The richness of Canadian political life is
that one has to be able to operate in two different
philosophies. To succeed at
being a Canadian is the best preparation for global
citizenship.
Quebec
and Canada
are jazz and opera, two different languages that when
fused successfully create something completely unique,
something beyond jazz or opera, something that is,
by definition, a 21st Century society.
The problem is that we never start this discussion.
Instead, we are trapped in the past, like players
in a bad science fiction movie, constantly bouncing
against some space-time continuum where time has materialized
as a physical prison.
Canada
and Quebec
look incredibly exciting as a story if one focuses
on the future.
They look much less so from within this time-space
prison we have constructed for ourselves.
All countries are prisoners of history to some
degree or another.
Canadians are prisoners of history but we are
also cultural amnesiacs, who forget the sacrifices
and compromises already made to build a country like
Canada. We need to reconnect
to the memories to realize the potential we have in
the future.
There are few frameworks where Canadians and
Quebecois can discuss their shared worlds. People who genuinely
understand both worlds tend to live in a bilingual
enclave in Ottawa
and seem further and further from the day-to-day life
of citizens in Kamloops
or Etobicoke.
In a world of new media, national leadership
must define and articulate a vision of a future Canada
based on its strengths, which start with the interaction
of our founding heritages.
It cannot
be done by relying on the pattern of elite-level accommodation
that worked in the past.
The
void of misunderstanding which creates our political
atmosphere explains why so much national decision-making
seems to produce suboptimal outcomes. In turn, this
process understandably alienates Canadians.
All
our debates are filtered through these lenses of unresolved
past disputes, abstract issues of federalism and misunderstood
arguments about how to pursue often shared objectives. We could be having an
interesting and useful debate about national capital
market strategies and Canada's
corporate governance laws in a Sarbanes-Oxley world right now. This could lead to a
national discussion about how a differentiated Canadian
legal and regulatory culture could give Canadian capital
markets a competitive advantage in a global economy. Instead, the discussion
of national capital markets and nation-building never
reaches the public ear. It
is instead transformed into a discussion of "federalism"
and discussion how Quebec
and Canada
have developed different economic models
they have used to manage globalization.
Why
is there so much misunderstanding,
not about "ideas" or "values", but about relatively
non-contentious "facts"?
There are many possible explanations for this:
(a) the
ahistorical nature of North American society which
leaves people confused about why certain issues are
on the agenda; (b) a public education
system that is too influenced in English-speaking
Canada by U.S. trends and fails to explain the Canadian
uniqueness to young and new Canadians; (c) a lack of imagination
about inventing a historical narrative the way Australia
has; (d) an
electoral system which creates incentives to play
one region against another;
(e) the natural difficulties of having distinct
cultures learn to appreciate each other.
The
result is the strange language within which we discuss
Quebec
in Toronto
or Vancouver
and the way we discuss English Canada in Montreal,
and now the hard-wired different intellectual
assumptions that underlie debate in each culture. Each of these explanations
addresses a part of the puzzle.
At
the end of the day, however, the problem seems to
be more simple.
We have never tried to develop a national vision
based on our Canadian uniqueness: we are a country
that only exists because of a fusion of two very
different cultures.
Why do we have so
many misconceptions about ourselves?
The innovative Health Minister of Quebec,
Philippe Couillard, discussed quite naturally
this month the inevitability and
desirability of increasing the private sector involvement
in health care.
This followed on a report for the Quebec
government authored by Jacques Menard, the investment
banker. Couillard's
comments were not particularly unusual. He is a world-renowned
neurosurgeon with a professional understanding of
health policy issues.
In
Quebec,
the ideological view of health-care as something which
differentiates us from the United
States is non-existent. Nor is the English-Canadian
attachment to this forty-year old moment in history
understood. . Health care
is a simply an essential service that is supposed
to be delivered well.
Couillard's
reaction of the Menard report did not make national
headlines. It is interesting to speculate how many English-speaking
Canadians who have serious criticisms of the national
health care system know of the Quebec
government's more market-oriented approach to health-care.
The proponents of innovative health-care in English-speaking
Canada have allies in Quebec,
but many of them still believe that Quebec
is a society where statism runs wild. However these constant
misperceptions came to be, they are in the way of
a constructive national public policy debate.
