This article brings together a series of essays originally released in three parts exploring the intricacies of nationhood with respect to Canadian federalism.
Part I began to explore the distinction between a nation and a province in response to Saskatchewan’s recent white paper “Drawing the Line.” Part II provided an answer to why the Québécois are a nation and Saskatchewan isn’t. Part III explains why the distinction shouldn’t matter for the proper working of Canadian federalism.
Part I:
How Saskatchewan is right and wrong in its bid to end asymmetrical federalism
While Alberta’s constitutional convulsions have received most of the national attention, for several years Saskatchewan has been quietly asserting its own claims to provincial autonomy. This culminated two weeks ago in a government white paper titled “Drawing the Line: Defending Saskatchewan’s Economic Autonomy.”
Much of the report is taken up with recounting the province’s historical fight against the federal government to own and control its natural resources, but its purpose is to remind the reader that the fight is not over. Today, it says, the challenge is intrusive environmental regulations that, while claiming a federal purpose, vitiate the province’s right to manage and export its natural resources, as enshrined in 1982 in section 92A of the Constitution.
To defend its rights and interests, the report says that it is “exploring all options to fully assert our existing powers, rights and privileges under the Constitution.” It even hints at something like the Alberta Sovereignty Act—”Provincial legislation to clarify and protect constitutional rights belonging to the province”—but the Government of Saskatchewan seems to want to wait to see how that plays out next door before committing itself to a definite course of action.
That combination of courage and caution runs through the white paper. While it is billed as an emphatic proschema to Ottawa, its ultimate recommendations are tentative and couched in caveats and equivocations. By the time you reach the end, the defiant title has fizzled to a short list of “next steps and ways in which the province could conceivably defend and act to assert greater autonomy in Confederation.” It is a journey from provocation to polite suggestion in 24 pages. An exercise in audacious prudence.
What follows is a digression on the style of the white paper. My main intent in this article is to defend the case for provincial autonomy, but I cannot resist a few words about how the shoddiness of the document undermines its case. Skipping this section will not affect the argument, which continues after it.
“Drawing the Line” is a new low in political communications in Canada. It is doubtful that any government in the history of Confederation—federal, provincial, or municipal—has published something so badly written. My first thought was that an early and unedited draft had been posted prematurely, but after almost a week it has not been replaced. The text is not so much spoiled by errors as composed of them and the run-on sentences meander more than the South Saskatchewan river.
Consider, for example, this paragraph on page 3, which makes a good case for radical educational reform in the province, at least when it comes to literacy:
As perceived by Saskatchewan’s earliest leaders, such as Fredrick Haultain, the last Premier of the Northwest Territories before Saskatchewan became a province, said ‘all of our public revenues go to swell the Consolidated Revenue Fund of Canada, our public domain is exploited for purely federal purposes, and we are not permitted to draw on our future.’ The ambition was to build and develop the province as a place people wanted to flock too, as set out in Premier Walter Scott’s vision, another early leader and visionary for Saskatchewan. The potential for Saskatchewan to be more than a territory within Canada was not lost on future commentators and politicians.”
Or try to grope your way through this obscure paragraph on page 14. There have been more transparent prairie dust storms.
An example few local ranchers raised on the effectiveness of telling our story to the rest of Canada was around the proposed, and eventually withdrawn, Health Canada rules on beef labelling. The public outcry from local producers in western Canada culminated in cattle raisers sharing their narrative on how devastating such federal rules and requirements would be on local operations but also how responsible and beneficial their products are for Canadians. The feeling was that this needs to continue more to assert our autonomy and express how sustainably our oil and gas and agri-food products are made to the rest of Canada to highlight Saskatchewan’s position and defend our local interests, economy and the livelihoods of our residents.
It has been said that government communications should aim for a Grade 8 level of reading comprehension, but rarely do you see government communicating at a Grade 8 level of composition. At times the report reads like the original draft in Finnish was run through Google translate; at other times it barely reads at all. I refuse to believe that anyone old enough to bike to school was responsible for a sentence like: “While our land and province may no longer be considered new, you can still find the prosperous people in both urban and rural communities as the mayor of Regina said over a century ago.”
