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Janice Kennedy: Enough! Stop picking at the disunity scab

Seriously? Do they honestly think we’re going to get lathered up — again — over threats of separation, national-unity concerns and how many sovereigntists can dance on the head of a pin? Or épingle? Really? For 40 years, this country has frittered aw

Seriously? Do they honestly think we’re going to get lathered up — again — over threats of separation, national-unity concerns and how many sovereigntists can dance on the head of a pin? Or épingle?

Really?

For 40 years, this country has frittered away inordinate amounts of time, talent and national passion gazing at its navel. We’ve gone nowhere with the exercise, accomplished little, dried up good will across the country and — both inside Quebec and out — exhausted Canadians’ capacity to give much of a hoot about the whole issue. But that doesn’t seem to stop the pros.

No, the people whose sense of self-worth apparently depends on how relentlessly they can keep picking at scabs — the national-unity/disunity pros — are at it again.

Leading the charge? Pauline Marois, of course, leader of the sovereigntist Parti Québécois and the province’s new premier. Elected in September with a minority — which even she conceded was no mandate to begin unfurling the sovereignty flag again — she nonetheless couldn’t help herself. Once a 1970s separatist, always a 1970s separatist.

So she scurried over to Scotland recently, hoping to find an ally in Alex Salmond, Scottish First Minister and proponent of independence from Britain. His embarrassing lack of enthusiasm — there was virtually no coverage of their meeting — did not dampen Marois’s determination to wave Quebec’s sovereignty flag abroad. In London, she informed bemused British business leaders that Quebec might well block Canada’s plans for free trade with the European Union. So there.

Back home, the Estates General on Quebec Sovereignty project, funded in part by the PQ, released a key “study” — i.e. the opinions of 1,200 Quebecers. Not surprisingly, it suggested that the Canadian system hinders Quebec’s development and is antithetical to Quebec values. It also lamented big bad Anglos’ “soft ethnocide” committed against French-Canadian minorities outside Quebec.

In faraway Ottawa, meanwhile, the Bloc Québécois did the least it could do, as sovereigntists. One of its four MPs introduced a bill to repeal the Clarity Act, the 2000 legislation we all naïvely thought settled the matter by sensibly insisting secession could only happen after a clear majority of people voted on a clear question.

Of course, it’s not just the identifiable Quebec separatists who keep picking away at old wounds, preventing the healing. The federal leader of the Opposition, New Democrat chief Tom Mulcair, has decided that it’s important to breathe new life into Canada’s most contentious quarrel, national disunity, by trying to change the terms of the Clarity Act. The NDP bill, introduced by Mulcair and Craig Scott, member for Jack Layton’s old Toronto riding, would make 50 per cent plus one the magic number for the dismantling of Canada.

You don’t have to be a fan of Liberal heir presumptive Justin Trudeau to agree with his assessment. What this country needs least, he said, is “to have Mr. Mulcair pandering to his sovereigntist or soft-nationalist base in Quebec at the expense of national unity.”

For numerous reasons, not least of which are most Quebecers’ understandable instincts for pragmatic self-preservation, Quebec secession will likely never happen. But such common sense doesn’t stop the pros.

Sucked into the vortex of an endless debate, Canada has for years squandered masses of its intellectual and emotional resources going over and over the same ground. (Imagine what we might have accomplished if we’d turned some of that intelligence and commitment to solving real issues, making progress in areas that really matter.) How many more times are we supposed to keep doing this?

Most Canadians have reached their tipping point. If they could deliver one simple and heartfelt message to the country’s professional threat artists — in Quebec, yes, but also in Alberta, Newfoundland and anywhere else disgruntlement has been planted and is routinely nursed — I think it might sound like this:

Shut up already. Stay or don’t stay. Engage fully or don’t engage. Commit or don’t commit. Just stop talking about it. Just stop the wheedling and whining and endless exhausting threats.

It’s time to say enough. Seriously.

Janice Kennedy is an Ottawa Citizen columnist.