Canada and Québec: Facing the Reality

Canada and Quebec: Facing the Reality BRUCE W. HODGINS and\DENIS SMITH "National unity" is again the cry. Again the Liberal party girds its loins to save Canada and thus to save itself. Thanks to Rene Levesque, the Prime Minister's recently low ratings are replaced by polls indicating high popularity. Many of our journalists desert concentration on the AIB, growing unemployment, and the Mackenzie Pipeline in favour of facile preoccupation with the "unity" issue. It is as if we Englishspeaking Canadians had never before heard of Quebec nationalism or the quest for epanouissement . Although the Parti Quebecois won on November 15, 1976 in spite of the federal Liberals and because of the provincial Liberals, Pierre Trudeau is the inheritor of a long Liberal tradition of benefiting from any threat to ''national unity." Building on foundations laid by Wilfrid Laurier and on a main structure constructed by W.L.M. King following the pyrrhic Englishspeaking conscription electoral victory of 1917, the Liberals have constructed the edifice of their power with this curious material which they call "national unity." In 1921 all Quebec seats went Liberal. Later, in 1935, it was "King or chaos"; then he ''brought us into the war united.'' Afterwards , he passed on his authority to St. Laurent, Pearson and Trudeau. Meighen and Bennett could never win in Quebec. Coldwell, Douglas and Lewis could never break into Quebec. Diefenbaker won Quebec fortuitously in 1958 and immediately showed his inadequacy by being unable to use or hold it, losing much of his support in 1962 to the Creditistes. Meanwhile, many of the great social and economic concerns of Canada have gone unheeded by the federal government, and the collective though varied aspirations of the people of the nine English-speaking provinces have gone unfulfilled. A party notorious for its constant refusal to face seriously the problems of the steady erosion of our social, economic and cultural inde124 pendence in the face of American expansion, the continued growth of regional disparities, the deterioration of our natural environment in north and south, the legitimate demands of our native people for local self-direction and greater recognition of their aboriginal rights, is able by its near monopoly of federal support in Quebec to appear as the prime guardian of "national unity." How ironic. The Liberal party only wins in Quebec because of the lack of a demonstrably realistic federal alternative. Yet within Quebec, all three provincial parties have agreed that "national" means Quebecois. To the DuplessisGouin Union Nationale of 1936, "nationale" referred either to Quebec or French Canada. And Premier Robert Bourassa governed through the ''National Assembly'' of Quebec while advocating ''cultural sovereignty'' and arguing that Confederation for his province only survived because of economic benefit. Furthermore, the independence option has not suddenly burst upon the Quebec scene. It grew slowly out of the· very reality of the Conquest . It ultimately became the goal of /es patriotes of 1837-38. It was an explicit aim of the early republican Rouges of 1848-54, persons who (like some in the P.Q.) believed that la petite patrie would fare better dealing southward directly with New York and Washington, the economic and political centres of power in North America, rather than east and west. The option was implicit in the widespread Rouge resistance to Confederation from 1864 to 1867; A.A. Dorion, the Rouge leader, advocated, on the left, a very loose association or federation of the ''two Canadas ,'' under much more democratic institutions than those proposed by the Fathers. It was also implicit in the reluctance, on the ultramontane right, of Bishop Bourget to accept Confederation. It was promoted among the intellectual and professional elite in the writings of J.P. Tardivel during the latter years of the nineteenth century. It was at the very centre of the teachings of Abbe Lionel Groulx - that most popular of francophone historians who began teaching history at the University of Montreal in 1915 and whom, on his death in 1967, Claude Ryan of Le Devoir Revue d'etudes canadiennes called the spiritual father of modern Quebec. Like Rene Levesque, Groulx rejected the word separatist and prophesied an independent state. "This evil of the Conquest," he argued...