Continental <i> Shifts</i> : Canada : Prime Minister Mulroney wants to cement his country’s constitution in place, with the ‘distinct society’ of Quebec a member in good standing. But the English are balking.

There is a joke told frequently in Israel about how the Jews first received title to their strip of land on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. Moses was a horrendous stutterer. After leading his people out of Egypt, he suggested they head for a roomy, resource-rich and trouble-free country called Canada. His newly freed followers, however, couldn’t quite make out his instructions. They thought he said Canaan.

During my nine-year sojourn in the Jewish state, I used to think that a year or so of R&R; in the Great White North should be mandatory for all Israel’s existentially distraught natives. How refreshingly healthy, I imagined, it would be for Israelis to be exposed to the example of two peoples--in Canada’s case, the French and English--warring in the breast of a single nation not with katyusha rockets and rubber bullets, speed boats and buzz bombs, but with newspaper editorials, lawyers and constitutional amendments.

Of these things, however, I am no longer sure. In Canada today, an otherwise grand experiment in North American nation-building has soured because of a slender and seemingly inconsequential document called the Meech Lake Accord.

Brian Mulroney, Canada’s Jay-Leno-look-alike prime minister, may have persuaded some recalcitrant provincial premiers to ratify the agreement--although Newfoundland’s Clyde Wells insists his signature will stick only if the provincial legislature says so. But whatever its fate, the scars left by Meech Lake may well outlast such Canadian calamities--most of them not widely recalled in the United States--as the Metis Rebellion of 1870, the Manitoba School Question of the 1890s, the World War I Conscription crisis and the FLQ-inspired October crisis of 1970.

Toronto novelist Margaret Atwood would have us believe her countrymen to be singularly preoccupied--or she gleaned from their literary output--with issues of survival. But to judge from their universal Medicare system, their low incidence of violent crime (not to mention the dearth of weapons in the streets), their infrequent flirtations with racial strife or with political and religious demagogy and their lack of natural enemies on the international scene, Canadians have had it pretty soft.

Meech Lake is not a blueprint for the revolutionary remaking of a country. Rather, it is a five-point amending document to Canada’s recently patriated constitution. In substance, it is neither long nor complicated. The accord calls for the recognition of French Quebec as a “distinct society.” It affords Canada’s provinces the right to opt out of some federally sponsored shared-cost programs. It augments provincial prerogatives on matters of immigration. It constitutionalizes the country’s Supreme Court, providing a formula for its composition from provincial lists. And it requires unanimity among the provinces for subsequent constitutional amendments.

Meech Lake was put together three years ago by a former Montreal labor negotiator who regarded it as the crowning achievement of an otherwise abysmal term as prime minister. If he could not be loved, as some recently published political memoirs suggest was his ultimate goal--Mulroney has, in fact, become the most unpopular national leader in his country’s 123-year history--he would at least go down in the books as the man who cemented Canada’s constitution in place.

Instead, Meech Lake became the rallying point for a majority of Canadians in and out of Quebec who appeared to prefer the imminent breakup of their country to the prospect of seeing these less-than-earth-shaking provisions passed into law.

The tragedy of Meech Lake was not that it provided the lamest reason in human history to abort a reasonably successful country once wrongfully dismissed as a worthless lump of rock and snow. Nor can it be found in English Canada’s loathing to acknowledge in law what it has always known in fact: that French Quebec is distinct in its language, religion, history and values.

Little solace, moreover, can be gained in tracing English rancor to a feeling that the price for getting Quebec to sign on to Meech Lake--allegedly at great cost to federal power--was a free-trade agreement with the United States that most English Canadians regarded as a sellout of their country’s sovereignty; or in tracing French Canadian disdain to a perception in Quebec that Meech Lake was initially foisted on it by the federal government in Ottawa. Why, then, were the English so dead set against it? And since they were, surely it was worth preserving.

The tragedy of Meech Lake--if it should still end in tragedy--lay, rather, in the fact that most Canadians still don’t know what’s in the document, or at least, what it all means.

In Canadian political scientist Philip Resnick’s recently published “Letters to a Quebecois Friend” (McGill-Queens University Press), a “ independiste “ professor at Quebec University in Montreal, Daniel Latouche, characterized the “distinct society” clause in Meech Lake as “an affront to our political culture . . . We all know it has absolutely no legal meaning, and that Quebec has no need for such a clause. It will poison further the atmosphere between our two nations for years to come, as we will come to expect great rewards from what is being presented to us as a great concession on your part.”

The crisis sparked by Meech Lake--one that will not end with its ratification--has evolved almost entirely beyond the realm of constitutionality. Meech Lake has become a symbol of national discontent. It is almost as if Canada, which had the good sense more than a century ago to send the Mounties out to make its frontier safe for settlement, now feels impelled to reinstate and relive a Wild West phase of its own.

In a country forever taking its own national pulse (another Atwoodism), Meech Lake now represents a self-induced psychotic break; in essence, a nationwide nervous breakdown.

There is mourning in English Canada today--a sense that, come what may, the country has lost much of its charm. During a trip to Vancouver a month ago, I ran into a a college friend from Montreal who, surprisingly, voiced the melancholy conviction that Canada was now, in his words, “toast.” In Quebec, which I visited in March, there is, in contrast, startling self-assurance, and also wide-eyed anticipation. The Quebecois, who have finally mastered the realm of business once reserved for the English, are convinced they can go it alone with little fuss.

If Canada succumbs to this mania for dissolution, declared Montreal novelist Mordecai Richler in Toronto last March, “future generations will laugh at our obsessions . . . We are not living through tragedy, but through farce. If this country flies apart from such matters, at least foreigners will find some comic relief in Canada’s plight.”

This may prove especially true for Israelis, who may--despite such hindrances as a Palestinian uprising and a new right-wing government under whose aegis such hideous concepts as “transfer” may achieve new respectability--be glad their ancestors didn’t take a left turn at Mount Sinai 3,000 years ago.