Michael Behiels, Special to The Windsor Star - If Prime Minister Stephen Harper has his way, the national unity debate will now trump the economic recession. This is not what the last election was all about. It was, and still is, about "the economy, stupid." But Mr. Harper's decision to turn his back on Quebec will create a very real and very dangerous national unity crisis.
Prime Minister Harper and his finance minister opted to ignore the economic realities confronting millions of Canadians. They boasted time and time again that the Canadian economy was just fine. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty reconfirmed this questionable assessment of Canada's deteriorating economy in his very misleading and politically loaded fiscal update.
Mr. Harper's mistakes brought upon his government the non-confidence vote he faced in the House. He avoided it by proroguing Parliament.

Prime Minister Harper's response to the emergence of a formal coalition between the leader of the Official Opposition, Stephane Dion, and the leader of the NDP, Jack Layton is very telling but also incredibly disturbing because of its ramifications for Canadian unity.
When it became clear that the Liberal-NDP coalition had obtained a commitment from the leader of the Bloc Québécois that Bloc MPs would support the coalition on all legislative matters pertaining to the economy, Mr. Harper pounced on the opportunity to save his government. Mr. Harper, wrapping himself in the Canadian flag, is going to war against Quebec and Gilles Duceppe's Bloc MPs who denied him the majority he so badly wanted when he called a snap election early this fall.
After making several very expensive attempts to obtain the votes of "les Quebecois et Quebecoises" in rural and suburban Quebec, Mr. Harper was extremely disappointed when he failed to gain any additional seats in Quebec. He believes that it was primarily "les Quebecois et Quebecoises" who denied him his rightly deserved majority.
Following their post-mortem of the election results, many prominent conservative commentators, including Tom Flanagan and Norman Spector, began to make arguments to the effect that the Conservative party should just ignore Quebec. Mr. Harper should seek to obtain a majority in the rest of Canada, namely in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia. This strategy is now unfolding before our eyes.
Tom Flanagan, Mr. Harper's long-time friend and adviser, argued that the Conservative party should focus its time and funds on what he called the fourth sister, the ethnocultural communities who are present in large numbers in every one of Canada's major metropolitan regions. Mr. Flanagan concluded that the Conservative party can and will win in the next election a sufficient number of seats in these heavily ethnocultural community ridings that would more than offset any seat losses in Quebec.
Along the same lines, Norman Spector has recommended publicly that the Harper government get on with democratic reform by granting Ontario all 21 more seats that its population warrants, rather than just 10 it was last offered. If Mr. Harper could win most or all of the additional seats that Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia would get he could win a majority government without any seats from Quebec. In Mr. Spector's view this would force Quebecers to "see supporting the Bloc as the cul-de-sac it truly is."
Mr. Harper is gambling big time if he believes that going to war against the Bloc will hasten its demise. Just the opposite will happen. And so his only option is to obtain his majority without, if necessary, any seats from Quebec.
Pierre Trudeau went to political war against the Quebecois separatists in 1968 and pursued his campaign relentlessly until he defeated Rene Levesque in the referendum of May 1980. Trudeau then obtained the Constitution Act, 1982 with its Charter of Rights and Freedoms. He then defended these formidable developments when he helped defeat the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords.
Pierre Trudeau was able to sustain his prolonged war against the separatists because he had the backing of a large majority of Quebecers, francophone, anglophone, and allophone. Trudeau's political war was never against "les Quebecois et Quebecois but against the Quebecois political class whose members promoted the secession of Quebec.

Unfortunately, as the results of the recent election demonstrated, Mr. Harper has very little political support in Quebec. The vast majority of "les Québécois et Québécoises" do not trust him or his government. They see an overly ideological government heavily dominated by former Harrisite Conservatives from Ontario and Reformers from Alberta.
Recent polls show that Quebecers are overwhelmingly in favour of the Liberal-NDP coalition. They also are comfortable with the fact that Gilles Duceppe's Bloc MPs will support the coalition and its economic program for at least 18 months.
Mr. Harper needs to reconsider his decision to go to war against Quebec. If he does not, there will be a very serious and very real national unity crisis. The explosive combination of a real national unity crisis and an ongoing major recession has the potential of fracturing the fragile bonds of Confederation.
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- Michael D. Behiels is the University Research Chair in Canadian Federalism and Constitutional Studies at the University of Ottawa. This column first appeared in the Ottawa Citizen.