It is axiomatic that a separatist government in Quebec City is bad for Canada.
Once again, we're to be treated to the tedious, deliberate provocations, always delivered in a tone of tragic victimization that have made Quebec separatists by far our most annoying fellow citizens since, oh, 1976.
And yet: What if we're all wrong? What if it doesn't matter?
What if, indeed, Quebec threw a national unity crisis and nobody came or even paid much attention?
It is interesting to note that in 2003, the previous great-leader-who-would-forge-a-francophone-new-Jerusalem-in-the-hostile-anti-Gallic-swamp-of-North-America - his name was Bernard Landry - was poised to capitalize on overwhelming opposition among Quebecers to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. As Canadian troops marched into Baghdad, meekly trailing behind their American masters, Landry would tell Quebecers that only a sovereign Quebec could drag their sons and daughters from the quagmire. Unhelpfully, Jean Chrétien said no to the war. Landry became a footnote and Jean Charest premier.
Now, there is no foreign military adventure to foment against. But Part Québécois leader Pauline Marois, a hard-working former cabinet minister who reinvented herself as demagogic champion of the Pure Laine ("pure stock" meaning Caucasian, Christian, francophone) in order to win power, has already signalled that fomenting once again tops the agenda.
She will foment for more provincial powers over immigration, more provincial powers over copyright rules, more provincial powers over foreign aid. Best of all she will foment for a Quebec citizenship certificate, presumably wallet-sized, that Quebecers can henceforth squeeze in next to their Amex and Visa cards. Only certain Quebecers would be allowed to receive the glistening new bauble, she said early in the campaign. She later recanted, saying even second-raters - sorry, I meant to say nonfrancophones - would be so blessed.
Either way, heaping these new contrived irritants onto the real ones - such as $7.5 billion in federal equalization payments to Quebec this fiscal year, with the formula up for renewal in 2014, is a sure recipe for terrible strife. Right? There can't help but be a crisis, because no matter what Ottawa does, it will never satisfy.
Quebec, whose people were declared a nation within Canada by Parliament in 2006, already behaves in many respects like an independent country. What's left to fight over?
Fewer than one-third of Quebecers, according to a recent survey, would opt for independence now. The reason is not difficult to discern: It's just too much damn trouble. Most francophone Quebecers I know are as bored of politics and politicians as the next person, perhaps more, and want only to be left in peace to live their lives.
Also, they live in a region that, though suffering slightly higher unemployment than the national average, is doing rather well in global terms. And, as elsewhere across Canada, the population is greying. The generation of young reformers who wept while singing Gens Du Pays in the late 1970s got old. They have their pensions and their children's jobs and mortgages to worry about. Separation, assuming it is even possible, would be horribly disruptive and expensive to all Quebecers. Everyone knows it. No one seriously can deny it.
If René Lévesque failed to achieve independence, with the weight of the Quiet Revolution and many legitimate historical grievances behind him; and if Jacques Parizeau failed, even in the toxic soup of post-Mulroney, post-Meech, Post-Charlottetown resentment; if Lucien Bouchard himself didn't dare to even make the effort, for fear of losing; how can anyone believe that Marois can reverse the tide, or that she even intends to try? She herself has been very timid on this question, saying only that she'd hold a referendum "tomorrow morning" if conditions were right.
It's true that Stephen Harper's Conservatives hold only five seats in Quebec. It's also true that Harper is the least-liked prime minister, from a francophone Quebecer point of view, in recent memory. What that does, though, is liberate him to a point from playing the old game. He is not beholden. It is reasonable to expect he will cede powers to the province where the fight isn't worth the effort. He will allow the courts to do their work, as they must, in protecting the rights of linguistic and ethnic minorities in Quebec. He will make it clear, without being overtly inflammatory, that he has no time to play ticktacktoe with a separatist premier. And then he will ignore Pauline Marois, to the best of his considerable ability.
It's not a bad strategy.
