severus has composed these great posts and I’m still boggled by reading the morning paper. Wow. flails
I just really hope this doesn’t touch off any violence…
So Quebec becomes a little more like Northern Ireland then? (Without the idiotic violence?)
We really, really hope.
It’s not very often that one reads of the First Nations as a founding people.
Prime Minister Trudeau defeated the Separatist terrorists back in the 1970s.
Yes, but that’s just what they call their House of Commons, which, as far as I can tell, is the same as everyone else’s in structure. Then again, names can be pretty important…
Disclaimer: I am not Canadian, and I relied exclusively on Wikipedia for the information in this post.
Excellent post severus, I have not heard the perspective of the Quebec separatist explained so eloquently before. Your handle, “sever us” also seems appropriate to the topic 
In my humble opinion, as an eastern Canadian, there is no threat to Quebec separating as long as it does not cost me as a taxpayer anything. That said it makes economic sense for Canada to stay as unified as possible, if not just in the economic sense, as a separate Quebec would signficantly diminish Canada’s critical mass, and in my mind Quebec would have the most to lose on that front. Having a common currency helps there too, but if a separated Quebec joined the European union, then Canada would probably fall in line next.
You mention that Quebec is more “secular”. I suppose I am under the common misperception that Quebec is a heavily Catholicized culture, even the “foul language” is entirely based on religion. That said, France is historically the home of many secular philosophers, can you draw a similarity between the secularness of Quebec and another country ? How does it compare to China? Also, how is it that Canada is not secular? Other than the openly Christian Prime Minister we have now (such a sad time for us) Canada is generally quite good, I thought, at keeping gods and monsters out of politics.
Nailed it - yes, it’s similar to everyone else’s, but nobody else calls theirs a N.A. because none of the other provinces thinks of itself as a nation. (Which is what I would say when they ask, Well, why can’t any of the other provinces be a nation? I say, Have any of the other provinces asked? Do any of them think of themselves as one?)
Both are true: many aspects of Quebec culture are heavily influenced by the fact that it was practically run by the Catholic Church until the Quiet Revolution, to the point of telling people whom to vote for (Le ciel est bleu, l’enfer est rouge!), running the schools and hospitals, influencing various laws, etc. As Mark Twain said, you can’t throw a stone in Montreal without breaking a stained-glass window. Ah, but then we had the Quiet Revolution, which the other provinces didn’t; that is to say, there was a period in which the influence of the Church was actively rejected on a multitude of fronts, rather than starting from a less intense influence that dwindled, as in the rest of Canada. There are a lot of trappings left - sacre, all the churches, every second municipality and street being Sainte-Clothilde-de-Rubber-Boot - but Quebecers consider themselves very secular people, in the main.
There are a couple of other countries that have arch-religious pasts and quite secular presents: Spain, for example, where the Church enjoyed privileged status up until the end of the Franco years, and which now has same-sex marriage, abortion, divorce, secular schools and hospitals, a very secular and non-church-going society, etc., with the best of them.
A very worthy post by severus!
It’s actually kind of surprising that Harper is making overtures to Quebec, as a lot of people felt that he would be the first PM in a long time to try and mend fences with Western Canada.
One of the problems with Canadian politics is that every region feels that they get a raw deal and that everywhere else gets special favouritism. There’s Quebec vs. the rest of Canada, the West vs. the East (or really, Ontario and Quebec, or even just Ontario), Atlantic Canada vs the rest of the country, etc… The regional interests conspire against each other on the national stage and so everyone ends up feeling like their agenda is not being advanced, and politicians maintain the status quo rather than risk alienating an important group.
IMO, the one thing that is needed to move on to more important issues is compromise, and unfortunately, neither side has moved enough to reach any common ground. It’s a sad state of affairs, really.
[Angry Anglo Hat]
This is just pandering to ethnic bigotry!
