A Future As Well As a Past

JOURNAL OF CANADIAN STUDIES· Editor Associate Editors Editorial Assistants Editorial Board RALPH HEINTZMAN DAVID CAMERON JOHN WADLAND ARLENE DAVIS MARGARET PEARCE JEAN-PIERRE LAPOINTE MARGARET LAURENCE HARVEY McCUE JACQUES MONET, S.J. W.L. MORTON W.F.W. NEVILLE GORDON ROPER DONALD V. SMILEY DENIS SMITH PHILIP STRATFORD T.H.B. SYMONS W.E. TAYLOR CLARA THOMAS MELVILLE H. WATKINS ALAN WILSON REVUE D'ETUDES CANADIENNES Directeur Directeurs adjoints Assistantes Comite de redaction A Future As Well As a Past between the Spring and Summer numbers. Six months ago, in the wake of the electoral victory of the Parti Quebecois, the editors of the Journal ofCanadian Studies decided it was their duty to contribute to the process of reflection about the country's future made necessary and inevitable by that event. For that purpose, we invited a number of Canadian scholars and thinkers to reflect on the meaning of the election and the prospect of the possible political independence of Quebec, and to suggest, as far as they could, the way ahead. The response to this invitation was enthusiastic and soon outgrew the limits of a section in a regular issue. We quickly recognized that, if the full benefit of the exercise was to be realized, the essays would have to be published as a special extra number of the Journal. The result is an additional issue which appears Journal ofCanadian Studies What the issue omits is perhaps as interesting as what it includes. In the original invitation, the editors asked contributors to take a hard look at independence and to examine, in as concrete and practical a way as possible, the issues and questions which would have to be settled if Quebec were really to dissolve its present form of political union with the rest of Canada. It is significant that very few of the contributors have done so. This may be due in part to the speed with which they had to prepare their comments; but it undoubtedly also has to do with the fact that most of the information on which such analysis would be based is not yet available. After fifteen years of talk, astonishing as it may seem, we still do not possess much of the basic data on which to base an intelligent discussion of the degree of integration of the two linguistic communities in Canada, and therefore also of the problems and issues which would have to be solved, the costs which would have to be borne, if the two communities were to come to a parting of the ways, or even a partial one. It is interesting to speculate on why that is so. Why is this information not more readily available ? Why has the basic research not been done? One can think of a variety of answers to these questions. No doubt the universities share a portion of the blame: this is yet another of those cases, of which so much is made in the Symons Report, in which the universities have failed to investigate a field which was vital to important decisions regarding public policy. (There are, of course, a few exceptions, such as t~e work of Jacques Brossard.) But government is also to blame, and one thinks of certain turning points which seem, in retrospect, greatly to be regretted. One thinks in particular of the failure of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism to complete the final stage of its own programme, the crowning phase of its labours in which it was to consider the future political arrangements which might make it possible for the aspirations of the two Canadas to be realized within a common framework. Six years later, after the election of the Parti Quebecois, we are more conscious than ever of our need for the kind of vision which the last volume of the B and B report might have given us, if the Commission had been encouraged to complete its work. One cannot of course be too optimistic about the ability of the Commission to do so: the death of Andre Laurendeau was a mortal blow, depriving it at once of its public prestige and of its internal leadership and inspiration . Moreover, as...