Canada closer to the end of ordeal than to the beginning?

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Canada isn't out of the woods yet, but Quebec's provincial election on Nov. 30 suggests that it is getting close to the edge. After three decades of continuous low-level crisis, periodically surging to acute levels as the mainly French- speaking province elects another separatist government or holds another referendum on independence, the whole story is going stale.

After the last referendum narrowly failed in 1995, Lucien Bouchard, the new leader of the separatist Parti Quebecois (PQ), was defiantly optimistic. "The objective of the PQ remains sovereignty, which Quebec has never been so close to achieving," he said. "Once (the rest of Canada) has drained the last dregs of its incapacity to recognize our reality as a people, another referendum opening will occur, under winning conditions for Quebec."

Well, not exactly. Over 80 percent of Quebec's 7 million people are so-called "old stock" French-Canadians, mostly descended from the original settlers from Normandy and Brittany. If they could all agree that they wanted independence, it would happen overnight, even though the so-called "anglophone" and "allophone" (recent immigrant) minorities are solidly against it. But they can never quite get their collective nerve up to try.

It's so hard to persuade French-speaking Quebecers to risk leaving Canada that in four of the six provincial elections since the "Quebec crisis" erupted in the late 1960s, the PQ has had to say that it was only running for office. The question of independence would be settled separately, it promised, in a referendum. So four times Quebecers have elected the PQ -- and twice they have said 'no' to independence in referendums.

True, the PQ has won the provincial election again, and Premier Lucien Bouchard is still promising another referendum as soon as he has "winning conditions". But he has already backed away from his prediction that Quebec would enter the next millennium as a sovereign nation, and now will not even promise that the referendum will happen during the next four years.

The PQ actually won this election on a slightly smaller share of the vote than the Liberal opposition (whose anti-separatist supporters are heavily concentrated in the metropolis of Montreal).

But in a referendum every vote counts, so the target of "50- percent-plus-one" that separatists say would give them a mandate for independence continues to recede like a desert mirage.

It may recede forever. Quebec governments almost never win a third term, so the PQ has probably won power for the last time before demographic changes make any future winning referendum impossible. Because slowly but inexorably, the ethnic character of Quebec's French-speaking population is diversifying.

It began with the 'Quiet Revolution' of the 1960s, which overthrew the Catholic Church as Quebec's dominant institution. The fall of the old elites led to rapid democratization -- but also, as usual in these cases, to an upsurge of nationalism.

All the excitements of the past thirty years in Quebec, from the bombs and kidnappings of the late 1960s to the "neverendum referendum" of recent years, are inevitable consequences of that outburst of nationalism. There is practically nothing that the English-speaking parts of Canada could have done except to ride it out and hope for the best.

But it is the nationalism of a specific generation -- and demographic change is now happening quite fast. For the other consequence of the "Quiet Revolution" was one of the steepest falls in the birth-rate that the world has ever seen. In one generation, Quebec dropped to an average family size of only 1.3 children: one of the lowest birth-rates in the world.

So if the French language was not to die out in North America, it needed lots of new recruits. Almost overnight, Quebec went from a policy that aimed at ethnic purity (leaving the immigrants to join the English-speaking minority) to a policy of forcing almost all immigrants to send their children to school in French.

It was vital to preserve French-speakers' share in the Canadian population (around 24 percent of 30 million people), but it was also a political Trojan horse. For all these new- generation French-speakers of Uruguayan or Iranian or Tamil or Vietnamese origin, though they will continue to defend the position of French in Canada, do not share the historical myths and obsessions of the "old stock" voters who are tempted by the separatist project.

With every election, these "allophone" voters (non-traditional French-speakers) are a larger share of the electorate. And with every passing year, the need to include them in the discussion shifts the parameters of political discourse in Quebec a little further to the disadvantage of the separatists. When the mythology isn't shared, the buttons are harder to press.

The damage done to Quebec by thirty years of political uncertainty has been huge, and it's not over yet. Montreal used to be the big city in Canada, a status that, once gained, cities almost never lose. (After 200 years of westward expansion, New York is still America's biggest city). And at that time, just 30 years ago, houses in Montreal cost one-third more than in Toronto.

Now Toronto has a million more people, and houses in Toronto cost, on average, three times what they do in Montreal. The whole country has taken the hit. And while currencies fluctuate for various reasons, it's striking that 30 years ago the Canadian dollar was worth more than the U.S. dollar. Now it's worth barely two-thirds of it: the whole country has taken the hit

It has been a long, grim decline for Quebec, and to a lesser extent for the rest of the country too. There will be at least four or five more years of it, for Premier Bouchard will keep Quebec on the edge of a referendum, psychologically speaking, even if he never dares to call it. But Canada is probably a lot closer to the end of the ordeal than to the beginning.