 97, 98 James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement (1975): federal obligations, 97; native peoples’ right of veto over Quebec claims of territory, 97; Quebec’s claims, and “stolen territory” argument, 85 Jandra, Richard, 89 Judt, Tony, 163 justice: and culture, 34–9; deep diversity, and equal respect, 200; and the exemplary state, 156; LaSelva on fraternity and federalism, 175; for Quebec minorities after secession, 275n34; and the right to secede, 157–8. See also liberal justice Kallen, Evelyn, 130

Index

Kanesatake, 208, 211 Kennedy, W.P.M., 106 Kulturnation (Courchene), 17 Kymlicka, Will: on Canada’s historical conversation between English and French, 203; on Canada’s sense of mission, 165; on Canadian myth of tolerance, 133; on cultural structures, 35–6, 40–1, 44; on lessons of Canadian ethnocultural relations, 164; liberal theory and view of minorities, 103; Multicultural Citizenship, 36; on multiculturalism, 130, 131, 146; on multinationality and mutual understanding, 196; on multinational vs. polyethnic pluralism, 21, 22, 35; on Quebec as “nationality-based unit,” 21, 22; on rights of minority cultures, 35; on “societal cultures,” 21–2, 41; on success of Canadian federalism, 158. See also Canada; nationalism, Quebec; Quebec; secession, of Quebec Laden, Anthony, 214 Laforest, Guy: on Lockean contract theory and the 1982 Constitution Act, 92; on Quebec as heart of Canada, 238; on Quebec-Canada dialogue, 217; on Quebec nationalism, 37 Lamont, Lansing: on Canada’s example of multiculturalism, 166; on Canada’s “mission,” 164 La nation en question (Seymour), 94 Land Sliding (New), 228 language: differences, and public debate in democracy, 195–6; fluency of elites, in more than one,

347

196; instruction, in report of Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, 190; Mill on effect of linguistic cleavage, 47. See also French language LaSelva, Samuel: on Canadian federalism and Lord Acton, 106–8; on challenges of Canadian democracy, 74, 182–3; on “complex fraternity” and Canadian federalism, 10, 175–6, 249; critique of nationalism, 176, 178; critique of secessionism, 176–7; on diversity and treatment of minorities, 176; The Moral Foundations of Canadian Federalism, 175; on multi-levelled Canadian identity, 226 Latouche, Daniel: on founding of Canada, and Quebec’s national identity, 92; on Quebecers’ view of free trade, 76 Laurentian School, of Canadian history, 235 “Laurentian Thesis,” 229, 230, 238 Lévesque, René: on “double paralysis” result of Quebec nationalism, 53–4; Trudeau’s interpretation of nationalism of, 161 liberalism: and accommodation of cultural minorities, 34–44; definition, 30, 103; and federalism, 42–3; and individual rights, 31, 122–4; liberal democracies, 30; principles, 30–2; role of state, 31–2, 33; secession, illiberal consequences of, 137–9. See also affirmations, of Quebec-in-Canada; liberal justice; “liberal purity” liberal justice: and accommodation of cultural minorities, 34–9;

348

Index

argument against Quebec nationalism, 32–4; Carens on “even-handedness,” 36–7; as principle, 31, 32, 43; and provincial equality, 43–4; and reasonable pluralism, 194; Trudeau’s views, 123, 125, 159 “liberal purity”: argument for provincial equality, 42–4; and presence of Quebec in Canada, 32–44 Lijphart, Arend: on consociational elites, 216; and Quebec as separate subsociety of Canada, 20 Locke, John: and liberal-democratic theory of revolution, 91; and terms of political authority, 91, 92 Lord Acton. See Acton, Lord Lower, Arthur, 189 Macdonald, John A., 236 MacLennan, Hugh: on Canada’s sense of mission, 165; on significance of Canadian experience, 163 Manzer, Ronald, 135 Marxism, and “class politics,” 57, 63–4 Mason, Andrew, 224–5 Massey, Vincent, 106 Mazurek, Kas, 136 McCullough, Charles, 131 McRoberts, Kenneth, 106, 206 Meech Lake Accord: collapse of, 6; debates, and shift in English-Canadian political culture, 93; “distinct society” clause, 38; as end of elitist political culture, 65; as end of executive federalism, 60; perception gap between Québécois and English-speaking Canadians, 61; rejected by Canadians outside Quebec, 76–7

