Following the May 2 federal election, Canadian federalists cheered the fact that the Bloc Québécois had been routed in Quebec -going from a pre-election Parliamentary presence of 47 seats to just four.
Yet on many issues, the nominally federalist NDP are nearly as nationalist as the overtly separatist BQ -including on matters of language policy in the province, and funding for Quebec-only programs. During the recent campaign, for instance, NDP leader Jack Layton promised that, if elected, an NDP government would extend the provisions of Bill 101 to federally regulated industries operating inside Quebec.
Quebec's language law requires that French be the first language of the workplace and that signs be predominately French. But its provisions have never applied to federal government offices nor to workplaces that fall under federal regulation, such as , banks and telecommunications companies. While stumping in Quebec a week before the election, Mr. Layton promised to make federal government offices and federally regulated workplaces compliant. Quebec would become unilingually French for all official purposes -even in domains controlled by the feds -while the rest of the country would continue to have to practice official bilingualism.
Mr. Layton also promised to recognize Quebec's "national character" (which admittedly is not so different from what Stephen Harper already has done), give federal money to Quebec social programs if the province chose to withdraw from national schemes and reopen constitutional talks to please Quebec and get the province's signature on the Constitution. And who knows what comes next: Given that two-thirds of Mr. Layton's caucus is now made up of Quebecers, many with at least quasinationalist attitudes, he is going to feel increasing pressure to strike anti-federalist postures.
Mr. Layton's off-again, on-again commitment to honouring a 50%plus-one vote on separation in a future Quebec referendum is perhaps the most worrying aspect of all this -for it implicates the very integrity of our country.
From Monday through Wed-nesday, Mr. Layton seemed to dance around the question of whether or not his party would accept a bare majority in a future referendum on Quebec independence. He left Canadians unsure of how we would interpret the 2000 federal Clarity Act, which states that Ottawa need only negotiate separation if a clear majority of Quebecers vote "yes" in a referendum that asks a clear question. The need for the legislation was demonstrated by the 1995 referendum, in which the separatists came within just 54,289 votes of achieving a bare majority -on a question so convoluted that most voters never understood it.
There is no definition in the Clarity Act about what constitutes a "clear" majority, but it is generally accepted in federal circles that it is something greater than 50%-plus-one. Otherwise, what purpose does the word "clear" serve in the legislation? For the past decade, nearly every constitutional scholar in the land has assumed the threshold was closer to 60%.
All three parties in the Quebec National Assembly cling to the 50%-plus-one trigger, which is perhaps not surprising given their strictly provincial focus. But on a matter that would change the entire country so profoundly, it is unlikely that either the House of Commons or the Supreme Court of Canada would accept such a low bar. Based on Mr. Layton's vague pronouncements on the subject, however, it appears that the leader of the opposition might.
By Thursday, things got worse. Mr. Layton was under so much heat from his new Quebec caucus and from Quebec commentators that he felt he had to state his unequivocal support for the 50%-plus-one standard, which he did at the news conference at which he also announced his shadow cabinet.
He argued, correctly, that 50%-plus-one has been official NDP policy for years. "It's in our official policies. It's been adopted in our Sherbrooke declaration," he said, referring to a policy document approved only in French by the NDP in 2005.
But few commentators paid much attention to that policy back then -because no one particularly cared what a third party had to say about the issue. It was always assumed that it would be a Liberal-and-Conservative-dominated Parliament that would have to deal with this issue. But now that the NDP is the Official Opposition, and possibly a contender for government in the next election, its separatist flirtations have become a real issue of concern. Mr. Layton should have the political courage to align his party with mainstream federalist opinion.