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Quebec’s Grievances and Proposals
Why do a substantial number of Quebecers favour
sovereignty- association, sovereignty-partnership or independence for Quebec? There
are perhaps many reasons. Professor Watts in Comparing Federal Systems, McGill-Queen’s University Press,
1999, thinks that there are two
motives: the desire for large political units that facilitate economic and
social progress, and the desire for smaller self-governing political units
that give expression [...] to historical traditions and social practices.
It is undeniable that the attachment to community is strong in Quebec. The sense of
community is strengthened by the shared history of a small and tightly knit
population, a common and distinctive language, the experience of an
extraordinarily active church in domestic and institutional life and its
dramatic, recent decline through a process of deconfessionalisation,
a lively oral, written and visual culture and many unique, common
traditions. The attachment to community beats on the pulses of many people
resident in Quebec as a strong attachment
to Quebec
-- as nationalism. But for many of these same Quebec
residents, the attachment to community is felt equally strong as an
attachment to Canada, an
identification as “French-Canadians” or “Quebecois” within Canada.
Many Quebecers share a profound “rêve d’une nation”, as well as the dream
of being one of the two founding people of a great Canadian state.
Quebec’s political leaders have consistently voiced the
idea of Canada
as an association of equals, as a bi-national state. For example,
Premier Daniel Johnson addressed the Federal Provincial Conference in Ottawa, in 1968 in
this way:
The object of the Constitution
must not solely be to federate territories, but also to associate as equals
two linguistic and cultural communities, two founding peoples, two
societies, two nations in the sociological sense of the term. A
Canadian Constitution must be the product of an agreement between the two
nations that make up the people of Canada, and must recognize the
principle of the legal equality of the two cultural communities
This idea has worked its
way deep into the French Canadian mind. It is associated with a
bundle of grievances which French Canadians have been encouraged by
their political and intellectual leaders to bear against the federal
government in Ottawa.
The core idea of these grievances is that the federal infrastructure is
chipping away at the autonomy of Quebec,
and eroding the community of equals which confederation is supposed to
represent. Therefore, proponents of the sovereignty idea have been
able to generate a sizable political following behind the following
grievances articulated over the years:
Canadian Identity has not Developed
under Federalism: Quebec separatists allege that federalism has been
incapable of resolving Canada’s
identity problem. It united
the East and West although both the East and West have more North-South
interactions. It unites the French and English yet the institutions
are British, the British monarch is the head of state. The country is
officially bilingual and multicultural and gives no respect to the founding
people or aboriginals. In short, Canadian federalism has failed to
“give birth to one united people”. [Jean Louis Bourque, Demain, la république: Le projet du
Québec profond (Sainte-Foy, PQ: Les Editions La Liberté, 1992),
pp.17-18].
The Federal Government Retains the
Key Instruments of Government Policy [Pierre Renaud, “Il nous fait tous les pouvoirs,” in A. Feretti and
G. Miron (eds.), Les grands texts
indépendantistes (Montreal: Editions de l’Hexagone, 1992), pp. 359.]:
Objectives, priorities, and norms for Quebec’s economy are determined by that
level of government that controls the great economic levers: money,
credit, customs, and most taxes. This is the federal government, and
the federal government will never let go of these powers. In effect,
Premier Lucien Bouchard argues, English speaking Canada
has a veto on the future development of Quebec within the federation. [ Debates of the House of Commons
(June 7, 1994), p. 4917].
Quebecers Do Not Believe in the
Equality Inherent in Canadian Federalism: Quebecers do not accept guarantees of equality
in the same way that the rest of Canada does. Former
Premier Jacques Parizeau suggests that “it is not that rights and
obligations are any less important than in Canada, but there must be a
place for differences” [Jacques Parizeau, “Who’s Afraid of Sovereignty
Association?” Canadian Speeches,
January 1991]. Therefore the equality guarantees in the Charter, calls for a Triple-E
senate, and other things held dearly by the Rest of Canada are antithetical
to Quebec’s
aspirations.