Michaelle Jean's appointment as Governor-General
raised a number of issues,.
The exciting realities of trilingual Montreal
or tricultural Quebec
have not previously had an impact on the national
consciousness, so many people outside of Quebec
did not know how to interpret the narrative of Michaelle
Jean's life. Some of the
comments made about
her in English-Canadian media wanted one more
time to apply English-Canadian definitions
of Canada
to the vocabulary in Quebec.
"Is (s)he a federalist?"
is a confusing question. If the 1995 referendum
is the litmus test, half of Quebec
and the large majority of francophone Quebec
has "doubts". After learning
the narrative of Lucien Bouchard's life, after seeing that a founder of the Bloc
Quebecois like Jean Lapierre can become the Quebec
political minister in a federalist government fourteen
years later, after the post-referendum nostalgia for
the committed economically-oriented
federalism of Robert Bourassa in the 1980s,
we have to replace the question "is (s)he a federalist?"
with the question "how open is (s)he to building Canada?"
If the issues weren't important, the debate
would have been like a great 18th Century
opera bouffe, where muisunderstanding and confusion
about identity move forward complex plots. Once more,
the conversation about what Quebec
has become falls on deaf ears outside Quebec. Similarly, the conversation about
what English Canada is becoming is inadequately reported and debated
in Quebec. As a result, the
discussion of how we fuse our national self-confidence
and national identity into something greater than
the sum of its parts is put off to another day. Many thoughtful
English-Canadians have come to view Quebec
as an annoyance; many thoughtful Quebecois have come
to see the national project and the national government
as irrelevant.
The splendid uniqueness of Canada
is that it is a post-colonial country of shared jurisdictions,
of vibrant nationalisms combining to build the first
20th Century society in 1867. The nationalism
of Scots, Irish, Quebecois created a new type of society
which was pragmatic and "new world". Canada
was the first constitution designed to be a fusion
country. In
the 19th Century, we were already in concept
a 21st century society. It is seldom understood
just how innovative this design was compared to, say,
Argentina
and Australia
who embarked on similar immigration-led strategies
for economic growth. The
Canadians involved in designing the BNA Act knew that
they were creating an experiment, an innovation in
political theory, whose constitutional DNA would be
relevant to many future societies.
Without significant constitutional change, but with
pragmatic politics, it survived the difference of
"global visions" over the Boer War.
Without significant constitutional change,
Canadians created
the conditions for the growth of western Canada, the
immigration of entrepreneurial new Canadians to Manitoba,
Saskatchewan and Alberta in the early 20th
Century and to all of Canada in the following hundred years. Without constitutional change,
Canadians created the conditions for the development of a
Pacific Coast economy in British Columbia. These are all extraordinary achievements
of practical politics and policy innovation.
By the 1970s, however, the stresses of a century-old
federal structure were starting to show. The requirements
of modern economic growth required a more streamlined
system of capital management, new forms of entrepreneurial
finance and capital market strategies and a strategic
capacity for governments to negotiate with multinational
enterprises. Provincial governments had the responsibilities
for capital market regulation and provincial ownership
of powerful electricity utilities created new powerful
economic players with strategic objectives that went
beyond boundaries.
In this policy environment, many of the instruments
for managing the modern economy were designed. This applies to
Manitoba Hydro, the Alberta Heritage Fund, and the
Vancouver Stock Exchange as well as to Quebec.
However, it was especially apparent in Quebec,
where language, a provincial utility with the clout
of Hydro Quebec and
a distinct legal culture made Quebec
the architect of its competitiveness strategies. It also applied particularly
to Quebec
after the 1960s negotiations on the Canada Pension
Plan resulted in the opting-out of Quebec
and the creation of the largest pool of institutional
capital in Canada,
the Caisse de depot et placements (now known
as the CDP). It may now be becoming
as apparent in western Canada,
where the nature of the oil-based economy makes effective
participation in national decision-making imperative,
but in Quebec
it was Quebec
government instruments which managed globalization
and set the policy framework for innovation. With all of these
many changes in Canadian society going on, the
federal government was seen to be sometimes negative,
often silent, and increasingly less relevant for key
policy innovations.
That
was not the way most the evolution of Quebec
society was seen in much of English Canada. Sovereignty
was seen as an irrational nationalism, seldom understood
in its context as an agenda for modern nation-building
and the management of what came to be called globalization.
