Publications!

Just a quick post today to announce two new publications that I'm excited about.

The first is my new edited collection, Contemporary Quebec: Selected Readings and Commentaries, which I co-edited with Michael Behiels at the University of Ottawa. We've been working on this book for the last six years (yikes!) but it's finally in print. It's mainly intended for upper-year Quebec history courses, and contains thirty-one articles and 14 historiographical essays on various facets of Quebec history since the Duplessis era. Several of the articles are new or previously unpublished English translations, and all are situated within the broader literature in the introductory essays to each of the 14 sections of the book. We've also included bibliographies of further readings for each section (with an emphasis on English-language or translated scholarship) to try to assist anglophone undergraduate students doing research on Quebec history. I also have a previously unpublished article in the collection on the interactions between Canadian and Quebec language policies from the 1960s to the early 1980s.

The second publication is
Life After Forty: Official Languages Policy in Canada / Après quarante ans: Les politiques de langue officielle au Canada. This new edited collection, put together by Jack Jedwab and Rodrigue Landry, came out of a conference held for the 40th anniversary of the Official Languages Act, and includes contributions from a variety of academic and policy perspectives on the impact of this legislation. I have an article in this collection dealing with some of the key features of how this legislation was framed and implemented, particularly its ramifications for the education sector. The book was also the subject of a recent article in the Montreal Gazette.

Christmas presents for the Canadian/Quebec history geeks in your life, perhaps?

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Quebec NDP: The Kids [Could Be] All Right

Monday was an exciting night for Quebec university NDP clubs, as a number of members of their executives were elected to the House of Commons, amidst a wave that elected NDP members in almost 80% of Quebec's ridings (on the strength of about 43% of the province's popular vote, although that's a subject for a different post). Since that day, news sites, Twitter and Facebook have been aflame with commentary and angry retorts regarding the issues of the youth, experience, and suitability for office of these newly-elected MPs.

To the vitriolic partisans on both sides of this issue, I say a pox on both your houses. Everybody has to start somewhere in politics, and many, many members of parliament (and indeed leaders of some major political parties) have been thrust into political office with no prior political experience. In many cases, this is what people find "fresh" about them. Many are elected at a young age, in their mid-20s, and seem to settle into the position without much difficulty. In both cases, they often stumble a bit as they get their footing, and many settle into the job quite nicely. Others don't, and our current House of Commons has many examples of "veterans" who were initially elected at a variety of ages who I'd argue are not fit to hold elected office. So this lack of experience is not necessarily a problem at all, and it's a cheap attack ploy when these individuals have not yet had a chance to prove themselves. It's particularly hollow and bitter coming from Liberal partisans, because they barely held on to less than half of their seats, electing very few rookies at all.

But to the NDP partisans who have been on their high horse about this issue, a little less self-righteous posturing would be appreciated. Many of these candidates were placeholder candidates. They knew it, Jack Layton knew it, and you know it. And they got lucky. So now the best line of argument is to make the case that they should be given a fair shot. But pretending that it is invalid to question and closely examine the credentials and political positions of people who were probably not closely scrutinized by the party when they agreed to run as the sacrificial lamb in the riding - to collect the $1.75 subsidy and reinforce claims to national party status - rings false to those on the outside. How about a bit more honesty? Admit that some of these people were not necesarily ideal picks with perfect qualifications, but make the case for their capacity to prove themselves despite their surface-level lack of experience and perceived lack of aptitude for public office.

I imagine that out of the current crop of rookie MPs, some will distinguish themselves. But at least a few others will likely be disastrous and make some serious media gaffes. It might be better to admit this earlier on in the process and perhaps earn a slight reprieve from the circling journalistic vultures when the inevitable first set of mistakes occur.

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NDP in Quebec: Who are these prospective MPs?

With all the excitement/panic/drama surrounding the apparent NDP wave in Quebec, it's fair to wonder who might suddenly become the new crop of MPs from Quebec if polling data translates into seats in the House of Commons. I, for one, am very curious. Here in Guelph, the NDP ran fourth in the 2008 election, and even today, a week before the election, there is still no candidate bio on the website for the local candidate, Bobbi Stewart. I have no idea from the website who she is, other than the election preparedness chair for the local riding association.

