We're just back from our trip to our neighbor to the north, Canada.
Canadians speak the same language (well, some of them do) and have much the same problems: downsizing, reducing the national deficit, unemployment, rising immigration.
They also have several problems that can be partially attributed to us: acid rain, for one, which is ruining Canada's forests and lakes. It comes in part from industrial air pollution, carried north from the United States.
But Canada's real concern is one we settled more than 100 years ago: separation. Specifically, it is whether the province of Quebec, which is home to about one-tenth of Canada's population, should separate from the Canadian federation and become an independent, French-speaking nation.
Both the Quebec and federal supreme courts have held separation to be unconstitutional, but that hasn't stopped the Quebecers from continuing to try to make it happen.
Indeed, a move toward separation has been under way in various forms for at least the past 30 years. The French-speaking province, conquered by the British on the Plains of Abraham before the American Revolution, has remained stubbornly unassimilated into the rest of Canada.
Not only do most of the residents of Quebec speak only French, but they have clung to their predominant religion, Catholicism, and to their culture. About 450,000 English-speakers (Anglophones, as Canadians call them) live in Quebec, want no part of separation and resent having all their street signs, billboards and other public printed displays in French. They have threatened to leave the province should separation become a reality.
They not only thoroughly hate the threat of separation, they also intensely dislike the Quebec insistence on French as an official provincial language.
Oddly enough, although French labels and signs are required elsewhere in Canada (cereal boxes, for example, are printed in French on one side and English on the other), bilingualism does not prevail in Quebec. Everything is resolutely in French.
What's more, on a federal level, Canada is now subject to what Anglophones call "language police." These are civil servants whose job it is to check on whether bilingualism is the rule in federal offices. Secretaries, for example, are required to answer the telephone by saying both "Hello" and "Bonjour." If they don't, they are in trouble with the language police.
In the last referendum, Quebec barely (by less than a percentage point) voted to stay in the confederation. No one is certain what another referendum would produce, and at the moment, no one wants to find out. Quebec is foundering in serious unemployment and more concerned about where to find a job than how to become independent. (English-speakers contend the unemployment is because international corporations want no part of an independent Quebec. Quebecers say this is not so.)
Yet the problem remains the first concern of Canada, a problem much like the issue of slavery in the United States. It just seems to go on and on with no solution in sight.
The current premier of Canada is French-Canadian and struggling to maintain a delicate balance on the issue. The premier of Quebec, of course, is a staunch separatist.
A Quebec advertising man named Howard Galgonov, the son of immigrant Jewish Canadians, has opened guerrilla warfare against French-speakers, claiming they are bullies. He journeyed to Wall Street to tell stock analysts this, but they seemed uninterested.
As are most Americans who have believed in one nation, indivisible, for a long time.
The problem is that although Americans speak many languages, English remains the dominant and de facto lingua franca. It seems unlikely, however, that the Quebecers will ever agree to this. They remain firmly certain they are a separate people.
Separation would seem, in the eyes of an outsider, to be a disaster. Quebec lies on both sides of the
St. Lawrence River. If it were to become independent, a separate nation, it would divide English Canada in half, in somewhat the way that the Polish Corridor once divided parts of Germany.
Quebec residents also would no longer be eligible for Medicare, federal pensions or any other federal benefits. Presumably, they would be asked to assume their share of Canada's sizable national debt. Although the province generates a large share of Canada's electric power, it is unclear how this would be distributed in an independent Quebec.
But the most grievous loss would be to a diverse but now single nation, a nation that has spanned the continent for as long as has the United States. Canada and Canadians have come to assume a nationhood which is interesting because of its ingredients, not in spite of them.
So the sore on the Canadian body politic remains and continues to fester and grow with each passing year and each new referendum.
For a while it seemed, as is much in Canada, that most civil and polite of nations, to be a conflict without nastiness. But, lately, the frustration for both sides seems to have grown. Graffiti has grown more obscene. Anger has entered the once scholarly debates.
Yet no one on either side seems to have any idea how to resolve the crisis. Remembering the Civil War, an outsider can only hope it never comes to armed conflict.
Canadians say it won't, that somehow the issue will be compromised peacefully. But that assurance seems less likely now than it did a few years ago.
Only one thing is really certain: One day Canada will either be firmly and permanently one nation or there will be two separate nations, one Quebec and the other what is left.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Saratoga News.
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, January 1, 1997.
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