Blood and Belonging (23 page)

Other people besides Canadians should be concerned if Canada dies. If federalism can't work in my Canada, it probably can't work anywhere. Canada has the resources to appease the economic resentments that nationalism feeds upon. As a parliamentary democracy, it has a political culture in which nationalist demands can be conciliated by argument rather than repressed by force. Federalism has not failed: the country is still together; but the cost of conciliating nationalism has been a thirty-year stalemate at the heart of the nation's institutions.

The nub of the quarrel is simpler than the infinite complexity of the constitutional negotiations makes it seem. Six million French-speaking North Americans—
les Québécois
—think of themselves not just as a people, with a language, history, and tradition of their own, but as a nation, that is, as a people with a political personality and a right to self-government. They have conceived of themselves in this way, not just since the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, but ever since Canadian Confederation, in 1867. The word “nation” has always figured prominently in their public language. In Quebec, for example, unlike any other Canadian province, the provincial assembly is called L'Assemblée Nationale.

The Canadian federation's essential problem has always been that Francophone Quebecois identify Quebec as their nation and Canada as their state, while English-speaking Canadians identify Canada both as their nation and as their state. So long as Quebec believed that it needed the rest of Canada for its own survival, this asymmetry did not prove fatal. Since 1960, however, Quebec has used its powers within the federal system to become a state within a state and to develop its own economy. Quebec has never needed Canada as a nation. Now it is asking itself whether it even needs it as a state.

Age eight, I had scaled cemetery hill in Rockcliffe in search of an enemy who turned out to vanish among the maples. Now, in my forties, I set off into Quebec to come face-to-face, not just with the Quebecois, but with the illusions, the phantoms, that shaped my imagined Canada. I should not have been surprised to discover that they did not imagine Canada as I had done, but I was. The embarrassing truth was that in the twenty years I lived in Canada I never traveled in Francophone Quebec—I had been to Montreal many times, and
just as often to the English communities in the Eastern Townships, but I had never been to Trois-Rivières, never to the Quebec northland, never to the heartland of the French reality in North America. This was in every sense not a return but a voyage of discovery.

STATE AND NATION

Sixteen hundred kilometers north of Montreal, in a granite cliff face, a large cantilevered metal door, colored bright red, slowly begins to rise. The four-wheel drive enters a long, descending tunnel, cut out of the rock, and the metal door closes, sealing off the tunnel from the arctic air. At the security checkpoint, the guards check the vehicle and wave it past. After a kilometer, dead slow, the vehicle stops at another, much smaller door.

You are not prepared for what you see when the small door opens. You step into a space as vast as a cathedral, only it is underground, and the walls are quarried out of granite, and the ceiling lights stretch away to the vanishing point, and there are low green instrument panels on one wall as far as the eye can see. Somewhere close by, vast turbines are turning. The floor shakes. The air is charged with a steady throbbing hum. Somebody must be in charge here. There must be a control room somewhere. As you walk through, there are signs of men at work—abandoned golf carts and several mobile tool kits on wheels—but you meet nobody. In this echoing, cavernous space, you are alone.

LG-2 it is called. La Grande Two. The biggest underground powerhouse in the world. Cost: $2.8 billion Canadian. Beneath the floor are ten turbines, driven by the waters of La Grande River. It is seven-fifteen in the evening. In Montreal, kettles are being switched on in ten thousand kitchens, heat
is being turned up at a hundred thousand thermostats, and in bedrooms from Westmount to Outremont, girls are running their hair dryers. Peak-load time, the guide says. The water is roaring beneath our feet, the turbines are whirring. There is enough power here to heat and light a city of two million.

I ask my guide what she feels. “Proud,” she says, blushing slightly. Proud that her people had the know-how to dam the river, build the turbines, cut the powerhouse out of this rock. Proud of Quebec.