If that's the case in Ontario, it's no surprise that speculation is rampant about the Quebec crop of candidates for the party. The Globe and Mail has started digging, and has turned up at least a handful of university students. I'm not surprised at all. When I volunteered for the local NDP candidate in Outremont in the 2004 election, I was rather surprised to discover that the entire provincial campaign was being run out of a single office on St. Laurent Blvd, and that most of the candidates for the province were in fact the campaign management team, based almost entirely out of Montreal, many of them university students, and most of them under thirty years of age. A quick glance through the list of candidates seems to indicate that this is again the case in at least a sizeable number of ridings.

As a person who genuinely would love to see the NDP replace the Bloc as the choice of Quebec voters, I'm hoping that some of the blue seats in that province will turn orange, and that the newly elected MPs will do a good job. It's just that nagging memory of the ADQ surge to become the official opposition in Quebec in 2007 that has me a little concerned of what could happen when a series of placeholder candidates suddenly become MPs.

Let's just say that I'm hopeful, yet concerned...

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An Orange Revolution in Quebec: The NDP in la belle province

I'm somewhat surprised by the latest CROP and Ekos polls coming out of Quebec, showing the NDP cruising into first place, and the Bloc vote steadily falling. But as I'll get to later in this post, there are good historical reasons to explain this trend. In the immediate context, to understand better why this is occurring, I'd strongly recommend reading Vincent Marissal in La Presse this morning, although the unilingual among you (ETA: or to be more accurate, those who can only read one of our two official languages) could get a slightly more negative appraisal of the cause of Layton's rise by reading Jeffrey Simpson's column in the Globe yesterday. Taken together, what emerges is that Layton personally is quite popular in Quebec, he fared very well in the leaders' debate, and, more importantly, the NDP in Quebec is running on the soft nationalist platform, endorsing an application of Bill 101 to federal institutions and an asymmetric vision of federalism.

Whoa! What's that you say, in English-speaking Canada? The grand old party of federal government control and centralization is advocating more powers for Quebec? What's up with that? Well, gentle reader, how about a brief history lesson...

It has been a rough and complicated ride for the left in Quebec over the last 80 years. The CCF, founded in the Depression years, encountered a Quebec ready for change, as decades of provincial Liberal dynasties were about to be cast off. However, in a province still heavily dominated by the Catholic Church, a socialist party was viewed with suspicion. And then things got worse, when Maurice Duplessis seized control of the would-be-progressive Union Nationale from his co-leader Paul Gouin and set about implementing his conservative vision for the province. For the left, this was disastrous, especially once the "loi de cadenas" or Padlock Law was passed in 1937, allowing the provincial government to lock down premises being used to promote bolshevism, a law widely used against unions and left-wing organizations. The arrest of Fred Rose, a Montreal-area Labour MP on charges of supporting communism in the wake of the Gouzenko spy affair in the mid-1940s didn't help matters.

Fast forward three decades, and Quebec's political Quiet Revolution led the provincial Liberals of Jean Lesage into office as the modernizers and pro-government intervention party. At the national level, Lester Pearson and then Pierre Trudeau's Liberals offered a safe option for left-wing Quebecers. Quebec's political culture opened up to government intervention and social programs. Indeed, the time should have been ripe for an NDP breakthrough in the province. However, in the 1960s, the party was seen as the standard-bearer for nationally-run social programs, which sold well to its constituencies in other parts of the country, but left them high and dry in Quebec, where the provincial government was fighting for more autonomy over social and cultural programs (including the Quebec Pension Program of 1964-65).

As Canada slipped into the 1970s, support for left-wing initiatives - support for unions, social programs and government intervention - were all growing in Quebec. But then things get derailed for the NDP. The Union Nationale collapsed, and the standard-bearer for all things progressive became the sovereignist Parti Quebecois, which promised a dynamic, interventionist, progressive - and largely independent - Quebec. Ever since the mid-1970s, a sizable chunk of the left-wing vote in Quebec has also identified with the sovereignist option, with many seeing the greatest potential for these policies outside of a more (small-c) conservative Canada. Quebeckers have come to love their social programs - witness the provincial daycare and drug plans. And so, in election after election, many soft nationalist, left-of-centre voters, particularly francophone ones, have supported the PQ at the provincial level, and later the Bloc federally (although the Bloc also attracts a lot of more conservative voters from rural Quebec who used to support the Creditistes and the ADQ). If you track the Bloc's positions on a lot of social issues at the federal level, they consistently end up left-of-centre. Heck, the CBC's who-should-you-vote-for tool pegged me, a Trudeau federalist, as a potential Bloc voter.

