Blood and Belonging

by Michael Ignatieff

  If Quebec does proceed with Great Whale, and with the destruction of the Cree nation, it will do so because the rhetoric of national pride will have prevailed over economic good sense. The trouble with nationalism, as applied to economics, is that it invests projects with a symbolic importance that makes governments blind to realities. If the James Bay project is what the Aswan Dam was for Egypt’s Nasser, what Kwame Nkrumah’s hydroelectric and aluminum-smelting projects were to post-independence Ghana, the message is one of warning. In these two examples, declarations of national independence took their societies to the edge of bankruptcy. It remains to be seen whether nationalist hubris will lead Quebec to overplay its hand. Quebec is neither Ghana nor Egypt. It is an advanced and developed society. But the risks are there. When economic development is vested in the imperatives of national pride, nemesis awaits.

  RIGHTS AND SURVIVAL

  Crees and Quebecois both argue their demand for national self-determination in terms of cultural survival. This link between survival and self-determination is central to nationalist claims everywhere, but it deserves skeptical examination.

  The survival of Crees as individuals is not in doubt: their birthrate, per capita income, and level of education are all rising. Given these facts, they can certainly survive as individuals who think of themselves as Crees. Whether they can survive as a nation, that is, as a distinct people with a way of life rooted in the land, is less certain. You could take the view that it should be up to the next generation—the teenagers cruising the ice in their Ex-Hunters jerseys—to determine whether to remain true to the hunting and fishing economy that sustains the culture. If so, then it is not survival itself but the right to choose which way to survive that is at issue. The old ways of life must be preserved so that the freedom of choice of future generations can be preserved.

  In order to preserve that choice, the Canadian federal government has begun turning local government, policing, and justice over to native peoples. Already, in many native communities of the north, justice is jointly administered by native elders and magistrates from the south. Canadian law remains paramount, but these communities enjoy a degree of self-administration that the Italian or Chinese peoples of southern Canada, for example, do not enjoy.

  Meeting the claim of cultural survival, therefore, implies that native Canadians may come to have more rights of self-government than those enjoyed by the rest of the population. Provided that these rights do not infringe on the rights of other Canadians or amount to secession from the Canadian state—and they do not—federalism can thus accommodate some asymmetry in the rights individuals enjoy within a state.

  But can federalism accommodate a situation where group rights accorded to one national people appear to encroach upon the individual rights of those who do not belong to that national group? This, at least for English Canadians, is the moral challenge represented by Quebec language legislation, which restricts signage in English and restricts access to English-language education.

  Nationalists in Quebec maintain that entrenching the French language is the precondition for the very survival of Quebecois identity. They live on a continent of 300 million English speakers; their native birthrate is declining, and every day immigrants arrive whose first language is not French and whose first preference in learning a new language is English.

  Here the standoff between Quebecois and English visions of political community is complete. Quebecois nationalists simply deny that basic freedoms are being curtailed by signage legislation, while the Anglophone community simply denies that Quebecois cultural survival is at stake.

  The same standoff can be observed in the Baltic republics. In Latvia, for example, the fact that ethnic Russians are in a majority in Riga, the capital, is held to justify a new citizenship law that makes the capacity to speak Latvian a condition of Latvian citizenship. Ethnic Russians born and brought up in Latvia lose their citizenship in the new republic unless they learn the rudiments of Latvian. As a minority, they lose the right to speak their language whenever and wherever they please for the sake of the cultural survival of the ethnic majority.

  These are not just disagreements about rights; they are also disagreements about the very purpose of the state. Liberals tend to argue that states should not have purposes: any state that wishes to further some collective end will necessarily trample on the rights of those individuals who oppose that end. The federal policy of bilingualism, on this view, is a classic piece of liberal neutralism—protecting the rights of both linguistic groups, while privileging neither. To a Quebec nationalist, however, the state cannot afford to be neutral when the cultural survival of the nation is at stake. In the real world of modern nations, English—being the language of global commerce—will sweep other languages aside.

