Editorial

JOURNAL OF CANADIAN STUDIES Editorial Editor Associate Editor Editorial Board Advisory Board DENIS SMITH BERNARD R. BLISHEN MAURICE J. BOOTE ROBERT D. CHAMBERS LEON DION M. G. HURTIG KENNETH E. KIDD W. L. MORTON PHILIP STRATFORD T. H. B. SYMONS MELVILLE H. WATKINS ANTHONY ADAMSON CLAUDE T. BISSELL DONALD G. CREIGHTON KATHLEEN FENWICK DAVID M. HAYNE JOHN HIRSCH JEAN PALARDY CLAUDE RYAN B. D. SANDWELL RONALD J. THOM REVUE D'ETUDES CANADIENNES Redacteur Redacteur adfoint comite de redaction Comite consultatif As Ottawa and the provinces talked past one another in the December session of the Constitutional Conference, one had the feeling that the Conference now has as little direct utility as the Paris peace talks. The reasons are the same: in neither forum have the parties come to the table with reconcilable objectives. The Ottawa meetings serve the propagandist purpose of lulling domestic unease in English Canada, but even that purpose is less and less effectively served as the illusion of progress in the talks is increasingly revealed for what it is. The delegates in Ottawa, as in Paris, now seem locked in a set of empty rituals while events are determined in other places. When the talks began, in February, 1968, it appeared that two provinces, Quebec and Ontario , approached constitutional discussion with a sense of urgency. This was the product of their common anxiety that attitudes to the federation in Quebec were moving rapidly away from accommodation , and might soon be out of control. Ottawa was a reluctant host, embarrassed into the first meeting by the initiative of John Hobarts in convening the inter-provincial Confederation for Tomorrow Conference of November, 1967. The federal government's conversion to belief in constitutional talks was hesitant and sceptical, and this spirit has permeated its entire approach to the two subsequent years of discussion. The scepticism is reflected in the Prime Minister's remarks about a ten-year timetable: he must Journal of Canadian Studies 1 assume either that the provinces are very slow (but patient) learners, or that they will tire of the whole effort long before the end, abandon the talks, and thus prove that it was a mistake ever to begin. The scepticism is combined with and complicated by a rationalist and even utopian strain, which has prompted Ottawa, once involved in the talks, to propose features of a new constitution which could not conceivably be accepted by the provinces. And so, as the meetings go on, the country is faced with one failed federal proposition after another: the reconstitution of the Senate and Supreme Court; the entrenchment of a Bill of Rights; the proposal for maintaining the federal role in social services much as it is, against the intransigency of Quebec ; the claim for federal "paramountcy" in the field of pensions. The Prime Minister's claim that this is progress cannot be taken at face value: one can reasonably argue that Mr. Trudeau 's constitutional program has collapsed in shambles. Unless, perhaps, its intention is not to reach agreement on the features of a revised constitution , but instead to put Quebec and the nation strenuously through the hoops. The federal government has done nothing to concede the possibility of a special relationship for Quebec within an altered constitution, the one concession of principle which might break the logjam in the constitutional meetings and lead to fruitful and possibly even rapid progress. !lather, the federal performance might be interpreted as an attempt 2 (and a fairly successful one so far) to display rto the public the impossibility of reasonable agreement among the provinces on constitutional change (even on its broadest principles), and to force the polarization of opinion in Quebec between Levesque independentists and Trudeau federalists. The final objective of such an effort, presumably, would be to defeat separatism decisively in an open battle at the polls in Quebec, and to convince the other provinces that Ottawa knows best in the matter of interpreting and altering the constitution. These unaoknowledged purposes, if they are elements in the federal strategy as they more and more appear to be, are quite risky ones for Ottawa. There is the real possibility that the outcome of the separatist-federalist tension in Quebec...