These are not the only examples. Even Homer nodded, so a government copyeditor may be excused the occasional lapse, but the text goes on like this page after semi-literate page. The reader must hack through a grammatical jungle to follow the path of the argument. If the Government of Saskatchewan wants its ideas to be taken seriously, it should start by expressing them in something more than pidgin English.
End of digression.
The most interesting part of “Drawing the Line” is its repeated invocation of Quebec as a model for Saskatchewan. References to how Quebec operates within Confederation appear no fewer than seven times. Here is a typical (and mostly lucid) example, summarizing the input from town halls held across the province last summer: “In discussing autonomy specifically, participants often highlighted an ask for the province to act more like the Province of Quebec. Namely, a government and province that acts instead of asks permission to defend its interests.”
This is not a new idea. Both Jason Kenney and Danielle Smith in Alberta have used Quebec as an example to justify a more assertive use of provincial powers. But the report goes further than suggesting that Saskatchewan act more like Quebec. Early on, it quotes a tweet from Premier Scott Moe last November that said: “Saskatchewan needs to be a nation within a nation.” This may be the most interesting political statement in recent Canadian history, but the report makes no attempt to explain it, let alone justify it. If anything, the report undercuts the force of Moe’s claim by suggesting that it just means that Saskatchewan needs to emulate “how the Province of Quebec operates with broader powers within Confederation.”
But acting like a nation and being a nation are very different things. I don’t expect the monkeys at the keyboard who drafted the white paper to appreciate this, but Moe is a serious and thoughtful leader, so it is worth taking his original words thoughtfully and seriously. The first thing to note is that Moe did not claim that “Saskatchewan is a nation within a nation.” Saying that “Saskatchewan needs to be a nation” is an aspirational, possibly hortatory, statement. It assumes that the province is not already a nation.
This prompts an obvious question: How does a non-nation become a nation? And a more basic question: What is a nation? The answer to those questions begins with recognizing that, despite the loose way we often use the terms, a nation is not the same thing as a country—or a province. It doesn’t help that, because we don’t have a common adjectival form of the word “country,” we talk of “national borders” and “national interests” when we mean the borders and interests of a country or of a state. But this confuses the fact that some nations are sovereign states and some are not.
The obvious example of this for Canadians is Quebec. Or rather, “the Québécois.” The motion proposed by Mr. Harper and passed by the House of Commons in 2006 said: “That this House recognize that the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada.” Interestingly, it is the people of Quebec (or perhaps some of them)1Recall the dispute between Gilles Duceppe and Lawrence Cannon in 2006 over who is and is not a Québécois and whether the term has an ethnic component. Around the same time, Jean Charest further complicated matters by insisting that First Nations within Quebec were included among the Québécois, raising the idea of multiple overlapping and possibly inconsistent national identities for the members of Canada’s 617 First Nations, including 70 in Saskatchewan and 39 in Quebec. who are recognized as a nation, rather than the province. This distinction was reinforced in 2021 when the House again approved a motion that included the claim that “Quebecers form a nation”—language taken from Quebec’s own Bill 96.
Designation of the Québécois, but not the province of Quebec, as a nation complicates Moe’s plans to achieve nationhood for his province. On the one hand, recognizing Saskatchewan as a nation would be a first within Canada; on the other hand, if he truly wants to follow Quebec’s example, he will have to explain why Saskatchewanians constitute a distinct people who deserve to be recognized as a nation.
You might say, of course, that the distinction between the Québécois people and the provincial government that acts on their behalf (through a national assembly, no less) is semantic and that, for all practical purposes, the province of Quebec and the Québécois nation are coterminous.2In 2006, Gilles Duceppe insisted that a Québécois was simply someone who lives in Quebec. In one sense, this is clearly illogical, for if an Albertan who was transferred by his employer to Quebec this morning is a Québécois, then there is nothing that makes being Québécois distinct from being Albertan. Duceppe can only be correct if we allow for some fudging between the core identity of a people and the complicating realities of immigration so that applying the term Québécois to someone who arrived yesterday is a convenient fiction that does not affect the central case of a Québécois as someone who speaks and is accultured in a distinct way. As noted in the previous footnote, the case of First Nations in Quebec raises even more questions about Duceppe’s sweeping definition. But if “nation” just means “province,” then what is gained by saying Saskatchewan should be a nation when it is already a province? The answer must be that a nation is something more than a province (or a country). Assuming this is true (and it is), then what is it that makes the Québécois (or Quebec) specially entitled to nationhood?