  Many Canadian liberals—led by Pierre Trudeau—have argued that when a state protects collective rights, whether they be Quebecois or aboriginal, the result is inevitably to infringe on individual rights. The cardinal sin of nationalism, on this account, is that it invariably results in some form of majoritarian tyranny. In this regard, therefore, Trudeau has warned, Quebec may be an example of an ethnic state in the making. As long as it remains within Canada, its language policies can be constrained and in some cases overruled by reference to the Supreme Court and the Canadian Charter of Rights. Should Quebec become sovereign, individuals would lose this right of appeal, and the way would be open to majoritarian ethnic tyranny.

  There is little doubt that the gut appeal of Quebec nationalism lies for most Quebecers in the vision of being a majority in their own society rather than a permanent, if powerful, minority within a federal Canada. But most Quebecers insist that theirs is not an ethnic but a liberal nationalism, based on equal citizenship. What other society, I kept being told, funds a public-school system in a language other than that of the majority? What other society has such a full panoply of human-rights protection as that enshrined in the Quebec charter of rights?

  What other nation, they also add, does not take steps to protect and develop the language of its cultural majority? All nations decree which languages will have official status; all nations run school systems in the language of the majority. The liberal ideal of a purely procedural state, one that takes no view as to what language or values should be taught in the state’s public schools, is a fiction. In this view, in safeguarding its cultural heritage Quebec is simply behaving like any other nation-state. At which point, of course, English Canada cries in anguish, “But you’re not a nation-state!”

  WHO BELONGS TO THE NATION?

  It is a cold February morning in Ayer’s Cliff, a farming community about half an hour’s drive from the Vermont border in southern Quebec. The fields of the McKinnon farm are white and bare, and the wind is drifting the snow up against the barn door. Inside, Angus and Peter McKinnon, two brothers in their twenties, are milking a hundred head of cattle, while their father, Dennis, looks on and reminisces. There used to be lots of English-speaking families around these parts, he says, and he rolls off their names—the Barclays, the Todds, the Buchanans—but now most of his neighbors are French. The farmers’ association used to run its meetings in English, and the Ayer’s Cliff town council, too. But that was in the old days, and now times have changed.

  Dennis McKinnon was one of the farmers who figured which way the wind was blowing, and sent his two boys to primary school in French. Though they did their high-school and agronomy courses at McGill in English, his sons remain bilingual. “You have to be,” says Angus. “All the business around here is done in French.”

  And so it is: at the town council, at the Quebec farmers’ association meetings, at the feed store, at the machinery distributors, Angus speaks French. It is much more than a halting gesture at bilingualism. Angus is the real thing: a fluently Quebecois Anglophone. Two generations ago, such a person would not have existed among the farmers of this rolling countryside.

  The two communities are cordial, and they work together, on the town
council, in the farmers’ organizations, but they keep to themselves socially. Angus McKinnon’s mother plays the violin in the orchestra in Sherbrooke. She is from Belfast originally, but her French is good and she fits in well in a French-speaking orchestra. Yet she’s never been invited home by any of the other players. When Angus goes out in his truck to a dance on a Friday night, he’ll be driving a lot of kilometers to get to a dance of English-speaking farmers.

  One hundred thousand Anglophones have left Quebec since the first independentist government was elected in 1976. But Angus is not going to take the road to Ontario. For one thing, Quebec agriculture is among the best-subsidized and best-administered of any province’s in Canada, and certainly superior to anything south of the border, where there is little price maintenance and the dairy producers have to survive on tiny margins and bulk production. And then there are cultural reasons for staying. The McKinnons and families like them have been in these rolling valleys for two hundred years. They came up from New England because they didn’t want to be part of the new republic, because they wanted to stay loyal to Britain and the Crown and British institutions, and because the land in these parts was good.

