Draft Proposal to Preserve Canadian Unity Is Unveiled

A parliamentary committee issued a rough-draft package of constitutional amendments aimed at keeping Canada together, after two days of delays and an ominous display of partisan feuding.

The report--which was due out on Friday but made public only Sunday afternoon--offers concessions to many of the groups vying for increased powers within Canada: Quebec Francophones, western Anglophones, native peoples and Social Democrats.

But the lengthy document may not go far enough to please hard-liners in any of those factions.

For the Quebec Francophones, the report calls for the federal government to relinquish key governing powers and transfer them to Quebec City.

If the parliamentary proposals ultimately become law, Quebec will have power over cultural affairs and job training, as well as a greater say in regional economic development and broadcast policy.

The French-speaking province has been calling for some sort of transfer of powers for three decades. Last year, its governing Liberal Party made a long and specific list of exactly which powers the province sought.

At the same time, Quebec committed itself to holding a referendum this October on the possibility of sovereignty--unless English-speaking Canada offered to go ahead with the transfer of powers.

The transfer now being proposed falls far short of what Quebec said it wanted. It will be up to Quebec’s federalist premier, Robert Bourassa, to convince hard-line Quebec nationalists that the offer is generous enough to make it worth staying with Canada.

Not surprisingly, there were indications that the nationalists were having none of it.

The final negotiations “bordered on buffoonery,” sneered nationalist Parti Quebecois leader Jacques Parizeau.

In addition to the transfer of powers, the plan calls for Quebec to be singled out in the constitution as a “distinct society” within Canada.

The label is in large part symbolic--it would merely give Quebec the power to preserve its language and French legal system--yet the question of whether Quebec ought to be given any special status at all has been one of this country’s most divisive issues.

At the same time that members of the parliamentary committee were proposing new powers for Quebec, they were also calling for Canada to begin electing its senators--something Anglophones in the western provinces have been demanding.

At present, Canadian senators are appointed by the prime minister, and they tend to spend their time in office rubber-stamping his policies. The Senate has little legitimacy anywhere in Canada, but westerners in particular are angry because the majority of Senate seats are held by appointees from Ontario and Quebec.

The parliamentary report stopped short of urging that the Senate be reconstituted as a body in which each province would hold an equal number of seats, and thus even as Quebec’s nationalists were hinting that the parliamentary package didn’t give them enough powers, political activists in the West were grumbling that the proposed Senate reform wasn’t enough for them, either.

For Social Democrats, the parliamentary report calls for enshrining the right to major social benefits--health care, education and adequate food and housing--in the constitution.

And the report would amend the constitution to make note of the “inherent right” of Canada’s native peoples to govern themselves.

Issuance of the report followed a week of heated partisan negotiations. So intense was the last-minute horse-trading that the committee barely made its midnight-Friday deadline.

Yet for all the wrangling, the package still isn’t the last word on how the Canadian confederation is to be saved.

Quebec has said that it won’t consider any proposals unless the nine English-speaking provinces have made them binding. So now, Canadian Constitutional Affairs Minister Joe Clark is expected to take the package to the provincial premiers and hone it until all will endorse it.

Once all the premiers are on board, the federal government is to issue an official draft constitution for ratification. It has promised to do so in mid-April.