Clinton Backs Unity in One-Day Visit to Canada

With the winds of division still rustling through the bronzed maples of Quebec, President Clinton met here Friday with the province’s champion of independence but hewed throughout the day to the United States’ support for Canadian unity.

It was the first meeting between a U.S. president and a separatist premier.

Offering only an allusion--but an unmistakable reference nonetheless--to the dispute that has roiled Canada for generations, Clinton said at the dedication of a new U.S. Embassy in Ottawa that “we deeply value our relationship with a strong, united, democratic Canada.”

The question of Quebec’s future shadowed the president from the start to the finish of his one-day visit to Canada, just as it did when he came here four years ago. Sensitive to the depth of the controversy, Clinton on Friday met only briefly--and in private--with Lucien Bouchard, the Quebec premier and a champion of the separatist movement.

Bouchard had previously visited the White House, on a tour arranged by the Canadian Embassy in Washington, but did not meet Clinton. The two men met during Clinton’s 1995 visit, before Bouchard became premier.

A senior White House official said that “nary a word” of the separatism dispute arose during Friday’s 10- to 15-minute meeting in this ski village northwest of Montreal, where Clinton came to speak at an international conference on federalism.

At the conference, Clinton never mentioned the Quebec controversy. Instead, he offered a defense of national unity and a lecture on the importance of overcoming ethnic and other differences in the global community. That is a common theme in a multitude of recent Clinton speeches but is particularly pointed in this French-speaking province of 7 million people.

Quebec has held two referendums on independence, the most recent failing by about 2% of the vote in 1995. Bouchard has promised to hold a third referendum before his term ends in 2003.

The president’s participation in the ceremony opening the $37-million glass-and-steel embassy marked the first time that an American chief executive has inaugurated a U.S. Embassy. The new building offers an architectural and geographic parallel to Canada’s embassy in Washington: Each is situated in the shadow of the national legislature, within sight of the national art museum, and each is strikingly designed.