Part II:
What makes the Québécois a nation?
“Drawing the Line,” the recently-published white paper by the Government of Saskatchewan that advocates a more aggressive assertion of provincial autonomy, repeats Premier Scott Moe’s statement last year that “Saskatchewan needs to be a nation within a nation.” It’s a curious inclusion. Why is it not enough to demand more power for the province qua province? Why introduce the sticky subject of nationality and nationhood? It must be because a nation is something more than a province (or a country), and the government thinks that whatever this is adds to its constitutional claim. It is right on the first point, but not on the second.
The claim that Saskatchewan needs to be “a nation within a nation” asks implicitly why we recognize the Québécois (or Quebec) as a nation and not Saskatchewan. It is an important question, though not a particularly difficult one. The answer is that there is something about the way the Québécois are different from other Canadians that transcends the ways in which the people of the other provinces are different from each other. In the case of Quebec, those ways are clear. You don’t even have to accept the continuing relevance of the idea of Two Founding Peoples3Or “two founding races,” to use the old and now unfashionable term. See, eg, Mr Pearson’s 1963 Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, which was to “inquire and report upon the existing state of bilingualism and biculturalism in Canada and to recommend what steps should be taken to develop the Canadian Confederation on the basis of an equal partnership between the two founding races, taking into account the contribution made by the other ethnic groups to the cultural enrichment of Canada.” to recognize that the Québécois (and, for that matter, Quebec) are uniquely distinct within Canada.
The claim that the Québécois have a qualitatively distinct culture (or that Quebec forms a distinct society) worthy of “national” status is inextricable from the fact of the French language. Charles Taylor has written extensively about how, in our post-Romantic world, the need for identity (and, importantly, recognition of one’s identity) is also a project of emancipation.4See, eg Charles Taylor, Why Do Nations Have to Become States?, in Stanley French (ed), Philosophers Look at Canadian Confederation (1979). Writing about Quebec specifically, he has explained that “the singling out of linguistic nationality as the paradigm pole of self-identity is part of this modern drive to emancipation.”5id. There is simply no comparable drive for generative self-creation in any other province.
But if the most obvious difference is linguistic, the differences aren’t only linguistic.6At least since the 1960s, the Government of Quebec has claimed to be the political expression of a Québécois nation but it doesn’t seek to include Franco-Ontarians or New Brunswick Acadians within the definition of “Québécois” or to expand the borders of Quebec to include these contiguous people, which would be logical if the identity were purely linguistic. This is a consequence of the separatist movement’s recognition that the French language and a distinct culture were best defended by a political entity that was majority French Canadian. Hence the definition of the Québécois in geographic terms as well as along cultural (and, usually, linguistic) lines. René Lévesque even went so far as to label French Canadians outside the province “dead ducks.” By contrast, Pierre Trudeau insisted that “the Quebec Legislature has no authority to speak on behalf of ‘French Canada’” because of the reality of non-Quebec French-Canada, though even he accepted that “because of historical circumstances Quebec has had to, and must still, assume responsibility for the French language and culture.” While the French language is the central feature of Québécois nationalism, the fact that some provincial residents included among “the Québécois” speak French imperfectly and others not all, while other people just across the Ottawa and Restigouche rivers who speak fluent French are not included within the nation, means that there must be a component of national identity beyond language. For want of a more precise term, this extra-linguistic component of identity is culture, and specifically “culture” in a deep sense that goes beyond what we mean when we talk about the culture of Calgary being different from the culture of Edmonton.
