Review Essay: A Reluctant Nation Finds Its Voice: English Canada Considers the Alternatives

Abstract

Philip Resnick. Thinking English Canada. Toronto: Stoddart, 1994. xii + 129 pp. $19.95 cloth. David Bercuson and Barry Cooper. Deconfederation: Canada Without Quebec. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1991. xi + 180 pp. $14.95 paper. Robert Young. The Secession of Quebec and the Future of Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995. xiv + 376 pp. $17.95 paper. Gordon Gibson. Plan B: The Future of the Rest of Canada. Vancouver: The Fraser Institute, 1994. x + 217 pp. $19.95 paper. Alan Freeman and Patrick Grady. Dividing the House: Planning for a Canada Without Quebec. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1995. xii + 257 pp. A recent letter to the editor of the Toronto Globe and Mail reflected a deep-seated confusion currently besetting Canadians. (1) Under the heading Search of National Meaning, the writer questioned a recent article covering St.-Jean-Baptiste Day, referred to as Quebec's national holiday. How can this usage of the term `national' relate to the Globe's reference to itself as `Canada's National Newspaper,' the writer asked. Does this mean the Globe and Mail implicitly accepts the idea of Canada as two nations, or is Canada a nation which includes a province with a National Assembly and related national institutions which in turn includes Indian nations? A confusion of terminologies to be sure. Yet, more significantly, this simple letter hints at the broader and more complicated political and sociological confusion at the root of the country's past thirty years of constitutional wreckage. For, at the heart of Canada's unresolved and seemingly intractable unity debate lie profound disagreements over how to reconcile the concepts of state and nation. If the books reviewed here in some ways reflect this confusion, they also challenge the model of Canada as a single nation-state. In fact, if these books can be assumed to represent an emergent, yet quite divided opinion of the unity impasse from an English-Canadian perspective, then one's hopes for Canadian constitutional closure in the near future grow only dimmer. These volumes make a frank and, at times, bold attempt to delineate a new agenda for English Canada within the unity debate. Written amid the fulminations which have characterized the years since the Meech Lake and Charlottetown debacles, these volumes attest to a new and greater willingness on the part of English Canadians to carve out a constitutional agenda that perhaps, for the first time, genuinely reflects the concerns of what might be called a reluctant nation, English Canada. (2) This willingness to speak out represents a significant shock to the conventional political wisdom that necessarily included Quebec within all conceptions of the Canadian nation. For decades, any discussion in Canadian federal political circles about the issue of English Canada has clashed with this increasingly frayed federalist paradigm. Thus, as Reg Whitaker has written, the gospel of national unity, as it has been played out on the Canadian political stage over the past thirty years, has stifled the emergence of an authentic English-Canadian voice. (3) Yet, the period in Canada between the failed Charlottetown Accord and the recent referendum in Quebec has seen a thorough breakdown in the pan-Canadian federal model. A conflict has emerged from the context that Peter Russell calls mega-constitutional politics, in which agreement on the very essence of the Canadian political community has all but vanished. It is at this mega level, as Russell suggests, that disagreements over formal constitutional principles have become overshadowed by powerful, emotional divisions between different groups' perceptions of identity and of belonging in the Canadian polity. (4) Jane Jenson has similarly described this divisive period as one marked by the attempts of various groups to assert their collective identities--to name nations--wherein much more was involved than the division of powers in federalism, self-government for Aboriginal peoples, recognition of the distinctiveness of Quebec society, the composition and role of the Senate, or even the economic and social consequences of embedding a neo-liberal agenda in the Constitution. …