And so, under Jack Layton, the NDP has adopted a new strategy. While outside Quebec the party continues to champion a strong federal role in social programs, within the province they speak of accommodation and asymmetrical federalism. They embrace Quebec's protective language laws and sing the song of the soft nationalist. It helped with the Outremont breakthrough, and appears to be selling well in this election, when Duceppe has not been in his best fighting form. And talk of coalition government does sell very well in Quebec. So in these respects, an NDP surge in the province should not be seen as all that surprising (although it's understandable why are surprised given this long history), but long overdue, especially given that active support for separatism is quite low at the moment.

The big questions are as follows: a) Will this support hold until election day and be concentrated enough to yield more seats in the province? and b) Will the NDP's core voters in other parts of the country continue to support Layton and his party despite these promises made in Quebec, if and when they become more aware of them?

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Language flap - CBC and CTV feed the trolls

Around noon today, CBC News and CTV News had posted stories that two anglophone bands were being dropped from a concert for Quebec's Fete Nationale. Predictably, the trolls flooded the comment boards denouncing Quebec, the French language, bilingualism, etc.

But here's the interesting twist. By 2 PM, Quebec culture minister Christine St-Pierre had denounced the decision, and she was joined by PQ culture critic Pierre Curzi by mid-afternoon. By 5:36, La Presse was reporting that the decision to exclude the anglophone groups had been overturned. But by 9:30 PM, both CTV and CBC were still running "Anglos excluded" headlines on their main news pages.

Irresponsible journalism? Unilingual laziness? Or just sensational troll-feeding? I suspect a combination of all three. And it irritates me profoundly. In the era of Twitter and blogs, our main English news sources should not be hours behind their French counterparts on breaking news.

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Don't add, just translate!

Inspired by a thought-provoking little column today by Chantal Hébert about the ongoing failure of Quebec politics to transcend the grievance game, I have finally picked up my copy of André Pratte's edited collection Reconquering Canada: Quebec Federalists Speak Up For Change. As it happens, I also own the French version, published as Reconquérir le Canada: Un nouveau projet pour la nation québécoise. I'm hoping to have a review up at some point in the future. However, being an occasionally lazy reader (and fighting a cold, although that's not really my excuse), I'm reading the English translation. The translator is Patrick Watson, a long-time writer, director, and broadcaster perhaps best known for his work with the CBC.

While reading the first article, by Daniel Fournier, I came across the following passage:

Whether it was the Manitoba Schools Question of 1890, which created publicly funded separate schools for French and English students, or the Manitoba Language Question in the 1980s, which required all provincial laws and legislative documents to be translated into French, French Canadians generally, and French Quebeckers in particular, have been wary of attempts by some of their fellow-citizens to shape Canada in their own image.

I found this rather startling, since the Manitoba Schools Question of 1890 did not create publicly funded separate schools - it abolished them, and only permitted religious instruction after regular school hours - and only allowed French language instruction in a limited capacity until this too was eliminated in 1916. I was questioning Fournier's history, and indeed the rest of his argument. But then I turned to the original French, which reads as follows:

Que ce soit lors de la question des écoles au Manitoba, dans les années 1890, ou de la querelle linguistique, dans la même province, dans les années 1980, les Canadiens français en général, et les Québécois francophones en particulier, ont légitimement exprimé leurs préoccupations devant les tentatives de certains de leurs concitoyens de façonner le Canada à leur guise.

The bilingual among you will note that there is nothing in the French version which explains what the 1890 Manitoba Schools Question or the 1980 Manitoba language question were - Watson (or the editor) introduced that content themselves. Now, being married to a translator, I'm not the best person in my household to expound on theories of translation. But I imagine that you'd be hard-pressed to find a theorist who advocates introducing new material which is factually incorrect into the target text.

Unfortunately, a sadly low percentage of this country's population is sufficiently bilingual to read in the other official language. As such, they rely on translators. Especially in a book such as this - which is attempting to explain and promote the positions of federalist Quebeckers to English-speaking Canadian readers - one needs to be careful to do so as faithfully to the original as possible. Hopefully, the rest of the text will be cleaner, but I'm now wondering whether I would be further ahead to read the French version.

[...end rant]

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Memo from Harper to Quebec. Re: the Constitution. Never Mind

This announcement, kiddies, is the sign of a trial balloon that sunk like a bag of concrete in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

I am particularly impressed by the way this one was floated - suggested by neither the Prime Minister nor the alleged Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, and therefore deniable as government policy.