For culture to be a definitive component of national identity, it must be rooted in and reinforced by factors that are separate not just in degree but in kind from anything experienced in other parts of the country. Where, then, does Québécois culture come from? Once again, linguistic difference matters. The idea that the language we speak influences the way we think is not new. It is likely that simply by dint of speaking (and thinking in) another language, a people develop a distinct culture. The predominantly French-speaking parts of Canada can be said then to have a separate culture in a way that no predominantly English-speaking region can.
Nor should we underestimate the effects of the closed media environment that this linguistic separateness requires. More than any other region, Quebec speaks to itself. Most Québécois consume news of the rest of the country second-hand, only after it has been translated both literally and culturally by the province’s media. This linguistic isolation appears to be self-reinforcing: small differences are exaggerated, while large differences are entrenched as cultural and political dogma.
But language is only part of the story. The other source of Quebec’s cultural difference is religious. This was clear for the first half of Canadian history when the province stood out as a distinct Catholic society within an increasingly-Protestant Canada. The revolutionary rejection of the province’s Catholic identity in the last three generations means that the weight of cultural identity that once rested on three pillars—language, culture, and religion—is now borne by language and culture alone, which increases concern about linguistic survival and awareness of cultural differences.
More importantly, it means that Quebec’s attitude towards religion is, uniquely within Canada, defined by a conscious rejection of religion. In a relatively short time, a profoundly Catholic society became radically anti-clerical. Nothing like that happened in any other province. As Marshall McLuhan described it (in his strange review of Pierre Trudeau’s 1967 collection of essays Federalism and the French Canadians for the New York Times), “French Canada leapt into the 20th century without having had a 19th century.” This is an exaggeration, but only a slight one, and the legacy of this sudden leap can be puzzling to non-Quebeckers.7The speed of the Quiet Revolution is captured in a poignant scene from Denys Arcand’s Les Invasions Barbares in which a priest showing an auction-house rep around a warehouse of surplus Catholic statuary explains how one day in 1966 everyone stopped coming to church and never came back.
To an outsider, Quebec’s insistence on militant laïcité as a distinct cultural value is more than a little ironic. Secularism emphatically is not a traditional Quebec value, as the illuminated cross on Mount Royal shining down a forest of silver spires across the city of Montreal attests.8The cross, which is a reminder of the original cross erected by Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve in 1643, was installed in 1924 by the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste. It is lit in purple to mark the death of a Pope. Within the lifetime of the current premier, the province’s hospitals, schools, and houses of charity were still staffed in part by priests and nuns, whose prominent religious symbols and head coverings were an obvious example of Quebec’s distinct society. And the province remains dappled with the memory of its first four centuries. From rivers9The St Lawrence river. and lakes,10Lac Saint-Jean. towns11Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu. and mountains,12The Notre Dame Mountains. hospitals,13In Quebec City alone, there are hospitals named: Hôpital Saint-François d’Assise; Hôpital de l’Enfant-Jésus; Hôpital du Saint-Sacrement; and Hôtel-Dieu de Québec. universities,14Université Laval (the successor to the Séminaire de Québec, now named after the first bishop of New France). and metro stations,15Metro Pie IX; Metro Lionel-Groulx. the province’s traditional identity suffuses the landscape.
Pointing this out, however, invites the accusation that, as a non-Quebecker, you simply can’t understand the continuing legacy of La Grande Noirceur. This is of course true, but it also illustrates how quickly even a recent mythopoeic change can assume mythic cultural status. Until the 1950s, the Government of Quebec unofficially regarded the post-revolutionary government of France as a usurping regime. Then, in the space of a decade, the province’s leadership traded a historic domestic identity for one based on the secularist ideology of a foreign country.16For an English perspective on this process, see Charles Taylor, “Nationalism and the Political Intelligentsia: A Case Study,” Queen’s Quarterly (Spring 1965). One has to admit that the transplant has been successful: imported by a small class of Quebec intellectuals, the fashions of post-war Parisian philosophy have been adopted so completely in Quebec that it is now hard to tell the graft from the rootstock.17One can imagine an alternative history in which Quebec remained Catholic and defended its traditional religious-cultural identity against claims by competing religions instead of policing them as a violation of a newly-adopted secular cultural identity (with possible exceptions for religious symbols and references magically denuded of their religious content and existing now as purely “historical” objects and customs). It could be argued that this reactionary path would have been more consistent and coherent. However, Charles Taylor was probably right when he wrote that “the context of a federal Canada would never permit a Quebec leader” to repress democracy enough to allow Quebec to follow the contemporary example of Salazar’s Portugal. See Charles Taylor, “Nationalism and the Political Intelligentsia: A Case Study”, Queen’s Quarterly (Spring 1965).