  Not that the history in the Quebec school textbooks ever tells their story. In Quebec history, where Anglophones figure at all, they appear as the colonial elite, the Anglophones who lived in Westmount in Montreal and ran the railways and the department stores and the big businesses on Peel Street. There wasn’t much room in the story for the small farmers of the Eastern Townships. They didn’t quite fit the picture of the master class.

  The McKinnons aren’t resentful people. For one thing, they’re doing too well. Besides, they can’t recall any overt insults. The Quebecois slang for an Anglo is tête-carrée— blockhead—but in all their time in the bars and pool halls, shooting some racks with the French farmers around, they can’t recall hearing that word.

  But other things hurt, all the same. They feel that they are just as much part of Quebec as the French, but the history books, the politics, the language legislation all convey the message that they don’t really belong.

  “They had the language police down here last summer,” Angus tells me when we are having lunch at a Greek grill in Coaticook, near his farm. The Parti Québécois (PQ)—the independentist party—hired some college students to go around the town taking pictures of English-only signs. Then they went back to Quebec City and reported the tradespeople for violating the language laws.

  The interesting thing is, says Angus, waving a greeting to a French farmer and his wife who have come in for lunch across the room, “everyone was mad here. Not just the English. Everyone thought: we have a community here, what are outsiders coming in for and driving us apart?” He sips on his coffee. “I tell you, had we caught those students, we would have run them out of town.”

  It wasn’t Angus McKinnon’s rights that were being violated by the sneaky way the students slipped into town and took photos of the signs. Rights language doesn’t really describe the problem. The problem is one of recognition. Are English-speaking Quebecers recognized by the majority as belonging to Quebec society or not?

  The minority populations of Quebec, not just native Anglophones but immigrant communities as well, are intensely irritated by the phrase “Québécois pur laine” or “Québécois de souche,” used by some Quebecois to distinguish those who descend from the original French-speaking inhabitants and those, of English, Irish, or other extraction, who arrived later. In any event, the distinction is fraudulent. There are fervent Quebecois nationalists called O’Brien or O’Neil, for example. Centuries of intermarriage among English, French, and aboriginal Quebecers make nonsense of the idea that some Quebecois are more purely French than others. Some Francophone nationalists admit the distinction is fraudulent. When I talked to the head of the Saint Jean Baptiste Society, she confessed that while she could call herself a Québécoise de souche on her mother’s side, her father was actually Spanish.

  In every modern nation, the nationalist myth that nations have a self-contained, “pure” ethnic identity comes up against the recalcitrant desire of ordinary people to breed across ethnic lines. Faced with the contradiction between the myth of ethnic purity and the reality of ethnic intermixing, nationalists have to choose how to define membership in the nation. Does the Quebecois nation comprise all those who live there, or only those who were born French-speaking?

  All nationalisms face such a choice. Is Croatia the nation of the Croatian people, or of all those—they may include Serbs—who chose to make Croatia their home? Is Germany the nation of the German people, or of the Turks, Yugoslavs, Portuguese, Spaniards, Romanians, and Poles who have chosen Germany as their home?

  Recent declarations by Quebecois nationalist leaders have raised the suspicion that their definition of nationality is ethnic. Jacques Parizeau, the PQ leader, has said that Quebec independence can be achieved with or without the cooperation of the minority populations. This may be a statement of fact, but it appears to imply more than a little indifference to the opinions and rights of the minorities.

  On balance, however, modern Quebec nationalists are at pains to differentiate their conception of the nation from the ethnic idea that they associate with the catastrophe of Yugoslavia. Thus, in its arguments for sovereignty, the Quebec teachers’ union rejects the idea that Quebec is the “national state of the French Canadians.” The Quebec state, they argue, should be the national state of everyone who chooses to live there, “regardless of their ethnic origins.” A national state, they insist, need not be an ethnic state.