[/AAH]
Sorry. Had to be said 
Most of what’s here is pretty good, but I’ll always disagree when Severus says stuff like this
That’s because as an anglo who grew up in Ville Marie I consider myself to be simultaneously a Montrealer, a Quebecois, and a Canadian. That, and during the 7 years I lived on the West Coast I was continually running into cultural clashes with my so-called ‘fellow English Canadians’.
On the whole I think Harper’s motion is a great way of defusing a can of worms opened up by Michael Ignatieff’s foot-in-mouth performance (boy is that an ugly mix of metaphors).
The one point I would make to you, Severus, is calling residents of the Rest of Canada (ROC) English Canadians. You may just be shortening “English-speaking Canadians,” but it isn’t particularly accurate. The residents of the ROC are Canadian, not English. I realize this is a small deal, but I think it’s a point worth making in this discussion.
(Please don’t kick us into Great Debates, Frank. We’re having such a nice, non-rigourous discussion here. 
)
Wow, I see that my perspective on this subject is appreciated! :o Thank you all for your kind comments.
Kythereia: There is no reason to expect that political violence will erupt anywhere in Canada. I mean, we are in Canada, aren’t we? A country with a long democratic tradition? Especially not after what is little more than a politically opportune move by Harper. I see that The Flying Dutchman has mentioned the October Crisis. I should explain the context where this happened. This was in 1970. Remember that time? I don’t, since I wasn’t born yet. But what I do know is that, just two years before, France, a very stable Western European country, had almost fallen into civil disorder due to protests. Even the United States was facing domestic unrest due to its unpopular involvement in the Vietnam War. Extreme leftism was the ideology of the day. And this was also true in Quebec, which had, as matt_mcl mentions, lived a so-called “Quiet Revolution” just a few years before that had liberated it from the influence of the Catholic Church and modernized it, also waking national feelings. The FLQ (Front de libération du Québec) was a Marxist terrorist group that believed that the next step in Quebec’s evolution would be to liberate it from what they saw as the colonial influence of Canada – and specifically English Canadians, including those who live in Quebec – and establish Quebec as a socialist state. They were a very small group, but they made a name for themselves in the 1960s by blowing up bombs in Montreal, attacking what they saw as oppression by the English (signs in English, for example). In October 1970, one of their cells decided to kidnap British diplomat James R. Cross (I would guess to put pressure on the federal government, but maybe just to attract attention), and another one kidnapped Quebec’s Labour minister Pierre Laporte, who they then murdered. It was a dark part of Quebec’s history, but there is just very little chance of something like this happening again, both because we remember this event, and because the political situation just isn’t the same. Many of the FLQ’s leaders were arrested and jailed, or exiled to Cuba. Prime minister Trudeau reacted by sending the army to Quebec, but I wouldn’t say that he is responsible for destroying the FLQ. They had already lost all the support they might have had, and his reaction is mainly seen as an example of overreaction.
Captain Carrot: as matt_mcl already said, the National Assembly of Quebec is similar in structure from the Legislative Assemblies of the other provinces, which was also the name it had until 1968, when it was renamed and the Legislative Council of Quebec was abolished. (I think the Legislative Assembly of Ontario is more properly known as the Provincial Parliament – their members of parliament are known as MPPs, after all.) But the fact that it was renamed “National Assembly” is the point, since it does point to a national feeling.
Pushkin: I think Quebec already has more powers than Northern Ireland. The UK is technically not a federation, while Canada is one, and Quebec is one of its provinces.
mrrealtime: Actually, what I described is not the separatist point of view. I just talked about the argument to recognize Quebec as a nation, which is independent of the federalism/independence question. Also, I’m not saying that Canada as a whole isn’t a secularized society. I mentioned secularism mostly because it is currently discussed in Quebec, with the Supreme Court’s decision to allow Sikh students to wear the kirpan in schools, the news about illegal religious schools operating in several parts of the province – I could find the threads here on this subject if you want – and the more recent news about a YMCA in Montreal putting stained glass on its windows because of complaints by a Hasidic synagogue, and the Montreal police memo asking policewomen to refrain from speaking with the same Hasidim (who apparently will not speak to women). The rest of Canada has to deal with the same issues, but it is entirely possible that they don’t deal with them the same way as Quebec does.