These distinct features of Quebec society—linguistic (by birth) and cultural (by adoption)—are real. Together they make the Québécois, by any normal definition, a nation. The belated recognition of this by the federal parliament in 2006 was just an acceptance of reality. By the same token, Saskatchewan is not a nation. Saskatchewan is certainly different from, say, Ontario, and both are different in their own ways from British Columbia and Newfoundland.18Years ago, Charles Taylor wrote that “for all people east of the Rocky Mountains, British Columbia is a strange place, not quite believable,” and yet even he didn’t believe this grounded a claim for nationhood. Charles Taylor, “A Canadian Future?”, in The Pattern of Politics (1970). Nobody would deny that. But they are each different within the normal parameters of difference for a vast and diffuse country. It makes no more sense to say that Saskatchewan is a nation than to imagine that Wyoming is a nation within the United States of America.
Part III:
What makes Canada a nation?
Saskatchewan is not and cannot be a nation, but I would push the idea even further. Not only are the nine English Canadian provinces not expressions of individual national identities, English Canada is not a nation either. This makes nonsense of the second part of the idea that Saskatchewan should become “a nation within a nation.” A nation is the political expression of a culturally-distinct people, which may exist within a country, but it can’t comfortably exist within another nation. That is why the 2006 motion in Parliament recognized the Québécois as a nation “within a united Canada.” Canada is a country, but neither it nor what the Québécois refer to, with magisterial disregard, as “the Rest of Canada” constitutes a coherent nation, if it ever did.
Pierre Trudeau, who viewed nationalism as an immature social state characterized by a reactionary political emotionalism that must give way to a “cold, emotionless rationality,19Two of the essays in the collection by which he introduced his political theory to an English Canadian audience in 1967, Federalism and the French Canadians, end with the same quote from Lord Acton warning that the course of “nationalism … will be marked with material as well as moral ruin.” (in Trudeau’s lexicon, that is a positive), nevertheless accepted that “[i]t is not the concept of nation that is retrograde; it is the idea that the nation must necessarily be sovereign.” “The nation” is, he said, “the guardian of certain very positive qualities: a cultural heritage, common traditions, a community awareness, historical continuity, a set of mores.” But it did not need absolute sovereignty to cultivate its national character, only the powers necessary to do so.
Trudeau opposed a Quebec nationalism that sought political sovereignty or a “special status” (which, as he used it, meant something between a province and an independent state), but he was interested in the question of how “without backsliding to the ridiculous and reactionary idea of national sovereignty … we protect our French-Canadian national qualities?” His conclusion was that Quebec’s linguistic and cultural ambitions could be accommodated within a “multi-national” federal state.
Here, however, the man, who more than any other Canadian leader prided himself in his progressive foresight, showed a typically-Laurentian blind spot. He could not see that Canada’s future would not be multi-national because there was no longer an “English-Canadian nation.” It was just a theoretical construct that most Quebeckers of his generation assumed must exist as the natural counterpart to the French-Canadian nation. It didn’t exist then, and it doesn’t exist now. Nor is the other option—a truly “national” federal Canadian culture that appeals to and thus transcended regional attachments, including the French-Canadian aspirations—any more realistic than it was when Trudeau was writing.
Few people were prepared to accept the futility of a single national culture back in the 1960s, and many Canadians still refuse to do so today. If only the federal government would build more truly national institutions and impose more centralization, they insist, we could put our regional bickering behind us and come together as a united country—perhaps even a nation! There exists still a thriving ecosystem of self-serious (and usually tax-payer-funded) Canadian institutions that still cling to the doomed belief that, as Trudeau described it in 1967:
Resources must be diverted into such things as national flags, anthems, education, arts councils, broadcasting corporations, film boards; the territory must be bound together by a network of railways, highways, airlines; the national culture and the national economy must be protected by taxes and tariffs; ownership of resources and industry by nationals must be made a matter of policy.