When economic players in Toronto
complained about the structural weaknesses of the
federal government, they were surprised to be told
that they sound like a sovereigntist critique of federal
economic policy-making. In today's
policy agenda, the world of innovation
in private health care, the development of trilingual
or tricultural citizenship, and the world of a socially-liberal
global competitiveness are taken for granted by many
Québécois .
The Canadian political system pays a significant
price for the way in which these policy innovations
are not integrated into a national debate.
How do we start a new period in national Canadian
politics, one which reminds Quebecois that thanks
to their membership in the Canadian federation, they
are an energy superpower, and one which reminds English-Canadians
that the social liberalism which they think is a cornerstone
of their identity is insured by the character of Quebec's
political culture?
On a personal note, I have argued
for three decades that the answer is strategically
simple yet immensely challenging to put into operation:
the federal government has to engage in relevant
and innovative public policies and become the primary
arena in which the management of Canada's
role in the global economy is worked out. Discussions of
institutions and constitutions are anachronistic .
We have to be aware of
how irrelevant much of our politics looks in an era
of media saturation. This requires
that we look at what governments do,
their actual capacity, and not have painful conversations
about jurisdictions . Today, this is more difficult
to achieve because Quebec
and English Canada have traveled down such different
paths in the twenty-nine years since the first parti
Quebecois government was elected.
If we quickly go back over the highlights of
those twenty-nine years, perhaps the next generation
of Canadian decision-makers can at least be freed
from the Groundhog Day that has been Canadian politics
in this period.
1976: Part Quebecois
is elected with Rene Lévesque.
1977-8 Bill 101
is passed in Quebec providing the policy instruments deemed
necessary to protect and promote the use of the French
language in Quebec. A different kind of
nationalist politics was inserted into this mix. The issues of language
and immigration became front-and-center of modern Quebec society. The language law and
Cullen-Couture were in many ways, a celebration of
the effectiveness of Canadian federalism, as the national
constitution provided no obstacle to the democratic
promotion of the distinctiveness of Quebec. The Trudeau government
and the first Parti Quebecois government negotiated
the Cullen-Couture agreement on immigration. Once
again, a combination of pragmatic politics and policy
innovation had deflected arguments for a sovereign
Quebec. One can
argue about its implementation, its absence of a sunset
clause, its current relevance and impact, but in context,
Bill 101 helped manage significant changes in Quebec and Canadian society and produce among
other things, the vibrant dynamism of trilingual Quebec.
1980: Parti Quebecois
defeated decisively in the first referendum campaign,
during which the federal government implied that a
defeat of the sovereignty initiative would lead to a renewed federalism
"rebooting" Quebec's rights and aspirations in a modern
context.
1982: The federal
government introduces a constitutional package that
contains the Charter of Rights and the patriation
of the constitution from London, a symbolic piece of constitutional
housekeeping.
The Charter is seen in much of English-speaking
Canada as an attempt to make individual rights
the focus of constitutional practice. In Quebec, whether one is pro or con the Charter
on substantive grounds, few people see it as
addressing the concerns of protecting and promoting
Quebec interests.
1984-7: There is an alignment
of new governments in Ottawa, Quebec, Toronto, Victoria and Edmonton which gives rise to a constitutional
process designed to close the chapter on the 1980
referendum campaign. This
leads to the so-called Meech Lake Accord, which attempted to reaffirm
the distinct
society of Quebec (recognized in the 1867 Constitution
through the vehicle of a separate civil law legal
system) and is seen as necessary housekeeping
after the 1980 referendum and 1982 constitutional
innovation.
It was intended as a way to clear the road to go
forward.
1990: The Meech Lake Accord is defeated in significant part
by arguments
that allege that it gives Quebec "new" powers rather than reaffirming
old ones in light of 1982 and by those who explicitly
want the Charter of Rights to be the cornerstone of
constitutional thinking.
The only possible reason to reject it, most
francophone Quebecois believed, was because Canada did not accept the obvious realities
of an economically emergent Quebec, plugged into a U.S. market and an economy designed to grow
with European investment in emerging sectors like
pharmaceuticals.
The collapse of the Meech Lake Accord in 1990 created many of the
dynamics which continue in Canadian politics today.
