CKNW Editorial
for September 29, 1999

The Toronto Globe and Mail editorial on Tuesday mused as to why the threat of separatism had diminished in Quebec. But before I get into that I must say how badly I will miss Gordon Gibson’s contribution to the Tuesday edition. Just why he should be dropped – I suspect money may have something to do with it – is beyond me. Here was a real live British Columbian – not just some itinerant journalist building a cv – who spoke the minds of many of us to a national audience. The National Post has no regular BC writer and now neither does the Toronto Globe and Mail. I believe that’s because the Toronto papers, which both of them are, are afraid of B.C. opinions and hope that if they are shut off they will go away.

Back to Quebec. The editorial talks of many reasons separatism is on the wane in Quebec – indeed it gives every reason except the real one. In fact, one of the reasons the editor talks about – the ersatz amending formula passed through the Commons by Chretien will turn out to be a most unhelpful initiative in other parts of Canada but that’s for another day.

The Reform Party and, dare I say it, commentators from places like British Columbia are responsible for the changes in Quebec. Left to their own devices, the federal Liberals would have continued the bipartisan, that is to say Liberal and Tory, policy of constantly appeasing Quebec. In fact the editor is right to say that much of Meech and Charlottetown has been done behind the backs of Canadian voters though he doesn’t quite put it that way. But the Liberals were compelled by outside forces including the Reform Party to stop giving Quebec all it whined for. In fact two big heroes are Quebeckers – Unity Minister Stephane Dion and Quebec City lawyer Guy Bertrand.

Bertrand, you will recall, took a suit demanding clarification of the right of any province to secede. The federal Liberals wanted no part of this, being scared to stand up for the territorial integrity of the country but Bertrand persisted and the government was forced to join in. Quebec now knows that it has an enormous hurdle to overcome if it wants to quit.

Stephan Dion, in 1997, entered into public correspondence with Bernard Landry, his Quebec counterpart and started talking straight talk for the first time in living memory of Ottawa governments. He spoke of the proposition that if Canada was divisible, so was Quebec. It set the Parti Quebecois on its duff.

Of more importance, these events gave French speaking Quebeckers pause for considerable thought. No longer was this separation business the slam dunk they had been led to believe. It began to occur to ordinary people that perhaps a divorce wouldn’t be all that happy … that indeed it could be downright messy. Maybe there wasn’t a ready and willing negotiator on the  other side who could speak for the Rest of Canada.

I give considerable credit to the Reform Party for all this. I also give credit to the NDP government in Victoria, especially Andrew Petter, for making it clear that their passage of the so-called Calgary declaration did not imply any BC approval of any constitutional amendments. That was a critically important decision as one can see by the fact that the Calgary Declaration is now a non event.

Because the Reform Party did a good job in this area I am concerned that it is, if my reading of the polls means anything, on a pretty dramatic downward slide. I don’t for one moment think that the Liberals unprodded by the Reform Party, will stand up to Quebec yet if present trends continue Reform will lose considerable ground to the Liberals in the next federal election.

Admittedly the next election is a year and a half or more away but the prospective loss of the Reforms strength on constitutional matters is a worry. This is what makes it such tragedy that Reform must, whenever provoked, show its apparent true colours. People like John Reynolds do a marvelous job of making the true Reformer happy as hell but at the same time they alienates those Liberals, Tories and even NDP, to say nothing of independents who are not hard right-wing bigots and whose support is critical to Reform success.

Firmness towards Quebec has turned the political situation around. Mean-spiritedness, real or perceived, in the Reform Party can turn it back to what it was. The only hope is that the Reform Party can change and project that change before the next national election.