I'm relieved... for now. I don't for a second believe that Harper would not have moved forward with this little bit of electoral blackmail if it had appeared like he'd get away with it.

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Meech revisited: Or why I wake up at night screaming

If it's all right with you, gentle reader, I'm going to pretend that Stephen Harper did not promise to re-open the Constitution if Quebec helps him get a majority government. My fourth year seminar group just finished up our discussion of the constitutional fiascos of the late-80s and early-90s, which began with a promise from Brian Mulroney to have Quebec sign the constitution "with honour and enthusiasm" if he won a majority in 1984.

The old Conservative alliance of alienated Westerners and Quebec nationalists is forming again. It worked so well last time, didn't it - the formation of the Bloc, the launch of Reform, the decimation of the Tories, a squeaker of a referendum in 1995...

I'd rather not revisit the constitution on those particular terms, thanks very much.

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Is it time for another election in Quebec already?

After almost a year since he last went to the polls, Jean Charest, although not leading in the polls, has not had as disastrous a term as many predicted might be the case. His personal popularity is even rising. Unfortunately for his chances at a majority, his support remains low among francophone voters. Coupled with the fall-out from the ridiculous faux-scandal invented by Le Journal over the Christmas season, where one of their reporters went on a sting to find out if Montreal stores, desperate for part-time staff, would hire a unilingual anglophone, the PLQ appears to be trying to firm up its nationalist credentials by promising stricter enforcement of the Charte de la langue francaise. I'm sure this is just stage one of the planned response to the Bouchard-Taylor Commission, expected to report later this month.

For me, this all begs the question of how long a siege mentality can be sustained? At what point will the Quebecois punditry decide that the French language no longer needs new, additional protections (on top of the existing Charter and regulations) to resist the Anglo menace? Will the day come when language is no longer used as a wedge issue, when the major political parties no longer have to wrap themselves tightly in the cloak of "defender of the language laws"? That day seems like it is a long way off.

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Pope Ratzinger to Quebec City: "Sorry, I have to wash my hair"

Some of my work as a historian deals with commemorations, and so I've been keeping an eye on the plans for Quebec City's 400th anniversary celebrations. The 300th anniversary celebrations were a big to-do in 1908, and were later the subject of H.V. Nelles' award-winning book The Art of Nation-Building. Concordia University historian Ron Rudin has been keeping an eye on the 400th anniversary celebrations as part of a larger project which started with the 2004 celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the founding of settlements in Acadia.

The organizers seem to be having a rough time of it. First the Queen didn't get invited for fear of controversy, and now Pope Benedict XVI - who will be traveling to both the US and Australia in upcoming months - has indicated that he won't be able to come and celebrate mass on the Plains of Abraham, citing health concerns.

On a purely voyeuristic level, I'm rather disappointed that he won't be coming. Lord only knows what deeply offensive statements the pope would have made in a province which has almost completely shucked off its Catholic heritage since the 1960s - a province which was among the first to recognize gay civil unions, was among the first to accept gay marriage, and where even heterosexuals prefer to live in common law arrangements. I'm sure it would have been a barn-burner!

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Anti-secessionist voices in Francophone Quebec

La Presse's chief editorialist André Pratte must take a lot of flack in intellectual/media circles in Quebec. A "yes" voter in the 1980 referendum, he has since turned his back on the secessionist movement. Moreover, as he does in his blog today (in French), he has opted not to simply withdraw from active participation in debates over secession, but to tackle them head-on, puncturing various myths as he goes.

As Pratte mentions, to engage in these debates honestly as a federalist is to be labelled "irresponsible". To speak of the possible partition of an independent Quebec, to talk about the possibility that investment in the province might drop off after secession, to raise the spectre of an end to equalization payments in the transition period is to speak the unspeakable. And so, he praises Charest for being honest enough to even consider these possibilities when asked about them by journalists, rather than glibly denying these real possibilities. It's not just Charest who should be thanked for a bit of honesty on this front, Pratte deserves a heap of credit for being willing to put his own beliefs in print, into what can be a very chilly intellectual atmosphere, especially for a francophone - as Stéphane Dion found out in the mid-90s (and for which he continues to pay the price.

Quebec needs more of these eloquent francophone voices to oppose separatism, particularly at a time when neither major federalist federal party is held in high esteem.

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When in doubt, strike a commission

Facing a scandal in Hérouxville and studies which claim that the majority of Quebeckers are at least somewhat racist (although the methodology of these polls are suspect), Quebec Premier Jean Charest has opted to follow a glorious Canadian tradition and strike a commission to resolve the debate over how to integrate minorities into Quebec society.

