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What can
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from Quebec?
Harry McGrath
I can assure Eric Falconer that he wasn’t the only one to find Jill Stephenson’s piece (14 March) irritating, though in my case it was a formless irritation as frankly I had no idea what she was on about. Something to do with clubbable (in the Johnsonian sense) English people – ‘haw haws’ – who can be either Scottish or English, and nationalists who need to get out more.
I did get that she was writing while on a ‘small ship’ which may explain why she made me feel all at sea. Keeping my eyes on the horizon, I read to the end and suddenly irritation morphed to something more serious. It was this that did it: ‘At one of our stops we met a Canadian couple from Ottawa who were keen to tell us what an awful business the referendum(s) in Quebec had been, and what a relief it was that all that was now over. Don’t do it, was their message. For them, the Québécois had wanted everything to be decided on their terms and in their favour, regardless of what other Canadians wanted. Sound familiar?’.
It’s not hard to see why Jill Stephenson found the couple from Ottawa so sympathetic. Their ‘don’t do it’ and her ‘sound familiar?’ achieve almost identical levels of condescension. However, the casual dismissal of the aspirations of the entire French-speaking population of Quebec as base selfishness is a step too far. And all on the word of two people from Ottawa, seat of central government and city of civil servants. Vous devriez avoir honte!
Jill’s new friends may also be counting their chickens. Certainly the Bloc Quebecois vote collapsed at the 2011 Canadian election. But in Quebec they will tell you that it went to the left-leaning National Democratic Party as a tactical (and as it turned out) futile attempt to prevent the election of a right-wing central government. Sound familiar?
Only a few weeks ago (perhaps while the small ship was still afloat) Pierre Trudeau’s son Justin attracted some opprobrium by suggesting that if the current government continues to develop its right-wing vision for Canada ‘maybe I would think about making Quebec a country’.
I do owe Jill Stephenson a debt for putting the words ‘sound familiar’ in my head. There are some things going on in Scotland just now that sound familiar to someone who was in Canada at the time of the second Quebec referendum in 1995. One is that a manipulative and patronising central government working the ‘no’ camp and a charismatic leader on the ‘yes’ side persuaded friends in Quebec to vote ‘yes’ when they initially tended to vote ‘no’.
The SNP doesn’t have the sharp divide of language to contend with and
is free to pursue an inclusive national vision even if Jill Stephenson
chooses not to see it.
Another is that there was an awful lot of discussion back then about the question that would be asked. It ended up as: ‘Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership within the scope of the bill, respecting the future of Quebec and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?’. Beside that, the Scottish question will be a model of clarity whatever it includes or doesn’t.
There are also a number of differences between Quebec in 1995 and Scotland today, most of them, I think, to the SNP’s advantage. Creating a new nation is a harder sell than restoring an old one. And Canada in 1995 had a liberal, pro-immigrant, pro-multiculturalism, optimistic vision to employ in its own defence. Eight years later Bono would summarise this as: ‘I believe the world needs more Canada’. Hard to imagine who is going to stand up now and say that the world needs more Britain.
In the end, the civic nationalism envisaged by the Parti Quebecois was never quite enough to bridge the ‘two solitudes’ and attract English speakers in numbers sufficient to tip the balance. The SNP doesn’t have the sharp divide of language to contend with and is free to pursue an inclusive national vision even if Jill Stephenson chooses not to see it.
There is no way of telling if the small ship is anywhere near Canada but, if so, it might be an idea to berth it in Vieux-Port de Montreal and disembark for a plate of poutine. While there why not ask the locals for their take on the current state of play in Quebec? What of the Quebecois ‘nation within a nation’ passed by Canada’s House of Commons in 2006? What of Relations International Quebec which represents its interests all over the world?
What of the ongoing debate about extending the powers of the assemblee nationale du Quebec even further to something approaching – I don’t know – devo max max? And what of the prospect of a revival of Quebec independence now that there is an unsympathetic right-wing government in Ottawa?
Even if none of this persuades Jill that her friends are – to put it kindly – premature in their assessment of the situation in Quebec, I’m confident she will find the locals a welcoming and generous bunch, passionate for their culture, engaged in their politics and able to discuss it all in at least two languages. Just don’t tell them they are selfish and need to get out more. It will spoil the party.
