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Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d'etudes canadiennes Editor DENIS SMITH Redacteur Associate Editor RALPH HEINTZMAN Redacteur adjoint Editorial Board MARGARET LAURENCE Comite de redaction JACQUES MONET W. L. MORTON W. F. W. NEVILLE GORDON ROPER DONALD V. SMILEY PHILIP STRATFORD T. H. B. SYMONS W. E. TAYLOR CLARA THOMAS JOHN WADLAND MELVILLE H. WATKINS ALAN WILSON Clutching at straws In this issue of the Journal, we have the honour to present an essay by Claude Ryan on his great colleague at Le Devoir, Andre Laurendeau. The richness of his sensibility made Laurendeau a remarkable "witness," as Fernand Dumont put it, of his own society, but we should not forget that he had things of importance to say about English Canada as well. He did not really get to know us until rather late in his life. In fact, his first real knowledge of English Canada seems to have come from the lectures of Andre Siegfried which he attended in Paris, and he did not get as far west as Toronto until the middle of the nineteen-fifties. But perhaps because of his own deep roots in a nationalist Journal of Canadian Studies culture, or perhaps because of the perspective which his position as an outsider gave to him - or perhaps simply because of the nature of the man - he understood some features of the national question which often escape the best English Canadians. During the last decade, it has been fashionable in certain circles of English Canada to define its culture in terms of biculturalism: in the future, it is said, English Canadians will be able to express their originality and to distinguish themselves from the Americans through the presence of their francophone compatriots and by their relationship with them. That is all they will need. By implication, and sometimes by explicit statement , the spokesmen for this point of view 1 offer their new formula for cultural independence in opposition to, and as an up-to-date replacement for, the view held by other English Canadians who wish to root their identity in a distinctive political culture, a culture which has grown out of the adaptation of British parliamentary and legal institutions to a North American environment. The point of view of bicultural nationalism has been given very clear expression in a recent essay by Professor John Meisel. In his contribution to One Country or Two?, he endorses the bicultural view, and calls those who espouse it the "dualists." In contrast to those English Canadians who espouse a parliamentary or constitutional nationalism, the dualists, as Meisel says, "are disposed to seek in the French presence in Canada a countervailing force likely to keep the Americans at bay." Now this new attitude on the part of some English Canadians, whatever its positive aspects, was one which surprised and disturbed Laurendeau. It is now almost ten years since he discussed the desperate plight of those English Canadians who seek their own salvation in biculturalism, but his remarks are still relevant and worth recalling. When Pierre Berton expressed the dualist doctrine in terms almost identical to those of Professor Meisel, Laurendeau replied: "J'avoue man malaise a la lecture de ces lignes. Etre la totalite d'un autre, cela a mains de sens que le Canada prive du Quebec . Qu'un groupe social puisse se definir uniquement par sa relation avec un autre groupe, cela signifierait que le premier n'a pas d'existence. C'est comme si la main d'un noye se crispait sur votre epaule." Laurendeau's message was an important one and deserves to be reconsidered: those English Canadians who neglect or disavow their own culture in the hope of replacing it by a relationship with French Canada are like drowning men clutching at straws. Whatever the purity of their intentions, if they do not demonstrate a knowledge of and a reasonable pride in their own culture, they 2 will contribute to disunity just as surely as they would through bigotry or intransigence. They will kill the country through sheer boredom : the boredom of themselves and their own vacuous society. Anyone who doubts this cannot be familiar with the present mood of Quebec. The greatest threat to the...

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