Fuzzy left

Yet once we agree to consider the real question, the sovereigntist doctrine is despairingly vacuous, at least as it appears in Bernard Landry’s recent letters to La Presse, including its latest, published on Thursday. Nothing, anywhere, to show that the resources necessary to further our culture’s development will be in any greater abundance comes independance. Nothing. Nada. What is there left, really, once we leave behind these absurd and scornful appeals to a collective dignity that is already so vibrant, honourable and confident inside Canada, as to reflect our sacrifice of some local maneuvering power in exchange for enlarging our influence in other ways, if only by holding a quarter of the federal power over a territory, resources and population included, of more than six times the size of ours? Or would one be asking to liberate a people from god knows what sort of bond, even if our new powers were insufficient to mitigate the consequences of further isolation between two oceans, one without human customers and the other even more insensitive before long to the french fact, including in its northernmost part? Mystery.

Futhermore, the identity-based arguments underlying this approach always exclude these parts of history, before Cartier and after Montcalm, which are just as definitive of who we are, including our Canadian identity, in any sense one may give to this word. Québec independance, far from being a road to emancipation of our collective self, would actually be a process of severing an intricate part of it, a part of who we are, for the sake of an obsession with another. As far as I know, this is a central theme in the political creed of our new federal liberal leader and likely next prime minister, the honourable Stéphane Dion, about whom, quite frankly, I’m getting more and more impressed almost every passing day.

But let me get back to the subject: what is there left? Is there even the beginning of the start of the presentation of a convincing case, that independance from Canada would provide us with a more efficient capacity to maintain and develop what would be left of this identity, confronted with a future fraught with social, economic and environmental difficulties? The irony, of course, is that Mister Landry, so literate in matters economic, as he claimed to all who would listen for so long, knows perfectly well - unless he missed his class on the public goods problem - that competition between sovereign nations already stifles, more than enough, efforts to humanize globalization just as well as those intended towards human sustainability, a pre-condition, one would think, for its cultural diversity.

In fact, showing how sovereigntist doctrine is becoming desperate, Mr Landry was suggesting, in his letter of November 16, that our resources were invested in too much canadian military spending. Recuperating this money would compensate for our losses in equalization payments and scale economies of all kinds, I suppose? Good grief, what a joke. What is there left again, thus, once we throw away the complacent demagoguery of this appeal to some politically correct pacifism, which would apparently justify beating Canada in the race for best military free-rider in the developed world? Isn’t it a summit in tartufferie, to use anti-militarism in this way, at the very moment when so many human tragedies in this world are demanding everything from a rich and generous nation such as Québec, except obviously to wash its hands of them so lightheartedly. Were I still a sovereigntist (yes, I have been), I would be deeply ashamed of such an argument.

What is there left then, in the final analysis, but this sorry tune about historical normality, that tune that’s been sung over and over by Pierre Bourgault, Jacques Parizeau, and those other romantic souls of ours, who have always tried to sell their dusty collectivist metaphysics as if they were the crux of modernity? It is actually the very strongest merit of those sovereigntists who called themselves “realists”, last spring, as they may embody the last real hope of renewing sovereigntist theory, that they did have the intellectual courage to abandon this unacceptable position, which is not only unfounded, whether in fact or in law, but which shows an unfathomable contempt for who we are, in the name of whom we should be, at least in the eyes of our very patriotic and sanctified aristocracy.

It could actually be in order to dodge this accusation that Landry presented yesterday a lighter version of the same argument, making first the oh-so-familiar excuse of federalist fear-mongering for our own collective insignificance, as if we were poor little doggies scared into paralysis, and then re-hashing a pseudo-factual generalisation, both false and irrelevant, according to which nations who know they can have their independant state, always do. That sort of hand-waving also happened a few months ago when our premier Jean Charest stated during a trip to France that we would be able to handle sovereignty if we so desired. The obvious implication, though, was that we had not chosen to go this way because it was not in our collective interest, period. Nobody does something just because he or she is able to. You do something when you want to, if you’re able. Big difference.You do something when you’re ready to pay the price of your decision, so as to obtain worthy and relevant benefits. But where are these?

As to the eternal story of sovereigntist courage versus federalist fear, this should also be turned off, unless one scorns at rational prudence and calculated risk. In any event, if anything looks like fear here, is there nothing to say about that of sovereigntists themselves, challenged as they have been by Pierre Trudeau and others to look beyond the defensive reflexes of self-contemplation that our old moralizing elites left us with? What is wrong with being a rational nation anyway?

No, clearly, it is high time that sovereigntists reconstruct their arguments around the real issue. Tell me why, Mr Landry, will tomorrow’s immigrants and investors be more seduced by an independant Québec to live and thrive in french here, more that is, or at least more productively, than they already are. I’m not asking for either poetry, creative historical interpretations, or more of the magical toolkit mantra of your new PQ leader, Mr Boisclair. I’m just asking you to ground your predictions on convincing arguments, those arguments we are still looking for after 40 years of sovereigntism. That’s your real challenge. In the meantime though, the false certainties that you are trying to sell are wasting everybody’s time and energy, and I don’t know that we have these in unlimited quantities these days, whatever some people may think, for whom reality is apparently just too darn unworthy of our attention.

Anyway. That’s that, and Merry Christmas nonetheless.