As the Options Narrow: Notes on Post-November 15 Canada

As the Options Narrow: Notes on Post-November 15 Canada DONALD SMILEY Our responses to the immediate Canadian crisis will be determined, in part at least, by the assessment we make of English-French relations in the recent past. It is now becoming the conventional wisdom that we have been failed by what Denis Smith has called ''Ottawa's narrowly legalistic and linguistic approach to Quebec nationalism.''I The record belies this charge. Since the coming to power of the Pearson Liberals in 1963, there have been several responses by the federal government which are to the advantage of the government and people of Quebec andIor the French language and culture, responses apart from and beyond institutional bilingualism. The following things have been done: 1. . There has been a series of federal measures to enhance the financial resources available to have-not provinces and to narrow regional economic disparities. Quebec has been a major beneficiary of both kinds of measures. 2. There has been an enhancement of what Mr. Trudeau calls "French power" in the senior ranks of the federal government. Francophones have come to hold crucial cabinet portfolios in fields of policy-making, particularly fields of an economic nature, which were for the most part denied to them before. Efforts have also been made to ensure more francophone representation in the executive and professional categories of the federal public service. 3. There was an abortive process of constitutional review between 1967 and 1971 in response to dissatisfactions with the constitutional regime emanating from Quebec. Those who are critical of the alleged inflexibility of the Trudeau government in respect to such matJournal ofCanadian Studies ters appear to forget that in this review Ottawa proposed several extensions of the powers of the provinces as part of an overall constitutional settlement - limitations on the federal spending power, provincial access to indirect taxes, provincial participation in the choice of the members of the Supreme Court of Canada and so on. In January of 1977, the Prime Minister offered to extend·a renewed process of constitutional review beyond the amending procedure problem to include the division of powers. 4. There has been a series of developments through which Quebec has come to exercise a wider range of powers than that wielded by the other provinces. Quebec is the only province which collects its own personal income tax and determines the base on which this tax is collected. Quebec alone took advantage of the 1965 federal legislation permitting the provinces to contract out of certain major shared-cost programmes. Only Quebec operates its own plans for contributory retirement pensions and student loans. Quebec has concluded special agreements with Ottawa related to immigration and the allocation of federal family allowances. In these very specific ways, Quebec has assumed a special status among the provinces, and there is no reason to believe that this is less advantageous to Quebec because in law the same options were open to all the provincial jurisdictions. 5. Recent federal legislation regarding the costs of health services and post-secondary education enhances the fiscal and administrative autonomy of the provinces. Most crucially, the new regime eliminates the distortion of provincial priorities by providing that federal contributions are not, as before, based on the levels of provincial expenditures on the aided services. Trudeauvian federalism then has been less inflexible and less centralist than it is now fashionable to allege - and less preoccupied with a 3 linguistic response .to Quebec's aspirations. Yet the growth of Quebec nationalism, and of course the electoral verdict of November 15, indicate in large measure the failure of these measures. Perhaps it was all too little and too late. Perhaps all that was done was done grudgingly and without generosity or imagination. Perhaps the reasons for what was done were not communicated effectively to either Francophones or Anglophones. Perhaps the excesses of administrative rationalism which came to prevail in Ottawa made the federal government increasingly remote from the interests and concerns of individual Canadians in their local and provincial communities. At any rate, the failures have causes more profound than the alleged deficiencies in intellect and character of the incumbent Prime Minister. The alternative explanation of the current...