Federalism Creates Overlap and Duplication: Beyond the waste involved in intergovernmental
conflict, federalism creates too much government. Overlapping
jurisdictions are “naturally very costly” [Gouvernement de Québec, Conseil
Exécutif, Québec-Canada: A New Deal
(Québec, Editeur official du Quebec, 1979), pp. 24-25]. It is a “waste of
money and energy that is difficult to measure accurately” [Ibid.]. In order to eliminate
this overlap and duplication, the federal government would have to transfer
virtually all of its powers to Quebec.
Quebec Cannot
Develop Economically, Culturally, Socially and Politically under Canadian
Federalism: These areas are
still controlled, in a large part, by the financial resources of the federal
government that seeks to create a concept of Canada
against the desire of Quebecers in a parliament where Quebec has a minority voice. [Parti
Québecois, La sourveraineté: des
résponses á vos questions (Québec: Service des communications du Parti
Québécois, 1995)].
Multiple Levels of Government
Authority in Canadian Federalism is Bad for Quebec
Business: Businesses do
not understand which level of government has jurisdiction and usually has
to negotiate with both, and this hinders the development of Quebec business.
[Jean Campeau, “L’indéoendance du Québec pour bâtir deux pays á leur
image,” Action Nationale 82(7)
(Spring 1992), pp.846-851].
Quebec is
Getting More Cuts than the Rest of Canada: Deficit-cutting in Canada
is felt harder in Quebec than in the rest
of Canada.
Reduction of transfer payments means that Quebec will receive 32 percent less in
1997-1998 than it did in 1994-1995. Between 1982 and 1993, Quebecers
paid 143% more in tax. Meanwhile, regional development has increased
by only 50 percent in Quebec while they
increased by 250% in Maritimes and 300% in Western
Canada. [Gaston Leroux (BQ), Debates of the House of Commons (May 2, 1995].
The grievances which
French Canadians are encouraged to bear against Ottawa have a certain
traditional or mythical cast about them, and nationalism is a
traditional or mythical response to the perceptions of French Canadians
that they are not getting a fair deal out of Confederation. But there
is a separate sense in which the grievances of French Canadians against Ottawa are not
misconceived ideology a sense in which the grievances of French
Canada are real and quantifiable. Prior to the quiet revolution the
two nations inhabiting the Canadian state did so on the basis of
inequality. The English Canadian nation dominated the civil service and the
private economy, and did so with the quiet concurrence of the Catholic
church, the dominant voice in French Canada. After the quiet
revolution, French Canada rapidly de-confessionalised. As it did so,
the new French Canadian intellectuals rejected the domination of English
Ottawa and the English corporations. While the inequality of incomes
and the unequal participation of French Canadians in the Federal civil
service has been largely eradicated in the past thirty years, the legacy of
domination lives on in certain minds and hearts.
To a certain extent, the problems of Canada resemble those of all
large polities. All large political systems engender economic and
political competition between regional subdivisions. However, in Canada, regional competition is exacerbated
by five additional factors: (1) Canada’s regions have
distinctive linguistic identities. In Canada, therefore, regional
economic competition is superimposed over a division of linguistic
identities. This makes it possible to perceive commonplace regional
competitions as contests of English against French. This makes regional
economic competition in Canada
at times supercharged; the competition of English against French tends to
be perceived as intensely political and all-pervasive. The feelings
generated by this competition become fierce. Canadians are capable of
carrying on this imagined rivalry between English and French everywhere in
their political life, even where it has little rational application, as,
for example, in majority-minority relations in the overwhelmingly
English-speaking provinces. The competition is perceived as a
zero-sum game one community wins; the other community loses.
