Deconstructing the Canadian State

Abstract

Preamble The first part of this article was presented at the Trilateral Symposium in February 1995. It is reproduced here with only minor modifications. Part II is an addition and extension made necessary by a profound shift in Canadian attitudes consequent upon the unexpected (at least in Canada outside Quebec) closeness of the 1995 Quebec referendum on sovereignty. My purpose at the symposium was to show how the obvious challenge to the Canadian state posed by the advocates of Quebec sovereignty was in itself compounded by other challenges, including a serious fiscal crisis and emerging notions of aboriginal sovereignty and self-government. After that event, my purpose in the second part is to show how these other challenges, including the continental integrative forces set loose by the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement and by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), alter perceptions about the viability of a sovereign Quebec and, at the same time, are bound up in some future resolution of the Quebec sovereignty program. The changing relationships between the three nations of North America are, certainly for Canadians and probably for Americans and Mexicans, in part dependent on the popular and political answer to the question of whether or not there are three North American nations or whether there are, in some future reality, four nations (or more) with legitimate claims to international recognition. Part I--Challenges to the Canadian State Canada may be thought of as a work of fiction. As a kind of text. As a sign, a symbol that stands in opposition to a political fragmentation that is in fact presupposed by the federal bargain that was effected in 1867. (1) Canada, the idea of Canada, signifies a unity that never existed. Canada is a nation-state built on the principle of division and that principle defined This division is traditionally defined by French and English By accident, the English General Wolfe defeated the French General Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham. Prophetically, both leaders died there. It was no accident that the English could not, as a consequence, subdue the French. It was no accident that the French could not persuade the English. Canadians ever since have lived in what Hugh MacLennan later called the two solitudes, each with a very different idea of a place called Canada. In understanding this primal division between French and English, we recognize that the impulse many French-speaking Quebeckers feel is to separate from Canada, and the idea of a sovereign Quebec is, quite precisely, a challenge to the idea of a sovereign What I want to argue here is that this is not the only challenge to the idea of a sovereign and unified Canada, and that the multiplicity of challenges to the Canadian state, the emergence of new challenges, means that Canada can never again be what it once was. Finally, I want to show that what Canada will become is not something that Canadians will, by themselves, determine. Beyond the Quebec sovereigntist program, the other leading challenges to the Canadian state are at least these six: - Canada's fiscal crisis is severe and increasingly defined by the concerns of the International Monetary Fund. The public debt--both federal and provincial--comes to almost 800 billion dollars. Per capita, the debt is half again the U.S. public debt. In 1996 it amounted to almost $26,000 for every man, woman, and child or, thought of differently, to almost $57,000 for every Canadian in the workforce. In the context of the challenges to the Canadian state, Canadian governments have reached the limit of raising additional tax revenue; therefore to bring down the debt they must significantly cut public expenditures, which means cutting programs, many of which were designed to hold the country together. (2) - Aboriginal claims to self-government remain unsettled. Again, this is a matter of incompatible views. …