LG-2 has mythic status in the making of modern Quebec. It stands as the happy ending of a nationalist romance that goes something like this: We were a backward society once. The Anglos of Montreal ran everything. The priests were in charge. Our families were too large. We were poor. We were down on the farm. Not anymore. We have come of age. We are proud. We are masters in our own house now, and LG-2 proves it. With cheap electricity, we can build our own economy. We can export power to the Americans. We can pay our way in the world.

Quebec's nationalization of its hydroelectric resources in 1962 was the first major economic step in its drive to become a state within a state in the Canadian confederation. Hydro is as important a constituent of Quebec's national pride as the Aswan Dam was to Nasser's Egypt, as the Kayser aluminum smelter was to Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana. The nationalization of Hydro set in chain the province's economic emancipation. There are now a host of major Quebec economic institutions entirely independent of Canadian or American ownership. The Caisse de Dépôt et de Placement, another key institution of Quebec economic independence, invests the funds deposited into Quebec's provincial pension fund; it is now the fifth largest pool of investment capital in North
America. And then there are the investment funds amassed by cooperative savings banks like Caisse Desjardins, with assets in excess of $45 billion Canadian, and mighty private companies, like Bombardier, which makes snowmobiles and public transport systems.

From an English Canadian point of view, the irony is that these developments, which make Quebecois feel they need Canada less, might just as plausibly have made them feel they need it more. For Quebec's state capitalism follows a deeply Canadian pattern. Given the small size of the domestic market and the huge size of the country, Canadian government and its business class have always had to work in tandem to develop the nation's infrastructure and resources. Public corporations—from the railways to the airlines to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to Hydro-Québec—have always been more important in Canadian development than they are in the United States. The result of 125 years of state capitalism
à la Canadienne
has been the emergence of a public culture which is pragmatic, social democratic, and left of center, in Quebec and English Canada alike.

Instead of leading to any discovery of what it has in common with the rest of Canada, Quebec's economic coming of age has confirmed a sense that it can go it alone. As the Quebec business elite has entered first the North American and then the global market, they have come to look on the Canadian market, and their cultural and political links with the English Canadian business class, as a historical leftover, a relic of a time when they, as Quebecois, were the hewers of wood and drawers of water.

In Montreal, I went to see Claude Béland, one of the men who not only run the Quebec economy but symbolize its increasing confidence in the independence option. From an
office on the fortieth floor of the Complexe Desjardins, he directs the $40-billion investment fund accumulated by the small savers and investors who bank with the Desjardins savings, loan, and credit company. Two generations ago, a man like Claude Béland would not have existed. A Quebecois might have worked as a senior accountant for the English Canadian banking and security houses that ran the Canadian market from Peel Street in Montreal. But a Quebecois would never have had the corner office on the top of a tower, with a view over the icebound Saint Lawrence and his finger on $40 billion worth of investment funds.

Thirty years ago, he says, Desjardins borrowed and invested entirely within the Canadian market. Now, more than half of its business is overseas. Quebec has taken its place at the big table of international finance.

Claude Béland looks like a North American bank president: silver-haired, immaculately suited in sober blue, with a fluent English that he uses to take calls from fellow bank presidents in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and London. Yet what other major North American bank president's native tongue is French? What other North American bank president is a nationalist?

He wasn't to begin with. Like the cautious accountant that he is, he thought sovereignty was too risky an option in the 1970s and early 1980s. Now he has changed his mind. Why?

“Well, because a state is the only way to protect the identity of a people, you know. Identity I define as the harmony between your values and your actions. In other words, you know who you are and you want to protect that … and be recognized for that.”

It seems odd to me that a bank president should be talking about such metaphysical entities as identity, so I ask him
whether statehood matters because it confers identity or because it completes an economic emancipation. Which is it, the pocketbook or the soul? Béland doesn't want to have to choose. Independence, he says, is about both dimensions. We have one layer of government too many. Quebec is like a company “with two finance managers, two marketing directors, two vice presidents for resources.” We need only one of each, and we want them to be Quebecois. I asked him whether he was worried about Quebec's place in the coming North-American Free Trade Area, linking Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Anxieties about cultural and economic survival are endemic in English Canada. But not among Claude Béland's circle. “No, people do business with us, not because of our politics, but because we are good buyers, and we make good products.”