(2) Canadian demography places the English and French languages in
contact. The sociology of language well understands that when diverse
languages come into contact, unique effects are produced. The most
important of these effects is language shift, which may be defined as the
switching from the language habitually used by a speaker to the language
better understood by that speakers audience. Language shift
occurs as a result of the need to communicate in a commonly understood
language. Over time, language shift leads to assimilation of weaker
languages by stronger languages. Canadian history offers a potent
illustration of how this works. Outside of Quebec, the weaker French language has
been assimilated by the stronger English language for over
one-hundred-twenty-five years, to the point where most provincial
French-speaking communities are diminished and some provincial
French-speaking communities have ceased to exist. More recently, a
similar process has been eclipsing the weaker English language inside of Quebec.
Canada’s political system does not have the
institutional strength to manage this competition well. (3) The Upper
Chambers design does not allow it to broker regional economic interests (as
in other federations). (4) Canada’s
extensive use of executive federalism as brokerage machinery has democratic
deficits which obscure the brokerage process. This tempts regional
actors to attack the regime, as well as the process, for brokerage
failures; (5) From the perspective of all major actors, the regime
Canada’s Constitution is incompletely manufactured. Proposals for its
completion generate strenuous political competition between the regions.
The presence in Canada
of all these factors simultaneously exaggerates regional and linguistic
competition to unusually severe levels. Regional economic competition
(which is superimposed over competition between the language communities)
plays out repeatedly to enlarge local incidents involving minority
linguistic communities. Local linguistic clashes all progress basically the
same. The conflicts emerge seemingly out of nowhere: at a school
board meeting, in an exchange between a speeding motorist and a police
officer, in a hospital restructuring exercise. The arena of contest
is overwhelmingly controlled by the linguistic majority. The majority uses
its power in a seemingly injurious spirit. The local minority has
inadequate constitutional weight in the balance of power. Local
actors have incentives to fan the flames. National actors appear to
give the incident weighty national significance, but no forum for national
resolution. Nor does the constitutional and institutional machinery meant
to control linguistic conflict work well. Counter-intuitively, in many
instances the machinery amplifies local conflicts: by drawing them out over
time, by failing to provide clear, unambiguous outcomes, by failing to
insulate linguistic minorities from aggressive provincial majorities, by
under-weighting minorities in the balance of constitutional power and by
expanding the stage to national debate without resolution machinery that
operates in the national interest. The repeated flare-up of these
local firestorms throughout Canadian history have made for difficult
relations between the linguistic communities, and in Quebec,
it has deepened suspicion of English Canada and Canada’s federal system.
In light of these
grievances, perceived or real, it is worth asking why a substantial number
of Quebecers favour sovereignty-association, sovereignty- partnership, or
independence as an antidote to these grievances. Sovereigntists find
fertile ground in merchandising nationalism to the Quebec polity. They find ready
consumers of the idea in various quarters: older Quebecers, particularly in
rural areas, still smarting from the domination by an exclusively English
managerial and entrepreneurial class, French business people competing with
rivals in English Canada, old time clerics longing for the ancien regime of
church supremacy, provincial bureaucrats and workers in the para-public
sector (schools, municipalities, hospitals, universities) who associate
their upward mobility with the almost exclusively French provincial
government and resist any encroachment on their jurisdictions by Ottawa.
There is a large body of
literature concerning Quebec’s
grievances with federalism. It is interesting to visit the web-sites
of the Bloc Québécois and Parti Québécois. One finds there the themes
that motivate the desire for sovereignty in Quebec. Distilled down to the core
ideas, this literature amounts to assertions that federalism:
·
pays
insufficient respect to the Quebec
people as a distinctive national community;
·
makes
vulnerable Quebec’s
institutions, language, culture, and national identity;
·
devolves
insufficient power to Quebec’s,
and
·
Ottawa too much
control over Quebec’s
economy.
The desirability of
sovereignty as a solution to Quebec’s
grievances about Canada’s
federal system is also advanced by certain political thinkers in Quebec. The Parti
Québécois stated in a 1994 pamphlet what a sovereign Quebec would look like. This was
developed by the Comité National pour OUI for the 1995 Referendum.
Finally, the PQ published another document in 1995 that purported to
explain the reasons why Quebecers should vote for sovereignty. This
was the PQs answer to the charge, “Why would sovereignty be better than
federalism?”
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