The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper
One of the points I was trying to make in last week’s column, in general support of Pierre Trudeau’s efforts to make both official languages present in all parts of the country, was that in any federal state, some concessions to particular regional concerns are necessary or the country will fall apart, or even atomize. In a little over a century, this fate has split Norway from Sweden, Singapore from Malaysia, Bangladesh from Pakistan, the Czechs from the Slovaks and, most painfully, the Sudanese and South Sudanese.
This was what made the Quebec separatist threat so dangerous; though there was never much prospect of heavy violence, there was a danger of the permanent diminution of the country after a prolonged and immobilizing constitutional crisis. Of course, the separatist leaders greatly and treacherously underestimated the complexities and problems of any such step, and aggravated the problem with trick referendum questions about seeking authority to negotiate sovereignty and association with Canada: Simultaneously to eat and retain the same rich cake.
My fear in those days was that the federal Progressive Conservative leaders, Robert Stanfield and Joe Clark, were men of such goodwill, but such limited familiarity with the devious Quebec nationalists and with the French language, that they could not win the federalist argument in Quebec. Trudeau thus emerged as the temporarily indispensable horse for that race.There were zealous regionalists in all parts of the country; including Westerners who professed to feel culturally oppressed at the presence of any language but English on commercial packaging, to match the French Quebec racists equally outraged at even bilingual commercial signs or supermarket product identifications.
Trudeau managed to continue the Liberal practice of selling his party and himself as essential to Quebec to make Confederation work for it, and to Ontario for keeping Quebec in “its place,” i.e. in a bonne entente Canada to the conciliationists, and in relatively untroublesome acquiescence in a federally governed Canada to those less full of fraternal feeling for our French-speaking compatriots. In fairness, the Progressive Conservatives supported these policies throughout, but until Brian Mulroney, were never plausible at executing them as well as the Liberals did.
But deft as he was with Quebec, Trudeau failed to show the same quality of judgment in dealing with legitimate Western sensibilities.
The National Energy Program of 1981 was based on vertiginous suppositions of oil-price increases that proved to be decades premature, and it was just a confiscation of Western and Newfoundland income and cancellation of much exploration activity. Billions of dollars of danegeld was extracted, disproportionately from Alberta, to steady Quebec as it wavered, partly from the long-suppressed temptations of sovereign nationhood and partly from Quebec’s ancient talent at jurisdictional political poker playing.
From Louis Hipolyte Lafontaine and George-Étienne Cartier and the so-called United Province of Canada (designed by the British to assimilate French Canadians), to recent days, Quebec has always politically punched above its weight in Canada.
For the rest of this article, please go to the National Post website: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/04/07/conrad-black-bashing-western-canada-once-again/