Semantic roulette, Rex wrote. I call it conversation.
Seems like lots of Canadians have been surprised lately by an old skeleton coming out of its closet. For sure, the Québec nation saga must have crossed some imaginary line as it now appears that a (close to) unanimous motion in the House of Commons will be adopted tomorrow attributing something referenced by the word “nation” to something referenced by one or many different words starting with “Q”. Rex Murphy in the Globe, yesterday, called this exercise “semantic roulette”, as to lament the whole thing, obviously. But isn’t semantic roulette, when you think about it, describing marvelously what people do when they simply say something that could be misconstrued? Which is the case for pretty much everything we say in any meaningful conversation, isn’t it? I mean beyond “pass me the salt” or “two plus two equals four”, that is. Or maybe Mr Murphy was making some implicit reference to a way more dangerous kind of roulette playing, associated with yet another nation on the other side of the arctic. Certainly in this case though, the barrel is rolling for more than one perspective on our collective future.
Now, I don’t agree with much of the general rhetorics on either side of the battleground, personally. The idea that Québécois, Quebeckers, Québec - all of which I feel a sense of belonging to - form, are, is, have or quacks like a nation, troubles me no more than my choice of a brand of margarine. Yet I really can’t see why this needs to be construed as implying that Québec should necessarily be either an independent country or have some special status as a province in Canada. If having a Fête nationale or an Assemblée nationale in this province was such a menace to keeping the Rockies united with the Laurentides, somebody somewhere would have taken this up with the courts.
To me anyway, the important confusion is not between various Q-words or different definitions of a nation, but between the more or less (un)disputable objective fact that Québec is a nation, and the totally subjective reasons for this fact to be so. In particular the whole civic versus ethnic nation debate, or political versus sociological (as if some actual thing, apart from a theory or a hypothesis, could be “sociological”, like what? a sociological tree? a sociological poem?), this debate thus makes the kind of distinction without a difference that you would make if you spoke of a kitchen table that you can eat on, as being oh so very different from a table that has four legs.
Actually, if this civic/ethnic distinction is at all meaningful, it is only with respect to one’s own completely subjective sense of belonging to one or many nations. It’s his or her very personal nationalism, then, not his or her nation, that can emphasize his or her attachment to some civic or political contract beyond all “sociological” differences, as opposed to a loyalty to some or other shared historical and cultural background. In both cases yet again though, such emphases are somewhat artificial as on the one hand, the civic pluralist doctrine is in fact a product of a particular historic and cultural background, which one could easily argue belongs to all of humanity, and as on the other hand, the absence of more focused histories and cultures would make it completely incomprehensible that there would be individual nation-states in the first place. You can’t just have a particular nation because you want to. If your “wanting to” has anything to do with it, then there must be some reasons for your choice of belonging to a nation and not to another, and one doesn’t find this in outer space but in his own culture, for crying outloud. Unless I got it completely wrong, the same applies here to Canada as a whole, as to Québec as a part of it. As a nation within another that is; not necessarily as one province among ten.
That is another distinction that is not done properly either, in my view, as if we dealt with solid objects that can’t occupy the same physical space. The territory and people of Québec can very well constitute a nation while the Canadian national deal gives equal provincial status to a part of their political institutions. As a province in fact, Québec is certainly no more different from the other nine than its people are from other Canadians when it’s time to wait for surgery, to get a good job or to trust no overpass will fall on their car. Yet as a nation, one should not be surprised to see its representatives, both at the federal and provincial levels, gang up together sometimes to play the political game the way their shared history and culture tell them they should. What’s so weird about that?
In the end, there might be a relatively simple explanation for all the commotion, which is a pretty common interpretation here: that many Canadians actually fear that Québec, like some old-world dinosaur isolating itself from the grand destiny of truly modern Canada, is killing the dream for the perfect country. Whether this is right or wrong, we should discuss it calmly and respectfully. What does Canada really want, after all? An all-out honest and open conversation has been long overdue in this country, beyond the linguistic divide. Let’s just hope the “semantic roulette” can stop on the right number this time.
Comments
Comment from Olaf
Date: November 26, 2006, 6:34 pm
Yvan,
First of all, your clarity of thought is sometimes mesmerizing and I will thank you not to comment on my site for fear you’ll make me look foolish on a daily basis. That said, I will do my best, for the sake of argument, to poke wholes in your own.