Meisel, John, 198 Mendelsohn, Matthew: critique of constitutional pessimism, 78; on integrative “public brokerage,” 78–9, 207, 215 Mill, John Stuart: and assimilation of French Canadians, 188; on cultural effects of different nations on each other, 187–8; democratic critique of mulinational states, 110, 193; developmental ideal of human agency, 191–3; developmental vision of citizenship, 249; on leading role of elites, 197; liberal nationalism, 186; On Liberty, 192, 214; on linguistic differences in multinational states, 47, 195; on multinational states and representative government, 46; principle of sympathy, 50, 67, 77 Miller, David: on aggregative vs. deliberative democracy, 47–8; on effect of Quebec’s nationalism on Canada, 54; on trust and the deliberative process, 49, 50 Mill/Miller thesis, 50, 67–8. See also Mill, John Stuart; Miller, David minorities, national: different orders of, 23–4; self-government, liberal views on, 38–9; “societal cultures” within a state, 23; “stateless nations,” 23; structure/character distinction, 41. See also Aboriginal peoples mission, Canada’s sense of: description, 154–5; as form of political justification, 155–9; as recurring theme in Canadian thought, 162–6; as scholarly argument against secession, 166–74; views of

Index

Trudeau and his contemporaries, 159–66 “missionary” argument, for Canadian unity, 155–6 Monière, Denis, 94 The Moral Foundations of Canadian Federalism (LaSelva), 151, 175 moral frameworks, and identity, 7–10 Morton, W.L.: influence of Lord Acton on views of, 106; and Laurentian school of Canadian history, 235; on nationalism and the Canadian state, 111 Multicultural Citizenship (Kymlicka), 36 multiculturalism: and Canada’s sense of mission, 155; definition, 130; and equal respect, 129; and multinationalism, 135; possible effect of secession of Quebec on, 145–7; Quebec’s contribution to, 130–4. See also culture; “deep diversity”; multinationalism; tolerance Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition” (Taylor), 199 multinationalism: compared with nationalism, 125; and moral necessity of maintaining Canadian unity, 155; and multiculturalism, 135; as type of “complex fraternity,” 178. See also multiculturalism; multinational state; nationalism multinational state: as challenging form of polity, 184–6, 197; and deep diversity, 194, 214; definition, 20; demands on capacities of citizens, 184–5, 194–5, 212, 214; developmental ideals, 184–6, 212–18; dialogue, role of,

349

198–212; elite domination of debate at federal level, 196; international examples, 170; justice, questions of, 22; Mills’s views of benefits of, 186–7; overlapping narratives of constituent nations, 227–8; trust, importance of, 50. See also multinationalism narratives, of Canadian history: historical, and imbalance of power, 229–30; shared vs. overlapping, 223–8, 246, 250 Naskapi people, and treaty rights in Quebec, 97, 98 nationalism: Canadian, as fragmented, 126; compared with multinational state, 125; and existential meaning, 120; nationality, definition, 263n2. See also nationalism, Quebec nationalism, Quebec: and Bill 101, 37; critiques of, 119–21; as illiberal, 32–4, 113; as reinforcement of political and bureaucratic elitism, 64. See also Parti Québécois; sovereignty, Quebec “Nationality” (Acton), 106 New, W.H., 228 Nielsen, Kai, 94 Noël, Alain, 61 Norman, Wayne: on secession as precedent, 95; on shared values and political solidarity, 223, 224 Northeastern Quebec Agreement (1978), 97 Nye, Russell B., 154 On Liberty (Mill), 192, 214 Owen, David, 210

350

Index

Parekh, Bhikhu: on Mill’s defence of cultural diversity, 193; multiculturalism, in theories of, 130, 131; Rethinking Multiculturalism, 213–14, 217 Parliament vs. People (Resnick), 58 Parti Québécois: independence strategy, prior to 1995, 86; support for rights of minorities in Quebec, 139. See also Lévesque, René; nationalism, Quebec; secession, of Quebec partitionism: definition, 83–4; primary right of minorities to be self-determining, 83, 84, 88–97; as a remedial right, 97–102; remedial right, and injustices due to Quebec sovereignty, 84, 85, 95–7; and rule of law, 83, 84–8, 101. See also secession, of Quebec Plato, 183 pluralism, multinational vs. polyethnic (Kymlicka), 21, 22 Political Liberalism (Rawls), 31–2, 49 The Politics (Aristotle), 153 Porter, John, 56 postmodernism, definition, 127 Powe, B.W.: A Canada of Light, 126; on Canadian diversity, 126, 127–8 primary right, of secession, 88–90 principled affirmations: arguments against secession, 221–3; definition, 9–10; democratic critiques, 46–79, 247–8; developmental visions of multinational state, 184–218; liberal affirmations, 103–47; liberal critiques, 29–45; moral foundations, 175–83; Quebec-in-Canada as global exemplar, 151–74; secession and partition,