This is the Canadian Boomer nostalgia industry.20Whenever the idea of a new Canadian nationalism is raised, you can be sure that misty-eyed reminiscences about “the spirit of Expo ‘67” and appeals to the unifying power of Medicare (the ultimate Boomer public policy) are not far behind. The members of these bodies tend to be well-connected to (especially Liberal) federal governments, so they are not unimportant, just irrelevant. Because they cannot accept that the fight to define a post-Imperial Canadian national identity was over before it was joined, they continue talking to each other at lectures, conferences, and salons, much like White Russians in London between the wars plotting the future of Tsarist Russia. These efforts aren’t entirely wasted, though: Ottawa’s catering industry depends upon them for its survival.
At the same time that Trudeau was defending the idea of a multi-national federation, Senator Paul Yuzyk was using his maiden Senate speech to advance the idea that Canada was not the bicultural society that Pearson’s Royal Commission had set out to define, but multicultural. Yuzyk was, for the first time, giving voice to the perspective of the new Western provinces with their large populations of Central and Eastern Canadians and their established Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian communities. As prime minister, Pierre Trudeau’s official recognition of multiculturalism, first in 1971 and then in the repatriated constitution in 1982, was a tacit (and perhaps oblivious) admission of the impossibility of either an English-Canadian nation or a unified national vision.
This leaves us in an odd place where the idea of two founding peoples is obsolete, but only on one side. The idea probably ceased to be accurate for English Canada shortly after the time that the Imperial government admitted Alberta and Saskatchewan provinces to Confederation,21 By 1911, the influx of Eastern Europeans, Northern Europeans, and especially Americans meant that Alberta was the only province in which the Canadian-born were a minority. At that time, almost a quarter of the province’s residents were American immigrants, and this percentage was much higher in the rural south of the province. See Nelson Wiseman, “The American Imprint on Alberta Politics“, Great Plains Quarterly (Winter 2011). but by the time Pearson ditched the old flag it was as anachronistic as the fur trade.22In 1970, Charles Taylor wrote that “[t]he ‘two solitudes’ of Hugh MacLennan are still a fundamental reality in Canada,” but here I believe this most perceptive of Canadian social commentators erred in reflecting a distorted and distinctly central Canadian perspective. Charles Taylor, “A Canadian Future?”, in The Pattern of Politics (1970). Even if traces of an English-Canadian solitude could still be discerned outside Montreal in 1970, the continued growth of the Western provinces in population and wealth and the related political development of an exuberant and assertive prairie spirit, have since erased it. Taylor recognized this trend in a 1991 article, in which he observed that “[o]ver the decades English Canada has been becoming more and more diverse and less and less ‘English.’” Charles Taylor, “Shared and Divergent Values”, in Ronald Watts and Douglas Brown (eds), Options for a New Canada (1991). There is very little that unites the provinces outside Quebec beyond a mutual recognition that we are better off together than apart, which is not nothing, but also not enough to support more than a federal identity that is more notional than national. In that light, Saskatchewan’s desire for constitutional autonomy, however crudely expressed, makes sense as a provincial (and perhaps regional, but not national) goal.
However much hope the Government of Saskatchewan might take from Pierre Trudeau’s old assurance that “the different regions within the country, must be assured of a wide range of local autonomy, such that each national group … may be able to develop the body of laws and institutions essential to the fullest expression and development of their national characteristics,”23Emphasis added. Saskatchewan is not and cannot meaningfully claim to be a nation. Fortunately, most of Trudeau’s vision of a multi-national federation can be salvaged by substituting “province” for “nation.” We recognize the unique Québécois claim to nationhood while insisting on a degree of constitutional respect for Saskatchewan sufficient to meet its provincial ambitions.
