If federalists were to organize another “love-in” in downtown Montreal like the one held before the 1995 referendum, would anyone come?
It’s a question worth asking on this Canada Day weekend, in the wake of a new Ipsos Reid poll suggesting that 49 per cent of people in the rest of Canada say they don’t really care if Quebec separates.
It brings to mind what former federal Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff said last April in an interview with the BBC: that Quebec and the rest of the country “don’t have anything to say to each other anymore,” and that because of that, “a kind of contract of mutual indifference” exists.
At face value, the poll results are cause for concern. But polls need to be taken with a grain of salt these days; recent election polling has shown that they aren’t as reliable an indicator of public opinion as in the past. For one thing, public opinion has become increasingly volatile on a variety of issues. Here in Quebec, high popular support for Action démocratique du Quebec in 2007 and for the Coalition Avenir Québec as recently as 2011 has dried up. And most interestingly, according to this latest Ipsos Reid poll, support for sovereignty in Quebec stands at 38 per cent, down significantly from 48 per cent in 1999.
Time and circumstance always have a bearing on the state of public opinion. It’s important not to lose sight of the fact that Canada has emerged only recently from almost five decades of active exploration and debate of the issues relating to nationhood and preservation and promotion of official-language-minority rights. It’s a conversation that began in 1960 with the Quiet Revolution and carried on through bilingualism and biculturalism, multiculturalism, constitutional reform and free trade; the prolonged discussion has seen important legal rulings having to do with language rights and secession. The political and legal landscapes have been clarified over those 50 years. Perhaps as a result of that, today there’s a sense of there being a collective pause in the national conversation.
Clearly there isn’t a strong desire right now in the rest of Canada, or in Quebec, to rehash unresolved issues. (Issues that can never be satisfactorily resolved for diehard Quebec sovereignists anyway.) But to conclude from this that people in the rest of the country don’t care about Quebec separation or keeping Canada’s territorial integrity would be a mistake.
It should never be forgotten, nor taken for granted, how Quebecers and Canadians in the rest of the country were able to negotiate political issues over the past 50 years with good will and grace. Through it all, Canada has continued to function – and function very well. The decentralized model put in place in the original British North America Act has served Quebec well. Our British parliamentary system, although not perfect, has allowed Quebec and the rest of Canada to avoid the kind of political gridlock seen south of the border. Canada continues to rank high on quality-of-life indexes. Our banking system is seen as a model for the world. Even our 1982 constitution, repatriated without the official blessing of the government of Quebec, has been held up by international experts as an example to emulate. (And polls have consistently shown that most Quebecers like the constitution and the charter of rights.)
All of that – and even the fact that the political conversation is a lot quieter these days than it has been in the past – just goes to show that Canada tends to work much better in practice than it does in theory.
Which is something to be grateful for on this Canada Day.