CKNW Editorial
for July 3, 2000

As I heard the fireworks on the evening of July 1, I couldn’t help thinking what a strange country we really are. Born in the crucible of the American Civil War as an expression of disparate colonies’ antipathy towards joining the United States we really haven’t changed too much. Hugh MacLennan, looking at Ontario and Quebec 40 years ago – which is still the way the federal government looks at the country – he referred to Canada as "two solitudes". That it remains except one of the solitudes has become hybrid. To see that, one only need look at the politics of the country. One major part, basically representing the Central and eastern parts of the country, sees the nation as a partnership between the English speaking and French speaking parts and votes Liberal while the another part, the western provinces sees that as outdated and historical nonsense, and supports another party that sees the constitution as standing for ten equal provinces. And as the fireworks went off we still, from coast to coast, only had one thing in common – like the beer ad says, we ain’t American.

It’s not that we in British Columbia aren’t good Canadians – it’s just that we get dewy eyed and weepy, in our moments of patriotism, over quite a different concept of Canada that the one extolled by those east of the Lakehead. They are very different places we both love. And you have to ask the question, Is not wanting to be American sufficiently strong enough glue to keep a nation together … as the notion of nationhood recedes world wide in favour of large trade organizations run, for the most part, less and less by politicians and more and more by large corporations? Robert Kaplan, the author of the excellent new book The Coming Anarchy sees Vancouver as part of a triumvirate with Seattle and Portland … with the national government becoming less and less relevant.

The trouble is, you see, that in searching for the enemy to national unity we’re looking in the wrong place. It’s certainly true that a separate Quebec would be the catalyst for the rest of the country breaking up but we never ask the question, Why should this be so? Why couldn’t the rest of the country simply swallow it’s pride, make some sort of divorce arrangements and carry on?

The reason is that the only two things the Rest of Canada has in common is a desire to hold Quebec in … and distaste for becoming Americans. Believe me, with Quebec gone there will be no passion whatsoever for a country run by Ontario, which would have half the new country’s population. In this afterglow of fireworks and singing O Canada you may think today we would all band together but when you sober up you’ll realize that a new country is hardly likely under the circumstances that would prevail.

Cascadia, while not a political reality, is more and more becoming an economic reality. The federal government, apart from being the custodian of our pension funds, is becoming less and less relevant. Indeed it could be argued that it’s mainly a nuisance. We don’t need Canadian Armed forces to protect us … the RCMP could easily be replaced by a B.C. force as we once had … we surely could not do a worse job running our fishery … the silicon chip makes the post office a relic of former times … government procurement contracts such as ship building haven’t gone to the west coast for years … the federal government is really becoming a tiresome and very expensive irrelevancy.

British Columbia is on the brink, in historical terms, of leaving Canada out of boredom. You will only play with an expensive but useless toy so long before you discard it.

We won’t likely ever become formally part of the United States. We will be like Singapore was when it broke away from Malaysia … a large city state, in the North American context, which no longer has any need for the larger political entity.

We won’t have civil strife, people in the streets waving flags and threatening violence. We will simply wake up one day to one more insult from the Canadian government, realize that our own MPs are either in on the game or powerless to act and say the hell with it. The BC revolution won’t come with a latter day Tom Paine crying "These are the times that try men’s souls" but will simply be there by reason of an inability of a faraway government to have any relevance in a place it has never paid much attention to anyway.