83–102, 248; and Taylor’s theory of agency, 221; and universal ideals, 222 provincial equality, under federalism, 42–4 Quebec: constitutional demands, 60–1; “deep diversity,” demands for recognition of Canada’s multinational nature, 41–2, 60–1; demand for distinctive constitutional status, 41–2; early merchant class, and St Lawrence River, 236; francophone population, as unassimilable, 133; identity, as nation, 16, 19; multiple roles in Canada, 247; and paralysis of constitutional process, 69–70; as part of English-speaking Canada’s identity, 227, 234–50; refusal to assent to 1982 Constitution Act, 3–4; required constitutional accommodation of own minorities, 94; view of federal contract, 92. See also institutional sharing, between Quebec and Canada; “Laurentian Thesis”; nationalism, Quebec; Parti Québécois; Quebec Act; Quebecers; Quebec-in-Canada; Quiet Revolution; secession, of Quebec; sovereignty, Quebec Quebec Act, 131 “Quebec and the Canadian Question” (Whitaker), 66 Quebecers: insensitivity to Englishspeaking Canada views on free trade, 76; parliamentary declaration as nation within united Canada, 261n47; primary identification with Quebec nationality, 196

Index

Quebec-in-Canada: and Acton’s dual framework of liberty and justice, 152–4; and Canada’s sense of mission, 151, 154–74; cleavage between Quebec and Englishspeaking Canada, 69–71; democratic critiques of, 59–79; “double paralysis,” according to Lévesque, 53–4; liberal arguments against, 29–45; as specific kind of multinational polity, 20–3. See also Canada; institutional sharing, between Quebec and Canada; nationalism, Quebec; Quebec; secession, of Quebec Quiet Revolution: as break with traditional experiential narratives, 231–2; elite bargaining and bureaucratic negotiation, 64; and Trudeau’s view of Quebec independence, 113 Rawls, John: on dissociation and individual liberty, 104; Political Liberalism, 31–2, 49; on “public reasons,” 49, 193–4; A Theory of Justice, 156 Reflections of a Siamese Twin (Saul), 243 Reid, Scott, 89 remedial right, of secession: bases for claim of, 90; issues of, 101–2 Resnick, Philip: on division between two nations in Canada, 58–9, 60, 66, 68–9, 218; Parliament vs. People, 58; on Quebec’s role in 1988 election, 71–4 Rethinking Multiculturalism (Parekh), 213–14, 217 Richler, Mordecai, 170 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 99

351

Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, 133, 190 Russell, Peter: on move toward Lockean constitutional culture, 60; on treaty rights, 97 Ryan, Claude: on biculturalism of Canada, 133; on Canada as exemplary multinational state, 163; on Canada’s sense of mission, 165; and development model of polity, 198 Saul, John Ralston: on Canada as incomplete experiment, 126; on Canada as site of toleration, 128; Reflections of a Siamese Twin, 243; on tripartite Canadian foundation, 126, 128 Scowen, Reed: on divestiture of Quebec, 40–1, 42; Time to Say Goodbye, 40 secession, of Quebec: Quebec-inCanada; sovereignty, Quebec: arguments against, 103–47, 151–74, 175–83; arguments for, 34–45, 46–79; effect on international view of Canada, 171; effect on multiculturalism, 145–7; importance of dialogue, as counterpoint to, 217, 218; as loss of fraternity, 180–1; as loss of particular identity, 12–13, 16–17, 144; territory and boundary issues under “rule of law,” 87–8. See also dissociation; partitionism The Secession of Quebec and the Future of Canada (Young), 17 Secession Reference (Supreme Court, 1998): framework for secession process, 86, 140, 144; and implications for Canada’s

352

Index

“mission,” 172; “legal continuity” and provincial boundaries, 87; as model statement for just multinational state, 165; and rule of law, 101 separatism: viewed as “contagion” by Doran, 167, 168, 169. See also dissociation; Parti Québécois; secession, of Quebec; sovereignty, Quebec settlers, and interpretations of history in Canada, 232–46 Seymour, Michael: argument on partition, 94–101; on equitable treatment of Aboriginal peoples within sovereign Quebec, 96–7, 99; La nation en question, 94; on Quebec’s territorial integrity, 94 Sharpless, Pavin F., 191 Siegfried, André: critique of Canadian democracy, 52–3; on lack of meaningful deliberative politics in Canada, 55 Smiley, Donald: on Canada’s sense of mission, 165; on Canadian federalism as political example, 153; influence of Lord Acton’s ideas on, 106; on multiple allegiances in Canadian federalism, 153 Smith, Allan: on Canada as non-nation, 126; on Canada as “post-modern dominion,” 127 Smith, Anthony, 154 Smith, Goldwin: on history of Canada as a country, 235; on Quebec as nation, 52 “societal cultures.” See also Quebec-inCanada: characteristics, 21–2; as distinct from “stateless nations,” 23 Sources of the Self (Taylor), 7, 8, 11, 15

