Agreeing in Principle, Canadian Leaders Say : Politics: But they admit stumbling blocks remain on thorny issue of French-speaking Quebec and constitutional change.

The mood in Canada has swung from hope to discouragement and even cynicism as the nation’s top leaders Friday wrapped up a full week of closed-door talks on its constitution with little yet to show for their efforts.

Late Friday evening, premiers emerged from yet another marathon session claiming they had an agreement in principle--but they added that there were still some stumbling blocks, and hopes were dashed once again, as they already have several times this week.

On the surface, the issues involved in this week’s talks are arcane legal concepts that, polls show, few Canadians really understand. But on a deeper level, the bits of dry legal language sum up sharply divergent visions of what this country is all about. At that level, the talks have touched the hearts of many Canadian onlookers.

As Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and the country’s 10 provincial premiers struggled for compromise, the country’s generalized sense of vexation became evident in the crowd that has taken to waiting each day here at the meeting-hall doorway.

“If the politicians would leave this country alone, the problems wouldn’t exist,” complained Ross Taylor, 38, who had come out to lean over the police barricades and watch for a glimpse of the country’s highest officials.

“He’s damned right,” said the young woman next to him, 17-year-old Kady O’Malley. “This is scare tactics on the part of the government. It’s a handy diversion for them, to take people’s attention off the main problems of the country.”

Last Sunday, when the 11 powerful men first began their talks, it was a different sort of crowd, one that cheered for the politicians and waved polite, patriotic placards urging the leaders to do whatever they could to keep the country on an even keel.

Back then, only one man in the crowd bellowed out that the high-level talks were “a sham,” and when he did, others promptly launched into a chorus of “O Canada,” the national anthem, to drown him out.

But by Friday, a number of pickets were pacing in front of the meeting hall, some because they object to specific issues on the bargaining table, others simply because they don’t like the way the country’s fate seems to rest on the shoulders of 11 men closeted in a room with the door shut.

There is a fairly widespread concern in intellectual circles here that the provincial premiers are going beyond their electoral mandates in the negotiations and are making major decisions for the country without consulting the people. Some fear that any compromise made in such a way will only paper over the deep, though nonviolent, divisions in Canadian society.

“When you have a very bad process, you get a very bad outcome,” said Daniel Drache, head of the political science department at York University.

“There will be more trouble,” even if the premiers do make good on Friday night’s predictions and reach some sort of agreement in the coming days, predicted Robert Bothwell, a historian at the University of Toronto. “You can’t have two systems of civil rights in the same state.”

Indeed, the central issue in this week’s talks has been the interplay between Canadian civil liberties and the protection of Canada’s French-speaking minority. Quebec, where most of Canada’s French-speakers live, has never signed the national constitution, which contains a Charter of Rights and Freedoms akin to America’s Bill of Rights.

English Canadians accept the Charter of Rights as the law of the land. But Quebeckers don’t want a document that protects individual liberties above all else. They would prefer a constitution that protects the existence of the French language and culture in North America.

When Mulroney became prime minister in 1984, he made it a special project of his government to bring Quebec into the constitutional fold. In 1987, he chaired constitutional talks at a Quebec resort called Meech Lake, and came up with a package of amendments, called the Meech Lake Accord, that walked a delicate line between English Canadian individualism, and French Canadian collective concerns about language. A key clause of the Meech Lake Accord does the trick by naming Quebec a “distinct society” within Canada.

At the time the accord was written, the “distinct society” clause was accepted by all the provinces. But before the document could be officially ratified by all 10 provinces, elections were held, some new premiers took office, and three of the newcomers began expressing doubts about Quebec’s right to be an official “distinct society.”

Their objections were rooted in, among other things, uncertainty in the legal community over whether the “distinct society” clause would give Quebec a way of getting around the Charter of Rights.

There have been other objections as well, many of them relating indirectly to powers given or not given to Quebec. Another key issue all of this week has been whether Canada should reform its Senate, now a discredited, appointed body where the lion’s share of the seats are taken up by Quebec and Ontario. Quebec has opposed reform, for fear that giving more seats to the other provinces would dilute the political power of francophones.

Under a proposal floated Friday by the federal government, a timeframe would be set for reforming the Senate, and if no unanimous decision could be made by the provinces by the deadline, some provinces would automatically get more seats in the senate. Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia would lose seats, Quebec would keep the same number of seats--and its parliamentary power ratio would remain unchanged.

All week, the debate has bounced back and forth as to whether Quebec ought to have “distinct” powers or not.

Mulroney’s latest proposal Friday evening would make Quebec a distinct society, while also granting the objecting provinces the right, in the future, to hold hearings nationwide on the status of other ethnic groups within Canada.

In the small hours this morning, this appeared to be the remaining sticking point.