Rejoinder by Edmond Turcotte

132 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY whatever elements in the nation shall have contributed most largely by bearing and bringing up children. If is unlikely that a citi~en of Great Britain concerns himself much about whether the Scots or the English are likely to show the greater rate of increase and to be the dominant element in the population fifty years from now. Each element regards the other as a perfectly satisfactory part of the British citizenry. But if you tell an English-speaking Canadian that fifty years hence Canada will be.peopled by a majority of French Canadians he will immediately declare something' must be done to stop it, and perhaps even add' that if it is not stopped he will emigrate to the United States where there is no danger of such a terrible thing happening. And while this state of mind exists it is very difficult to think of English Canadian and French Canadian as joining hands for the upbuilding of a common nation. REJOINDER BY EDMOND TURCOTTE With the generalizations of Mr. Sandwell, I am in agreement. I would only dissent from his interpretation of French-Canadian psychology and behaviour and from his view that religion plays an important role in the attitude of the average French Canadian toward problems of economy. I note incidentally that Mr. SandwelF~ whole approach to the problem of the future unity of Canada is focussed on French Canada alone, as though the Canadian problem lay solely there. If there were no other than French Canadians in Canada, there would be no problem. The problem of unity is created by the presence of other Canadians. The action among Canadians ' is reciprocal and the solution has to be a mutual one, as. I have trIed to show in my conclusion.·Mr. Sandwell points to «the vast growth of the economic power of the central authority" as an ('important factor" in the ((present diffic"Q-Ity between Quebec and the rest of Canada." He adds that, unlike a considerable element among the older English-speaking Canadians, the French Canadians "are not fundamentally opposed to the control of economic life by a political, non-economic authority. But they are anxious that the authority which does the controlling should not be an essentially secular and English-speaking one. If there are to be controIs, they desire French and Catholic ideas to be the'basis of them." , This interpretation is only half correct. Sp~aking of the Catholic factor iri. the stand of French Canadians generally on temporal questions) Mr. Sandwell does not distinguish the social from the economic realm. As faithful Catholics, French Canadians naturally follow Church discipline in all the social fields where the individual and the family meet the State (such as hospitals, schools, orphanages, old-age homes, and all welfare institutlons generally). Nothing seculal" there-but this is true not only THE FUTURE OF UNITY IN CANADA 133 of French-Canadian Catholics, but of all other Canadian' or American Catholics. Wherever Catholic social discipline is absent in the life of Catholics in the United States or Canada, it is not owing to voluntary abandonment on their part but ,solely to the pressure of an enormous secular majority'in the nation. The economic realm is another story. It is true, as Mr. Sandwell notes, that there is Corporatist indoctrination in French Canada. But it is mostly the rhetoric of a small and pedantic coteri~ of intellectuals out of touch with the world of practical men and entirely without support in the masses of the people. The nearest attempt to give practical form to Corporatist doctrine has been the launching of HCatholic Syndicates," and those eventually turned out to be nothing but labour unions of th~ orthodox variety, even to the extent of admitting non-Catholics to membership and altering their name from "Catholic" to "National Syndicates." A few of the leaders ,of the Bloc Populaire Canadien are imbued with Corpo,ratist theory, but that theory has had nothing to do with what limited success or failure the Bloc has had so far. The Bloc rank and file is not a Corporatist phenomenon. It is an element in the Canadian problem in democracy...