sovereignty, Quebec: and Aboriginal claims to self-determination and own territory, 142; economic implications, 142, 143; liberal values and rights of minorities, 142, 143; limited appeal for non-francophones, 141, 142; projected unintended effects of, 139–47; sovereignty-association, 12; sovereignty-partnership, 12, 66, 93; support for, 3, 4, 252n5; and territory, 222. See also secession, of Quebec Sparrow decision, 98 “The Spirit of Haida Gwaii” (Reid), 210 staples, as interpretation of Canadian history, 232, 233, 235 Stein, Michael, 48, 53 Strange Multiplicity (Tully), 208 Strange Things (Atwood), 242 survival, as standard narrative of Canadian history, 232, 233 Survival (Atwood), 242 la survivance, 37, 39, 44 Symposium (Plato), 183 Talon, Jean, 236 Taylor, Charles: on affirmations, 7, 9–10, 16, 247; on agency, 7, 9, 11, 221; on Canada’s sense of mission, 165; on “deep diversity,” 20–1, 165, 198–9; on identity, 8, 9, 37, 247; influence of ideas of, 6–10; Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition”, 199; on multiculturalism in the academy, 200; on recognition, and dignity of culture, 37–8, 44; on recognition, as basis of argument for secession, 38–9,

Index

91; selfhood, definition, 6; Sources of the Self, 7, 8, 11, 15 territory: and sovereignty, 222; “theft of territory” argument, 84, 85 A Theory of Justice (Rawls), 156 Time to Say Goodbye (Scowen), 40 tolerance, in Canada: as characteristics of political community, 128–9; by elites, as greater than that of general population, 136; and multiculturalism, 133; as “public philosophy” rather than mass attitude, 135–6. See also multiculturalism treaty rights: and effects of Quebec secession, 97–102; protection, under Section 35 of Constitution, 96–7; and right of partition from Quebec, 84, 89–90, 96 Triple-E Senate, 42 Trudeau, Pierre: on Canada’s sense of mission, 160–1, 165; and Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 121, 123–4; on Canadian liberalism, as supported by multinationality, 114; on distinct society designation for Quebec, 118; on equal respect for minorities, 115–16, 117; on federalism, 111–12, 115, 121–2, 134; “Federalism, Nationalism, and Reason,” 115, 121–2, 124; influence of Lord Acton’s ideas on, 106; on liberal justice, 123, 125; on national identity, 120; on nationalism, 111, 125, 282n30; on Quebec nationalism, 10, 33, 186; on reason in politics, 115, 117 Tully, James: on Bill Reid’s sculpture “The Spirit of Haida Gwaii,” 210;

353

developmental ideals, in the thought of, 208–12; and dialogical federalism, 249; on dialogue in culturally diverse states, 201–6, 226; on “diversity awareness,” 205–6; on experiential narratives as secondary to dialogue, 226–7; on “federal abilities,” 204–5, 215; on justice, 208, 216; on multinational state, 20, 165; on stability in diverse politics, 208, 209; Strange Multiplicity, 208 U.D.I. See unilateral declaration of independence (U.D.I.) Underhill, Frank, 198 Ungava territory, Quebec’s claims and “stolen territory” argument, 85, 87 unilateral declaration of independence (U.D.I.), and charge of “stolen territory,” 86, 88 United States: “melting pot,” compared with Canadian fraternity, 179–80; possible incorporation of Canada, after secession of Quebec, 147 “unity politics,” leftist critique of, 56 Varty, David, 85, 87 Vernon, Richard, 110–11 The Vertical Mosaic (Porter), 56 Vipond, Robert, 42–3 Viroli, Maurizio, 224 Webber, Jeremy: on benefits of dialogue across diversity, 202; on cultural pluralism and Canadian “mission,” 165; on democracy and debate in different languages,

354

Index

195–6; on secession and ethnic cleavages, 141; on shared conversation across national boundaries, 202, 226 Whitaker, Reg: on benefits of dissociation for Canada, 66–7, 68–9; on the “democratic paradox,” 67, 77; on participatory democracy, 59, 60; “Quebec and the Canadian Question,” 66; on Quebec secession and Canadian democracy, 64; on

Quebec’s role in 1988 election, 71–4 White, Peter G., 163 Why Canadian Unity Matters (Doran), 166 women, and “Laurentian thesis,” 229 Woodcock, George: on Canada as symbiotic union of regions, 234–5; on radical decentralization, 233 Young, Robert, 17