Also, I’ve been thinking of changing my username for some time. I chose it when I registered because I couldn’t think of anything else, but I think I have better ideas now.
Barbarian: Interesting post. I’m sure you consider yourself as a Quebecer, but do you consider that Quebec, in itself, is a nation? Or a sub-entity of the Canadian nation?
Actually, this raises an interesting question. Can we consider Canada (as a whole) to be a nation, and Quebec as another nation that is part of the first one? My answer would be, maybe. But I guess it would need redefining Canadian identity.
Also, I’m interested to know what cultural clashes you had with Western Canadians. I don’t doubt it, I’m just curious.
featherlou: Well, us so-called “French Canadians” are not French either, aren’t we? It’s just the accepted terminology. On the other hand, if I called residents of the “rest of Canada” “English Canadians”, I apologize, since there are English Canadians in Quebec, and not everyone in the rest of Canada is an English Canadian.
I certainly think so. I definitely consider myself to be both a Canadian and a Quebec national. And I think any identification of a Canadian nation as an English-Canadian one would do an injustice to the history of French-speaking people within Canada.
This seems obvious, but it’s amazing (and unsettling) how many people you come across who find the possibility plausible.
One of the last times I visited my father (in the late nineties) he was glued to the Kosovo conflict on CNN for days at a time. It wasn’t long before he admitted to me that he was so keenly interested in it because he saw it as a “preview” of upcoming Canadian history. Tensions over language, geographic and political resentment – he saw an isomorphism between the Slavs/Serbs and English/French Canadians, and he honestly believed that it would inevitably lead to street-to-street fighting in Eastern Canada, and that the West would have to come to the aid of anglophones in the East.
In most other regards, my father was not batshit crazy.
It boggles the mind.
I think this attitude has at its core the idea that if violence erupted, it would be a kind of validation of how important the issue is, and is part of the strange Canadian inferiority complex. “Look! People are dying over this! We matter!”
I just can’t understand what you’re saying here and it might be over my head. Can you restate that please ?
I have nothing to add to this thread (IMHO, what has been said has been very well covered, and I’ll add my thanks to those of the folks who are thanking severus), but I would like to know the OP’s reaction to all this.
Cunctator, given your reading of the online news item that sparked your query, and the reactions of all in this thread, I have to ask a few questions:
– Originally, did you know that the issue was this complex?
– Do you feel the news item was somewhat misleading, due to its brevity?
– Do you now understand the concept of nationhood, as used by Quebec?
I must say, after reading that news item, it did seem to be a little misleading due to its brevity. However, I can certainly understand that an Australian publication could not be expected to have in-depth coverage and analysis of Canadian events. Still, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts upon reading it, and after you’ve read the responses here.
Basically, I hope we avoid any tendency to say that because Quebec is a nation based mainly on a French-Canadian cultural identity, that the rest of Canada is a nation based mainly on an English-Canadian one. I feel that would do a disservice to the partnership between the founding nations that has led the development of Canada up to this point. It bears more reflection, but I hope Canadians as a whole come to a greater understanding of the extent to which Canada has descended from the French.
Harper’s motion was specifically as response to a Bloc motion. Had that never taken place I suspect Harper’s advisors would have told him to let the Liberals throws themselves into a tizzy over definiting “nation.” It wasn’t doing the Liberal Party any favours at all.
If the Liberals want my vote in the next election they absolutely need to make Stephane Dion their leader. I wouldn’t vote for Michael Ignatieff or Bob Rae if they offered to come over to my house and cook all my meals.
Everything said so far has been true, so I have little else to add.
No apology necessary; I thought you might not be aware that the ROC do not consider themselves “English Canadians” (especially people descended from the Irish, the Dutch, the Germans, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Spanish, the Italians,… )