Vancouver Courier
for March 29, 1998

There's a question no one likes to ask, though it's often thought of and sometimes forms part of private conversations.

It takes considerable prescience and no little courage to see accurately into

the future. A man whose courage and prescience was legendary, Winston Churchill, was nevertheless dead wrong on the future of the British Empire. Churchill foresaw with astonishing accuracy what was to happen in the "white" world but "did not become the Kings first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire". He didn't. But his immediate successors were forced to do what was clearly inevitable - break up the Empire.

Well, if the great Churchill could be so wrong, I dare not make a prediction. I merely ask the question.

Is it inevitable that Canada will break up? If one looks at the great sweep of history, is it clear that the shotgun marriage would never really take and that like so many unions of convenience the distractions eventually greatly outweigh the attractions? Will historians, perhaps 50 years hence, look back and say. "how could they have fooled themselves so long into thinking that they could make a country out of all that geographical and cultural disparity?"

Professor James McPherson, the man who wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning Battle Cry of Freedom, the best one volume history of the American Civil War ever written in the opinion of many, has a new book, Is Blood Thicker Than Water, $14.95 in paperback. Professor McPherson compares the ante bellum South with post 1960 Quebec and finds some startling similarities.

Quebec considers itself a "distinct society" - so did the South. In Quebec it was language and culture, in the south it was slavery and what Southerners felt was a superior society to that of the materialistic Yankees to the North.

Each had a sense of "ethnic", as opposed to "civic" uniqueness. The Quebeckers ethnicity is obvious - the South's wasn't, though no less real for that. Southern society, especially the upper strata, began by the 1850s to see themselves as descended not from the religious "fanatics" (by 17th century English standards) and greedy merchants who spawned the North, but as descendants of the Cavaliers of the English Civil war, an altogether more genteel and aristocratic group.

Both Quebec now and the South then had influence in the central government considerably in excess of their actual numbers.

Each proposed a "sovereignty-association" scheme - Quebec through Rene Levesque and the South through a system of two presidents, one for the North, one for the South with each having a veto. (Where have we heard that word before?)

Professor McPherson falls short of predicting civil war in Canada and doesn't say that Canada will necessarily split. What he did, however, was give us a wakeup call. Our situation in Canada is by no means unprecedented and to assume that we have a one off, only in Canada sort of a problem is to badly delude ourselves.

In a recent interview I raised with Professor McPherson this point. After the horrendous carnage of the Civil War which utterly destroyed the South's way of life, a conflict all the more bitter for having been civil, and after the excesses of the Reconstruction period, the South became the home of the most patriotic Americans of all. His answer itself was interesting but what was important, I think, was his answer to my supplementary question, "will Canada, if it is to stay together, have to learn to have as an integral part of our country a society far more patriotic to its province than Canada?'

In short, he said yes. Canadians outside Quebec will have to learn to live with a Quebec that treats the Fleur-De-Lis with much more affection than the Maple Leaf and sings patriotic songs about Quebec while being indifferent to what many outside Quebec see as essential to citizenship - loyalty first and foremost to Canada.

The South, Professor McPherson points out, accepted the fact it had lost the war. It fought with great distinction and from the moment General Grant at Appomatox told General Lee that his men could take their horses home to the farm, there was a general feeling that each side was left with its dignity, its military traditions and heroes intact, concentrating thereafter on accentuating these positives. They'd lost but had not been shamed and, after the relatively short Reconstruction Period, quickly accommodated to a redefined America and became Americans first and Southerners second.

Canada, if it is to survive must, it would seem, radically redefine itself. If the recent flag waving nonsense by some Liberals and all Reformers is any indication, this redefinition, if it is to come at all, will be too late.

It may be, at the end of the day, that it wasn't meant to be. Perhaps Quebec will never allow itself to be une province comme les autres and the rest of Canada won't resign itself to one province being, juridically at any rate, a special case.