For Canada, Spats Despite a Birthday

This is Canada’s 125th birthday year, and an outside observer might be excused for expecting fine celebrations north of the 49th Parallel and pride in a national history free of war at home or serious domestic strife.

But instead, such is the level of civic distemper in Canada this year that the government body handling the anniversary of confederation couldn’t even send out invitations to the party without setting off a row over language.

Canada 125 Corp., a group created by the federal government to organize anniversary events, recently made the mistake of sending out pamphlets printed in English to Canada’s nine majority-English-speaking provinces, and pamphlets printed in French to majority-French-speaking Quebec.

The mailing angered the small number of French-speakers who live outside Quebec. Canada is officially a bilingual country, coast to coast; the Francophones demanded that all citizens be sent copies of a single pamphlet, printed in both English and French.

The birthday pamphlet spat may sound trivial, but it is emblematic of the contentiousness of Canada’s public life today.

This is the year that Quebec is scheduled to hold a referendum on whether to seek independence from Canada. The vote can be averted only if the rest of the country extends an olive branch, in the form of constitutional amendments agreeable to Quebec. (Quebec has never ratified the Canadian constitution and probably won’t unless it is substantially amended.)

The looming Quebec referendum ought to send the rest of Canada scrambling for a compromise. But in fact, with the clock ticking inexorably down to Oct. 26--the deadline for the referendum--Canadians seem unable to agree on anything.

Indeed, the political debate seems only to be deepening the divisions within Canada. It is pitting English-speaker against Francophone, westerner against easterner, federalist against regional nationalist, large province against small, laborer against capitalist, politician against “ordinary Canadian.”

This winter, feminists, native Canadians, disabled people and other interest groups have thrown wrenches of their own into the constitutional discussions, complaining that to the extent solutions are being found at all, they are white male solutions.

Against this backdrop, one professor from Montreal’s prestigious McGill University has said that violence could be the price of Canada’s political travails and suggested that English-speaking Canada would be justified in using force to contain Quebec’s nationalist impulses.

The federal government of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney certainly wants to avoid that, as well as the Quebec referendum, and keep from entering the history books as the stewards who let the country come unstuck.

In hopes of placating Quebec without offending non-Quebecers, it has proposed a major overhaul of the way governing power is distributed in Canada. The Mulroney government wants to give a number of powers now held by Ottawa--powers over job training, forestry, mining, housing and recreation--to the provinces and to let the provinces have a greater say over immigration, cultural affairs and monetary policy.

At the same time, the Mulroney government wants to give Ottawa greater power over the Canadian economy and to enshrine Quebec’s long-sought official status as a “distinct society.”

To make Canadians feel that they have a say on these changes, the government has, since the new year, been holding weekly public meetings on its constitutional proposals.

Each week’s meeting brings together about 200 politicians, civil servants, academics and “ordinary Canadians”--selected by lottery--to address a key element of the proposed amendments.

When the series of meetings ends this month, the federal Cabinet is to consider the findings, then draft the final amendments by the end of April.

What will happen after that, though, is anything but clear. The amending process can take up to three years, and Quebec, in the meantime, may go ahead and hold its referendum.

This weekend’s meeting, which ended Sunday, was the first and only one held in Quebec, in the politically important city of Montreal. Montreal is the intellectual and cultural heart--though not the political capital--of the Francophone province. The official topic at the meeting was the management of the economy.

But like the other meetings held so far, the Montreal talks yielded little more than a sense of how far apart the various Canadian camps truly are.

In essence, the Mulroney government had proposed strengthening Ottawa’s power to manage the economy and control budget deficits and had urged the provinces to tear down the varied, anachronistic trade barriers they have erected between themselves.

To an American, accustomed to the free movement of goods and services within the United States, Mulroney’s ideas might seem eminently sensible. As things now stand, Canadians living in, say, Ontario, are unable to buy Moosehead beer, brewed in the Maritime Provinces. And a Nova Scotian wishing to travel by bus to Quebec has to change bus lines at the New Brunswick border--New Brunswick forbids Nova Scotian bus companies the use of its roads.