Yet I really can’t see why this needs to be construed as implying that Québec should necessarily be either an independent country or have some special status as a province in Canada. If having a Fête nationale or an Assemblée nationale in this province was such a menace to keeping the Rockies united with the Laurentides, somebody somewhere would have taken this up with the courts
The fact that Quebec as a province has declared itself a nation, is different legally speaking than were the Federal government to convey legal status on the province. If the province as a political entity were legally considered a province (which neither Quebec’s self-appointed status nor Harper’s resolution, by my understanding, convey), it would have claim to a number of legal rights according to international law, which troubles some including myself. Essentially it would provide a territorial entity by which nationhood could be realized, and would necessarily suggest that all residents of Quebec were part of a nation that some (such as aboriginal groups) would not necessarily support. This is the problem with declaring the province, as opposed to a subset of the population (les Quebecois) to be a nation. While the former is mandatory membership, the latter is elective, and it is the latter that you seem to support in your discussion of a “personal nationalism”.
Honestly, I had difficulty following your fourth paragraph, which I have a feeling could be the result of my failings rather than your own, so I will reserve comment on the points that you made there for the time being.
The territory and people of Québec can very well constitute a nation while the Canadian national deal gives equal provincial status to a part of their political institutions.
I’m not sure that this is possible, for the simple reason that nationhood conveys a degree of self-government for which a comparable argument cannot be made for non-national units (the other 9 provinces). This would not necessarily be the case, but it is likely, as both federalist and separatist governments in Quebec have attempted to increase the provinces autonomy, despite the high degree of centralization that Canadian provinces already enjoy. Recognizing Quebec the province as a nation, would give credence to the idea that Quebec and Alberta are fundamentally different units, and not equal provinces.
Quebec could (and likely would argue) that as a nation it should have a wider scope of powers to act as a nation than the other provinces, which are merely territorial-based units, lest their ability to act as a nation together be suppressed by another nation. Indeed, why should a nation-based unit be treated the same as territorial based unit? If Quebec, along with the rest of Canada, are to be seen as two nations, each with a distinct territory, than should they not be on par with each other, as opposed to Quebec merely being on par with territorial based political units? It is this argument which forces me to reject the idea that Quebec, as a province, composes a nation while relatively easy for me to accept that self-electing Quebecers can consider themselves part of a Quebecois nation.
Comment from Yvan St-Pierre
Date: November 28, 2006, 9:41 am
My dear friend Olaf,
And please don’t be offended by this unsollicited friendship offer (see how Canadian a Québécois can be?), but let me also doubt that I might deserve even a small fraction of your praise. My thoughts may be relatively clear - although I could probably dispute that as well - but I’m conscious enough of the convoluted limitations of my written english to know that your kind reserve is the real compliment here.
This being said, replying adequately to your own reply could be demanding way more than I feel able to offer right now, but my initial impression is that you seem to be equating democratic politics, which relates to the whole iceberg of citizens’ interactions, and the rule of law, with its more restricted focus on the said iceberg’s very formal tip. And I think that the legalistic framing of a deeper political question such as the current one is an intricate part of the problem. We can hardly discuss frankly, openly, of the goals of our marriage and of what we should invest together in pursuing them, while lawyering up for an eventual divorce, can we?
Actually this metaphor itself is misleading, as it involves only two parties, and I wouldn’t want to condone polygamy in any way, shape or form, so one might prefer to think of a union more akin to, say, a labour union of sorts. At any rate, the main point I was making, in what you highlighted, was rather that even if one assumed that recognizing Québec as a nation could lower at all the legal costs on Québec’s side of the “disaffiliation”, this did not imply at all that such recognition could provide a sufficient rationale to either want separation in the first place, or to trump any sound argument in favour of provincial equality.
I can admit easily that special status has been a mainstay of our provincial take on this, but times change, and the Bloc Québécois is actually the proof in the pudding, if somewhat dysfunctionally, that federal institutions can matter to the Québécois nation just as darn much as the administration of hospitals and public libraries. We have to remember that the linguistic barrier is both real and shrinking, which can explain the past and still present focus on provincial institutions in Québec, while Canadians can all hope, for the future, that the Québécois will find other ways to recognize themselves better, as such, in federal institutions that belong to them just as much as their provincial jurisdictions. This is the direction in which the Québec motion can take us, I think. If and only if we choose to see it that way, obviously.
As to my treatment of the semantics debate, and for all practical purposes here, I’m just saying really that the Canadian civic/political ideal of openness towards all cultures is itself profoundly cultural, and that the Québécois culture is itself deeply open towards all other cultures… The real difference in my view is basically in the political weight of the language question. A majority of Quebeckers support a strong institutional bias in favour of the use of french in the public sphere, given its minority status on this continent, a bias which the rest of the country can not be realistically expected to support at the same level.
I’ll leave it at that for now, but I’m sure we will take it up yet again, and why the heck not?
Kind regards to you, then.
Write a comment, or trackback from your own site.