Canada Might Get Interesting

By Richard Brookhiser

If you asked Americans to pick the dullest country in the world, most of us would pick Canada. That is a tribute to Canadians. For decades, Canada has heeded the Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times" and done the opposite. Given a choice between the headlines and a decent life, Canadians cede the headlines to Haiti. Americans should start thinking about their dull neighbor though, because there is an even chance that this year or the next, Canada will join the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia on the list of former countries and become two neighbors.

The most obvious force pulling Canada apart is language. Three-quarters of the population grow up speaking English, while one-quarter of it grow up speaking French. For the most part, the groups do not mingle, but live in segregated regional blocs -- French speakers in Quebec province, English speakers in the rest of Canada.

For three centuries, the Quebecois -- descendants of France's attempt to plant a North American colony -- maintained a society that was rural, Roman Catholic and inward-looking. But in the 1960s, as Quebecois moved into business and the professions, Quebecois separatists raised their sights. They now control two parties of their own -- the Parti Quebecois, which contests (and sometimes wins) Quebec provincial elections, and the newer Bloc Quebecois, which holds seats in the national Parliament. French Canadians are intelligent and entrepreneurial. When it comes to politics, they're blowhards, endlessly recounting their frustrations, many of them imaginary. Compared with other minorities in the modern age, they have had an exceedingly easy life. But grievance is in the minds of the aggrieved, and the Quebecois want to run Quebec as a French enclave -- or they want out.

English Canadians feel they have taken the role of the masochist in a bad marriage, making concessions in the vain hope of peace. The most irritating concession they went along with was the policy of bilingualism, established by former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in the '60s and '70s. Pols and bureaucrats were required to learn both tongues, and it was hoped that over time their fluency would trickle down. Quebec paid no attention, enacting a series of French-only laws. For the first time, English Canadians began to wish that Quebec would clear out.

Another malign force in Canadian life is the national government. In recent decades it's been spending like a sailor. (Thirty cents out of every dollar Ottawa collects goes to service the debt, vs. 17 cents of every dollar in Washington.) The behavior of the central government especially angers the resource-rich provinces of the west. But neither big spending nor structural problems get a hearing in the din over the Quebec issue.

In 1987 Prime Minister Brian Mulroney offered a constitutional-reform package known as the Meech Lake Accord. For Quebec its guarantees of a "distinct society" were a bare minimum, but for many in English Canada they went too far. When Meech Lake was not adopted, Quebec scheduled a referendum on its future for October of this year. The federal government is working on a new batch of compromises, which should be ready for national discussion in April. Beyond this hurdle is the next general election, which must be held no later than 1993, and which may see Canadian politics fragmented into five parties -- Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives, the opposition Liberals, the socialist New Democratic Party, the Bloc Quebecois and the brand-new Reform Party, a rebellion of westerners whose slogan is "We Want In."

U.S. government policy on all this is to speak bromides and carry no stick. A U.S.-Canada working group of the Atlantic Council in Washington has been studying the Canadian question privately, but its reports are scarcely more definite than official pronouncements. There is nothing definite America could profitably say. Before he began his run for President, Patrick Buchanan wrote columns suggesting that the U.S. welcome the western and Maritime provinces to statehood. Canadians shouldn't worry. Among the obstacles to such a scheme is ethnic etiquette here: we could scarcely take on several dozen white-bread Congressmen without boosting Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia to statehood too.

Some Canadian-policy intellectuals have discussed the prospect of violence. Canadians shouldn't worry about that either: they aren't Serbs and Croats. In a way, that may be part of their problem. "Every society," said Oliver Wendell Holmes, "rests on the death of men." Canadians fought bravely in Britain's wars (twice against us), but they have rarely fought one another. As a consequence, they may not feel the same stake in their society that Americans earned, at such grim cost.

The crisis could go any number of ways, including petering out. Quebeckers may not want to risk a leap into the dark of independence during a recession. (Even a Quebecois economist admits that sovereignty would involve transitional costs of as much as 10% of Quebec's GDP -- a prospect that separatist politicians carefully soft-pedal.) It is possible, finally, that some deal will be struck either by Mulroney or even by western politicians willing to give Quebec its head in return for a redesigned federal government.

| Americans can live with any of these options. The main lesson we should take from our neighbor's troubles is not to import them here. Multiculturalism and bilingualism, once planted, grow like kudzu. Our struggles over our racist problem have lasted 200 years and included a Civil War. Let's not add problems that have made even Canada interesting.