But as it happened, delegate after delegate condemned Mulroney’s ideas. Some saw them as a federal power grab while others thought they would wipe out jobs and fray Canada’s generous social safety net. The delegates who tried to argue that Canada couldn’t hope to compete in the global economy if it didn’t even permit competition among the provinces were given a polite hearing--then forgotten in a rush to put a “social charter” into the constitution.

The social charter, as its advocates described it, would guarantee health care, housing, education and freedom from poverty to every citizen. This idea left delegates from the business community grumbling about how much such a constitutional guarantee would cost, but no one seemed to be listening.

Through it all, a small number of Quebec nationalists picketed outside the hotel where the meeting was held. Proponents of Quebec’s sovereignty have boycotted the series of meetings from its beginning.

The first meeting, held in Halifax, gave the delegates three days to discuss the Mulroney government’s proposed devolution of much federal power from Ottawa to the provinces.

Quebec has been pressing for such a transfer for about 30 years. But outside Quebec, many Canadians are greatly put off by the prospect. They fear that if Ottawa has less power, then Canada itself will be weaker.

Not surprisingly, the Halifax delegates failed to find a way of resolving 30 years of disagreement over a long weekend. As they thought matters over, some began to argue that perhaps Ottawa could pass on some governing powers to Quebec but refrain from giving them to the rest of the provinces. This proposal came with an ungainly name: “asymmetrical federalism.”

But other delegates said no to shedding powers in Quebec’s direction only. They said all provinces should be equal.

The next meeting, held in Calgary, yielded results that were scarcely more conclusive. On the agenda was the reform of Canada’s governing institutions--particularly the Senate, a discredited assemblage of political appointees, the bulk of whom represent Ontario and Quebec.

Western Canadians of all parties have long been clamoring to make the Senate an elected body with an equal number of members from each province--much like the American counterpart. This construct is called a “Triple-E Senate,” for Equal, Elected and Effective.

But in Ontario and Quebec, there is much resistance to equal representation in the Senate; voting equality for the smaller provinces would mean less power for the big ones.

When the Calgary proceedings closed, chairman Peter Lougheed--a former premier of Alberta--said that he could envision an elected and effective Senate but that Canadians hoping for representational equality had better scale back their ambitions. That was a tall order for “Triple-E Canadians” such as Newfoundland Premier Clyde Wells, who has made himself something of a national folk hero by crusading for perfect equality among the provinces.

The upcoming weekend’s meeting is likely to further highlight Canada’s internal divisions. The topic on the agenda is the “distinct society,” the idea that the constitution should take special note of Quebec’s unique French history, culture, language and legal code.

Any proposal that Quebec be given special constitutional status offends many Canadians outside Quebec. The “distinct society” matter has been one of the most divisive issues in the ongoing constitutional debate.

Even before the series of meetings began early last month, political leaders from Canada’s various regions were already bringing a pugnacious new tone to the constitutional debate.

In the west, Alberta Premier Donald Getty suddenly announced that his constituents were fed up with official bilingualism; he recommended dumping it.

In Ontario, Premier Bob Rae, who leads the democratic socialist New Democratic Party, was calling insistently for the inclusion of the social charter in the constitution.

In Quebec, Premier Robert Bourassa has been complaining that the original goal of the constitutional meetings--to reach agreement with Quebec--is being lost in the debate over social charters, Triple-E Senates and the like.

Meanwhile, the real “ordinary Canadians”--those who aren’t attending the meetings--are fuming. Poll after poll has shown that Canadians are sick of hearing about asymmetrical federalism, “opting out with compensation” and other lugubrious constitutionalisms they don’t understand and that seem to have scant bearing on their personal lives.

Some polls have suggested that a good number of English-speaking Canadians are so wearied by the national-unity debate that they would just as soon let Quebec leave the country, simply to put an end to the haggling.

When Gallup Canada asked Canadians what they thought about Mulroney’s constitutional proposals a month after they were unveiled, 28% were against them and only 15% were in favor--and 57% had no opinion.

A full 66% said they knew little or nothing about what is on the table.

And a Gallup poll taken in December showed that 37% of Canadians think their country will eventually be absorbed by the United States. As recently as 1988, only 24% of Canadians foresaw such a union.