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Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.8 KB | 122 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 78

Canada Might Get Interesting


By Richard Brookhiser


    If you asked Americans to pick the dullest country in the
world, most of us would pick Canada. That is a tribute to
Canadians. For decades, Canada has heeded the Chinese curse "May
you live in interesting times" and done the opposite. Given a
choice between the headlines and a decent life, Canadians cede
the headlines to Haiti. Americans should start thinking about
their dull neighbor though, because there is an even chance that
this year or the next, Canada will join the Soviet Union and
Yugoslavia on the list of former countries and become two
neighbors.

    The most obvious force pulling Canada apart is language.
Three-quarters of the population grow up speaking English, while
one-quarter of it grow up speaking French. For the most part,
the groups do not mingle, but live in segregated regional blocs
-- French speakers in Quebec province, English speakers in the
rest of Canada.

    For three centuries, the Quebecois -- descendants of
France's attempt to plant a North American colony -- maintained
a society that was rural, Roman Catholic and inward-looking. But
in the 1960s, as Quebecois moved into business and the
professions, Quebecois separatists raised their sights. They now
control two parties of their own -- the Parti Quebecois, which
contests (and sometimes wins) Quebec provincial elections, and
the newer Bloc Quebecois, which holds seats in the national
Parliament. French Canadians are intelligent and
entrepreneurial. When it comes to politics, they're blowhards,
endlessly recounting their frustrations, many of them imaginary.
Compared with other minorities in the modern age, they have had
an exceedingly easy life. But grievance is in the minds of the
aggrieved, and the Quebecois want to run Quebec as a French
enclave -- or they want out.

    English Canadians feel they have taken the role of the
masochist in a bad marriage, making concessions in the vain hope
of peace. The most irritating concession they went along with
was the policy of bilingualism, established by former Prime
Minister Pierre Trudeau in the '60s and '70s. Pols and
bureaucrats were required to learn both tongues, and it was
hoped that over time their fluency would trickle down. Quebec
paid no attention, enacting a series of French-only laws. For
the first time, English Canadians began to wish that Quebec
would clear out.

    Another malign force in Canadian life is the national
government. In recent decades it's been spending like a sailor.
(Thirty cents out of every dollar Ottawa collects goes to
service the debt, vs. 17 cents of every dollar in Washington.)
The behavior of the central government especially angers the
resource-rich provinces of the west. But neither big spending
nor structural problems get a hearing in the din over the Quebec
issue.

    In 1987 Prime Minister Brian Mulroney offered a
constitutional-reform package known as the Meech Lake Accord.
For Quebec its guarantees of a "distinct society" were a bare
minimum, but for many in English Canada they went too far. When
Meech Lake was not adopted, Quebec scheduled a referendum on its
future for October of this year. The federal government is
working on a new batch of compromises, which should be ready for
national discussion in April. Beyond this hurdle is the next
general election, which must be held no later than 1993, and
which may see Canadian politics fragmented into five parties --
Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives, the opposition Liberals,
the socialist New Democratic Party, the Bloc Quebecois and the
brand-new Reform Party, a rebellion of westerners whose slogan
is "We Want In."

    U.S. government policy on all this is to speak bromides
and carry no stick. A U.S.-Canada working group of the Atlantic
Council in Washington has been studying the Canadian question
privately, but its reports are scarcely more definite than
official pronouncements. There is nothing definite America could
profitably say. Before he began his run for President, Patrick
Buchanan wrote columns suggesting that the U.S. welcome the
western and Maritime provinces to statehood. Canadians shouldn't
worry. Among the obstacles to such a scheme is ethnic etiquette
here: we could scarcely take on several dozen white-bread
Congressmen without boosting Puerto Rico and the District of
Columbia to statehood too.

    Some Canadian-policy intellectuals have discussed the
prospect of violence. Canadians shouldn't worry about that
either: they aren't Serbs and Croats. In a way, that may be part
of their problem. "Every society," said Oliver Wendell Holmes,
"rests on the death of men." Canadians fought bravely in
Britain's wars (twice against us), but they have rarely fought
one another. As a consequence, they may not feel the same stake
in their society that Americans earned, at such grim cost.

    The crisis could go any number of ways, including petering
out. Quebeckers may not want to risk a leap into the dark of
independence during a recession. (Even a Quebecois economist
admits that sovereignty would involve transitional costs of as
much as 10% of Quebec's GDP -- a prospect that separatist
politicians carefully soft-pedal.) It is possible, finally, that
some deal will be struck either by Mulroney or even by western
politicians willing to give Quebec its head in return for a
redesigned federal government.

    Americans can live with any of these options. The main
lesson we should take from our neighbor's troubles is not to
import them here. Multiculturalism and bilingualism, once
planted, grow like kudzu. Our struggles over our racist problem
have lasted 200 years and included a Civil War. Let's not add
problems that have made even Canada interesting.