As the president's public relations people show me out, down the long broadloomed corridor in the executive suite, I find myself puzzling over the paradox that as men like Béland join the global economy as players, they become more, not less, interested in national sovereignty for a little corner of the globe called Quebec. I had assumed that global players ceased to care about nations. I was wrong. Here was a man, in other words, who believed that the coming of continental free trade and globalization of capital markets strengthened, rather than weakened, the case for a sovereign Quebec.

English Canada looks at Quebec's economic development since 1960—symbolized by a man like Claude Béland—and says, “If you can do all this within Canada, why not stay?” Canada is already the most decentralized federation in the world. Quebec looks at its own transformation and says, “Why do we need to?”

NATIONALISM AND THE FOLKLORE OF BACKWARDNESS

There is a further paradox here. Once upon a time, English Canadian domination of the Quebec economy was blamed, by nationalists, for the province's relative economic backwardness. You might expect economic nationalism to ebb as economic backwardness is overcome. Not so—at least if Quebec is any guide. Here is a people who have caught up economically in two generations. They no longer feel dominated by the Anglo-Canadian elite of Montreal. If you ask when they last were made to feel ashamed to speak French, they have to go back to their father and mother's times, or to their childhood, when the Ritz Carlton Bar on Sherbrooke Street or the T. Eaton department store would not serve you unless you spoke English. These memories are no longer personal: they are from the mythic bad old days. One would expect that nationalist feeling would ebb as personal memory dissolves into myth. If anything, the contrary has been the case.

Isaiah Berlin once likened nationalism to a bent twig, which, if held down, will snap back with redoubled force once released. The twig in Quebec has long since been released, yet its force is far from spent. What does this mean? First, that grievances do not cease to be actual just because they are in the past. Collective myth has no need of personal memory or experience to retain its force. The English conquered Quebec 234 years ago. On the Plains of Abraham, in Quebec City, where the battle was fought, nowadays children play with their sleighs and the Carnaval de Québec spills its horn-tooting, beer-drinking crowds all over its slopes. The Conquest is ancient history. No matter. Quebec nationalists
still describe the nationalist project as
la reconquête de la conquête:
the reconquest of the Conquest. Yet the plain fact is that Quebec nationalism has mythologized a nation's defeat at the very moment Quebec finally overcame it.

Nor is this the only paradox. Quebec nationalists insist on the cultural and social distinctiveness of their society at exactly the moment it is losing so much of what made it distinctive. In the 1950s, when it stood on the eve of its great leap forward, Quebec was in every sense a distinct society. Backwardness, after all, is a form of distinctiveness. Quebec had a predominantly small-town, agricultural population that lagged behind the Canadian one in education and literacy; its public culture was authoritarian; demographically its family structure was unique in North America, with families of ten children the norm.

Quebec's Quiet Revolution was meant to overcome the distinctiveness of backwardness, and it has succeeded. From having the highest birthrate in North America, Quebec now has among the lowest. From having the worst-educated population in North America, Quebec now has among the best. From being the most devoutly religious community in North America, it is now among the least observant. From having an authoritarian political culture, it now prides itself on the freedom and openness of public debate.

Quebec's distinctiveness used to be like that of the Appalachians or the American South, a regionalism anchored in relative rural poverty. Now, just like these other regions of North America, it has opened itself up to a continental way of life. To an outsider, the Quebecers hitting the road for cottage country on a Friday night, in their Cherokees and Winnebagos, baseball hats on their heads, radios tuned to the local country and western station, could be in Minnesota or
any other American state or Canadian province. Until they open their mouths, that is.