WARNING THIS IS A POLITICAL POSTING.
Quebec as a nation?
I am amazed at how quickly people have started jumping all over Michael Ignatieff recent incredibly stupid decision to try and force a resolution at the Liberal convention in Montreal to study some way of recognizing Quebec in the constitution. Rightly so I feel.
I was watching CPAC(which thanks to some new knowledge I can now listen to without the translators. Thank god for SAP technology) tonight and they had two guests, one was Jeffrey Simpson (I had no idea he could speak French so well) and William Johnston.
Jeffrey Simpson repeated mostly his argument in Saturday’s Globe and Mail that only someone who wasn’t in country during Meech and Charlottetown could come up with such a stupid suggestion as Ignatieff’s idea of recognizing the Quebec nation. William Johsnton was also talking about how silly Ignatieff’s position is. Johnston brought up two points which I thought were worth mentioning here.
As he mentions clearly in his book on Stephen Harper, the supreme court has already ruled on what would happen in the case of a successful referendum. There would have to be a constitutional amendment in order for Quebec to leave to country. This means that all the provinces would have to come to some sort of agreement on how we would move forward. There is no pretending anymore (after the supreme court reference) that Quebec can unilaterally separate from Canada. After all we live in a democracy under the rule of law. Quebec cannot unilaterally declare independence. The constitution would still apply and Quebeckers are subject the constitution as are all Canadian provinces and territories.
The second point he made, and this I didn’t know before, is that no right to secession exists under international law. Apparently Quebec hired a group of experts from the UK,US Germany and France who said as much in a report published in 1992. There was some sort of tenuous right to secession in cases of formerly colonized countries but outside of those cases, no such right exists. Quebec as a rough approximation of the French Canadian community, has language rights, education rights, the province of Quebec has many other rights guaranteed under the constitution as well and so has no right under international law to secede.
Now Quebec separatists wrongly assume that every nation must have a state. This is simply not true. Such a position creates divisions and really Canada can stand to have a strong Quebec.
The funny thing is that the Liberals are reeling from sponsorship scandal in Quebec still to this day. One of the few places the Liberals can gain in the next election is in Quebec. I think it might be the only area of the country where they can gain seats. The sense of opportunism about these appeals only makes them that much worse.
The 1995 referendum was an extremely close call because no one actually stood up for Canada during that campaign.
The Liberal party seems to be attempting to buy the allegiance of Quebeckers by putting a few symbolic words in the constitution. The general thinking of many in the Liberal party and many who were in government, is that they need to purchase the allegiance of Quebec. This kind of thinking is what led to the sponsorship program in the first place.
The idea that instead of articulating a coherent defense of Quebec and it’s place in Canada, they simply throw money at the people of Quebec. It’s an incoherent plan, it wastes money and ultimately leads to resentment. I think that was a big lesson of the sponsorship scandal, Quebec liberals were literally trying to buy the votes of the people of Quebec.
Now on another note, I think if it came down to it. I’m thinking more and more that if Bob Rae wins the liberal leadership, it wouldn’t take too much for me to vote for him and his (new) party.
3 comments:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought there was a Liberal Party committee looking into the Quebec question again and so Ignatieff bringing it up wasn't exactly his initiative but the party's. Iggy was just stupid enough to be the first to open that can of worms.
The problem with the Liberals is they try to be everything to everyone and that is simply impossible because there is no consensus on any issue. This is true for the Quebec question.
But in the end it is foolish for anyone to think this issue is over. The right-wing has only just recovered organizationally after 14 years of fragmentation thanks to Quebec, and their new reincarnation has yet to really grapple with the question of Quebec (and their support has fallen from 37 to 16% in Quebec). The Liberals have been reeling from the sponsorship scandal, itself ultimately rooted in the crisis of the early 1990s. The NDP has yet to crack Quebec.
Electorally, Quebec may be second to Ontario, but politically, it is the hot potato - the issue that makes and breaks parties. It will be interesting to see how the Liberals handle this new round of debate.
The Supreme Court Reference was asked whether the Constitution Act allowed for a province to separate, whether international law would allow an otherwise agreeing and willing participant of a constitutional document to secede legally, and if there was a conflict between the first two answers, which side would prevail. Since neither the Constitution Act nor international law allows for Quebec to secede, the SCC said that, despite this, if the clear majority of people vote to secede on a clear question, then Canada would be honour-bound to negotiate.
I think it is even more interesting that the SCC reference, to my knowledge, did not answer the question what happens to those groups inside a now-sovereign Quebec to separate from itself. The separatist logic ("that Quebec can separate from Canada but not parts within it") doesn't make sense to me.
Yes what you said is true Pat. However it does not require that Canada in the end recognize a sovereign Quebec.
The negotiations could go nowhere, and until they were concluded Quebec would not be sovereign.
Basically the entire reference says that Quebec must respect the constitution and negotiate its way out of Canada and that the rest of the country cannot be held hostage by a referendum vote alone.
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