As I wrote in these pages after the last federal election:
We are a country of many solitudes. We are at least ten distinct regions, split by generation, and further diced, divided, and dissected along linguistic, religious, cultural, moral, rural/urban, and class lines. Pick two points on this multi-dimensional graph and the visions of Canada you see will be fundamentally incompatible and, in some cases, mutually incomprehensible.
Charles Taylor has described the mutual incomprehensibility between the French and English perspectives of themselves, of each other, and of Canada as “two photographs of the same object taken from such different points of view that they cannot be superimposed.” Expanding this metaphor of multiple and multiplying solitudes, the perspectives are now so kaleidoscopic that an accurate portrait of Canada today would have to be Cubist.
These colliding perspectives pose a challenge if we want to continue to live together as part of a united country. In another article, I proposed that “a renewed respect for the principles of Confederation is the best hope we have for accommodating our many solitudes” because, while “[f]ederalism and decentralisation may leave us without a unifying national identity … the alternative is a procrustean imposition of a single, central idea of Canada, which by definition will be alien and unwelcome in some parts of the country.”24Constitutional lawyer Asher Honickman suggested something similar in a Hub Dialogue. And, in a perceptive 1993 article that deserves to be re-read, Alain-G Gagnon and Guy Laforest (drawing on work by Charles Taylor and James Tully) proposed that “Quebec’s desire to express its specificity should not be interpreted as a mutiny but rather as a profound attachment to the federal spirit.” They concluded that:
“Now more than ever, there is an urgent need for some “constitutional morality”: a morality that would allow for sensitivity to the Quebec question and that would refrain from imposing identical requirements on all communities for association with the Canadian state. Canada, after all, has been built on many competing, but reinforcing, identities. To require that Quebecers put the principles of provincial equality, pan-Canadian uniformity, and individual rights above everything else is, by definition, to relinquish the premises of federalism among complex societies.”
Alain-G Gagnon and Guy Laforest, “The future of federalism: lessons from Canada and Quebec”, International Journal, Vol. 48, No. 3, (Summer 1993). I would endorse this conclusion and add that, in the years since they wrote, the reality of Western alienation has reached the level of concern to warrant similar constitutional accommodation, legally and politically.
Or, to quote Marshall McLuhan’s review of Pierre Trudeau’s Federalism and the French Canadians, because “Canada never had a unified national identity or goal,” federalism offers “the cool, casual interface of the numerous components minus the old 19th century drive for goals and gains.” A federalism reliant on offish comity may lack the romance of a Garibaldian nationalism (let alone ten such national visions), but in place of passion it offers a practical modus vivendi. And for a relationship that has lasted 155 years, there is no shame in recognizing that separate beds make for a happier marriage. A marriage de raison is still a marriage and can be a very successful one.
Since I wrote those two articles, almost all the criticism has come from Laurentian elites (a former prime minister called it “an alarming vision of Canada”!), which rather proves my point. Ontarians in particular are often surprised and dismayed that the rest of the country to its west doesn’t behave like an extended suburb of Toronto. When their intrusive ignorance results in a predictable backlash—prairie alienation or BC indifference—they then double down on the need for more political unity. A unity forged, naturally, in their own image. It is not surprising that Saskatchewan (and Alberta) have had enough of this Central Canadian chauvinism and are now rejecting it in favour of the constitutional division of powers.
The problem that Saskatchewan is trying to solve is not asymmetrical nationalism—there is only one nation in Canada—but an asymmetrical federalism. This is a federal model that accords Quebec special (and mostly appropriate) privileges within a Central Canadian vision of Canada. Premier Moe is quite right to push back against this model and insist on his province’s constitutional rights, especially in the face of an unusually hostile federal government. But he doesn’t need to pretend to a nonsensical nationhood to do so.
Nation or province, all constituent parts of Canada are entitled to the full measure of their constitutional autonomy, which they are free to take up or ignore to whatever degree they believe is necessary to meet their diverse ambitions. The exercises of provincial power necessary to secure the ambitions of a nation may be greater than those required to satisfy Saskatchewan’s regional ambitions, or they may simply be different. But the one should be no impediment to the other, and a responsible federal government would respect both.