  Even if it did become an ethnic state, Angus McKinnon muses, we will never go the way of Yugoslavia. Why? “Because there’s the highway to Ontario,” says Angus with a laugh. “We can always get on the highway and leave. The poor people in Yugoslavia can’t leave, but we can. But I don’t want to. This is the best place in the world.”

  HOCKEY NIGHT IN CANADA

  Dennis Rousseau is in his late twenties and works for Wayagamack, a paper mill in Trois-Rivières, on the north shore of the Saint Lawrence. His wife works as a bookkeeper in town, and they live, with their baby girl, in a two-bedroom bungalow on a suburban street a few minutes’ walk from the paper mill. Outside, it is about fifteen below zero and snow is falling through the light cast by the streetlamps. In Dennis’s front yard, there is a gigantic snow fort, and half of the kids on the street are attacking it with snowballs and the other half are defending it. Snowballs are whizzing through the night air around me, splattering against the fort, against Dennis’s front door. He pulls me inside and shuts the door with a laugh.

  Dennis is wearing a hockey shirt and jeans, and his thin blond hair is down to his shoulders. His Quebecois is fast, heavily accented, and sometimes too much for my French-French to understand. He apologizes that he doesn’t speak English, and then points down to his three-year-old daughter, who is pushing a large plastic tractor across the living room. “She’s going to be in English immersion.” English immersion courses are in their first year in Trois Rivières. “We don’t want to be cut off,” he says.

  I was looking for someone who could talk to me about the economics of independence from a worker’s point of view, and union organizers in Montreal gave me Dennis’s name. Besides, Trois-Rivières is the heart of Quebec, a unilingual town that used to be the capital of its pulp and paper industry. There used to be twelve mills in the region, going twenty-four hours a day, making the paper for the phone books and newspapers of a whole continent. No more. Demand is down due to the recession, and in Alabama and Georgia they have plants that can produce the paper for less. Only six mills are left, and at Dennis’s factory they have lost one-third of the workforce in the last year.

  “A lot of layoffs at my mill. Over two hundred. Same at the Belgo, Kruger, and worst of all is the PFCP, which used to have a thousand workers. Now it’s closed. We’ve got 17 percent unemployment in Trois-Rivières. It’s bad. I could lose my job anytime. When I go out to the rink
to play hockey with the guys I never know who’s going to be there.”

  Hardly the moment, I would have thought, for nationalist experiments. But that’s not how Dennis sees it. “The government ought to do something. We need a jobs policy, but Quebec doesn’t have the power. Employment is federal. We need to get our hands on the levers.”

  Dennis isn’t a Parti Québécois militant, but he is a phenomenon—he represents the spread of Quebec nationalist doctrine from the cafés of Montreal intellectuals to the industrial heartland. Three years of recession have, paradoxically, turned him into a nationalist. “We’ve got the businessmen, we’ve got the skills, we could make this place work, I’m sure of it.” The Canadian government, he thinks, takes care only of English Canada.

  Why, I suggest, don’t you make common cause with the workers in Ontario? They’re having just as hard a time as you. Dennis won’t budge. “Ontario won’t give us the powers we need. They say we have too much already.”

  Dennis is a cheerful, openhearted man, diffident with strangers, but with convictions no amount of arguing on my part can shift. It doesn’t make much impression when I tell him the Canadian government has been pouring money into the fight against unemployment in Quebec. It doesn’t matter that an independent Quebec might have just as much trouble keeping a tired old paper mill in business. He knows what he knows, and that is that a sovereign Quebec couldn’t make a bigger mess of his life than Ottawa has already.

  I can’t help feeling that for Dennis, nationalism may just be a welcome flight from disagreeable economic realities. One reality is that his mill used to be owned by a Quebec company. They failed to put in the necessary investment and sold it off to an American company. The Americans are now investing, but it may be too late for the plant to compete against the company’s own lower-cost plants in the United States. What, in other words, can Quebec ownership or Quebec sovereignty do in the face of the competitive economics in a continental market?