A Country in Search of Identity : And the United States has vital interest in what happens in Canada

There is still a Canada. There is, for that matter, still a Canadian constitution. But Quebec still has not ratified it, and a package of constitutional reforms that many hoped would rationalize the status of Quebec as a “distinct society” within Canada has been rejected at the polls. Western Canada thought Quebec would get too much. Quebec thought it would get too little. Perhaps both resented the reforms as too clearly the creation of the Establishment in Ottawa and, most especially, of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

The defeat of the reforms does not, by any means, mean that independence for Quebec is now certain or even that it is more likely than before the defeat. What it does mean is that Canadians, collectively, do not yet know quite what kind of federation they wish to have. And they do have the luxury of entertaining that question.

The Cold War that helped to hold the vastly more disparate Soviet Union together for so long and that did the same for the Czechs and the Slovaks in Czechoslovakia and for the several varieties of South Slav in Yugoslavia also papered over major differences in Canada. Not to put too fine a point on it, the United States could not have tolerated troubled waters, and good fishing for the Cold War opponent, on its northern border.

That has now changed. It is difficult to see how the troubling of the Canadian waters makes for good fishing for anybody, but for just that reason Canadians and Americans alike are less troubled by this turmoil than they once would have been. Perhaps, in the long run, the North American Free Trade Agreement will become an economic umbrella under which new political entities can shelter. Perhaps Canadians, who pride themselves on their ties to Europe, will steal a page from the European Community. Perhaps Canada’s native peoples, now playing a role unlike any that original inhabitants have ever played on either American continent, will determine the future. Whatever happens, America’s closest ally--and one of the last great, largely empty areas on Earth--is too big for the incoming U.S. President, whoever he is, to overlook.