1994-5: The Parti Quebecois
is reelected in Quebec and calls the second Quebec referendum which results in a win by
federalists with a 50-50 split.
Instead of taking the path of a collaborative Canada-building
exercise in the post-free trade association world,
Canadians and Quebecois embarked on journeys
perhaps not to different destinations, but certainly
with different means of transportation.
Quebecois sought to ensure that the instruments
of global competitiveness and innovative social policy
were well-designed in Quebec
City.
Through the 1995 referendum and the rise of the Bloc
Quebecois as a national force, the disconcerting reality
is how little real dialogue between English-speaking
Canadians and Quebecois has taken place. Quebecois
feel like the victim of a suitor who keeps sending
unwanted gifts. English-Canadians end
up feeling that
they are subsidizing Quebec,
while many Quebecois believe that the inefficiencies of
fiscal federalism are producing costs for all participants.
There are, of course, profound differences
of political culture between Quebec
and English Canada which generate flash-points of
misunderstanding that will always be there.
Quebec's
social liberalism ignores the strains of social
conservatism emerging in English speaking North
America.
But English speaking opponents of that social
conservatism fail to understand the power and originality
of this social liberalism in Quebec.
For this reason, natural
political allies in Canadian politics (e.g. proponents
of same-sex
marriage) do not come together because the lens through
which Canadian politics is seen stops a coalition being
built around the values they share. What are needed are common
projects that join Quebecois and English-Canadians
together around the goals, values and potential visions
that they do share. What is needed
is a new lens through which Canadian politics can
be viewed.
Where
do we go from here?
The federal government has only one thing it
can do to address "Quebec"
as an abstract issue. It can govern well and
be on the side of innovative social and economic forces. The relevance
of the federal government is not to be found in some
abstract theoretical constitutional language, but
in the reality of its
relevance to everyday life. Its relevance was in doubt
during the 1995 referendum campaign, and is still
in question. There is
no shortage
of national projects that could mobilize Canadians: the
development of global water purification and conservation
strategy, an international project backing entrepreneurially-led
growth in emerging markets,
the definition of a 21st
Century society that designs a new Canadian identity
based on core Canadian values. These
are potential "national" projects in which Quebecois
and British Columbians would find much common ground.
As a starting point, Quebecois need to
be reminded that the federal government is also seen
to be out-of-touch to
many people with similar political and social values
in Vancouver or Halifax.
The goal of renewing national
institutions to deal with common purposes and innovative
agendas is not something that should be done because it is
good for Quebec.
It should be done because it is good for Canada,
and in doing that which is good for Canada,
we re-engage Quebec
and remove the argument that sovereignty is the default
position, made necessary by an underperforming federal
system.
The strongest arguments for Canada in Quebec
are positive and focus on realizing our unlimited collective
potential: the
chance to be an energy superpower, the chance to frame
the global arguments about energy production and environmentally
sustainable energy consumption; the chance for Canada
to define the way societies move beyond race and ethnicity
as the definition of a complex identity in the modern
world; the chance for Canada
to use Quebec innovations in the commercialization
of technology and the development of social policy
to redefine the scope and role of government in an
internet age. Quebecois are
among the most globally-oriented people on the planet,
by lifestyle, by travel habits, by philosophy. The opportunity to go
beyond parochialisms is hard-wired into the Quebec
identity. If
Canada
is a better vehicle for this journey, then Canada
is the automatic choice. Right now, Quebecois consistently
vote for a federal political party that promises it
will not be in power and will deliver no benefits.
That is proof that pork barrel federalism no
longer has any chance of success in the 21st
Century.
Strong national leadership on policy issues can
render the question of sovereignty
unnecessary. When national
politics is about important themes, the sovereignty
project will no longer have credibility. The answer to Quebec-Canada
issues in 2005 is the same as it was in 1975:
do significant things in Ottawa
and do them well.
Define Canada
as an energy superpower planning for sustainable clean
growth. Define
Canada
as a socially liberal society with an effective multiculturalism
in a world plagued by sectarianism. Define Canada
as an innovator in health-care rather than a country
that clings to a discredited bureaucratic model. This
will speak to the next generation of Quebecois, who
know that the sovereignty model is as outdated as
the federalist options that have been presented since
1990.