Charest's selection of commission co-chairs makes it evident that he's not seeking radical new proposals. Gérard Bouchard, a sociologist and historian at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, and Charles Taylor, a philosophy professor at McGill (and former NDP candidate), are both outspoken proponents of the collectivist approach to identity that has long been followed by successive Quebec governments. Essentially, Jean Charest is paying these two leading intellectuals to go across the province, hold hearings, and then slightly rephrase their existing published works in a nice report in a year's time.

The Bouchard-Taylor Commission may diffuse the issue for a while, as commissions are expected to do. However, to make a big deal out of the commission being non-partisan ducks the main issue. It is ideologically and intellectually one-sided, and will not produce a report that calls for any substantial revision of Quebec's policies to give greater latitude to individual rights or pluralism. I have little doubt that the report will be well-written and intellectually rigorous. But if you want a preview of the outcome, you could read La nation au singulier et au pluriel, Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism, and Multiculturalism and The Politics of Recognition for a pretty good overview of what that commission will say.

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Actions speak louder than resolutions

For those keeping score - and I use that term advisedly - Gerard Kennedy is set to announce his opposition to the Harper resolution recognizing that the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada. I say "keeping score", because our politicians still seem to be treating their treatment of Quebec (or Québécois) nationhood as a political football to be kicked around for short-term gain. It is this treatment of the issue, at least as much as its content, which has worried me.

My colleague, Andrew Nurse has beaten me to the punch with his more scholarly treatment of the nationhood debate. Although Andrew doesn't name him directly, he is referring to Benedict Anderson's seminal work on nationalism - referring to nations as "Imagined Communities" which are voluntary communities, more often than not stateless, of people who consider themselves to be a nation. Applied to the Canadian situation, the Québécois people, or Quebeckers who consider themselves to form a nation do, simply as a matter of self-identification. No resolution in Parliament will change that fact. In the realm of semantic games then, or the politics of recognition, to use a more lofty phrase of Charles Taylor, the Parliamentary resolution could be considered to be Parliament expressing its recognition of a sociological reality, and an act of self-definition. One might take the argument further and argue that this effectively changes nothing, and might even be a positive step indicating that English-speaking Canadians recognize how many Quebeckers feel about their identities.

But here's the problem. For a large number of Quebec nationalists, this type of resolution is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of their demands, and acceptance of this resolution will do almost nothing to end this debate. What most separatists, and many soft nationalists, actually want is a wholesale devolution of powers from Ottawa to the Quebec state, and an unfettered right to use the Quebec state for nationalist objectives. To wit, if we look at the Meech Lake Accord round of constitutional talks, a Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of the Charter of the French Language (Bill 101) was handed down in the middle of the ratification process in 1988. The Supreme Court struck down the Charter's provisions requiring French-only signs. Premier Robert Bourassa re-passed legislation on commercial signage, invoking the notwithstanding clause to do so. It is notable that at the time that Bourasse said that if the "distinct society" clause of Meech was already in operation, there would be no need to invoke the notwithstanding clause - Quebec would have the right to pass laws restricting the use of English as part-and-parcel of being a distinct society. (And for those who are wondering, this does roughly coincide with the implosion of that Accord, at least as much as Trudeau's denunciation of it). What was sold in English Canada as being little more than a nice turn of phrase was revealed for having the real power that it might, and the popularity of the Accord plummetted.

What I am getting at here is that "nice" words of recognition like "distinct society" (which passed through Parliament in 1995) aren't enough for nationalists. Without real power/influence stemming from them, they count for nothing. And so we can count on a resurgence of demands for some form of constitutional entrenchment of this Parliamentary resolution - which is when these pretty words would begin to have some constitutional oomph (to use the technical term).

In rationalizing his acceptance of the resolution, Stephane Dion has apparently stated that he would also find resolutions acceptable which recognized First Nations as nations, or Acadians as a nation, or French Canadians as a nation, etc. There are many who like this approach of considering Canada as a country that contains many nations working together. You will, however, note, that the resolution being proposed has not been amended to include all of these other "nations" - or even a Canadian nation, which has as much sociological/historic validity as a Québécois one if we are talking about self-definition. The fact that noone is actually putting such a resolution forth concerns me. The politics of recognition should be mutual and diverse. What we have right now is a unilateral resolution recognizing only one group, which to my mind is only going to further divisions, feelings of non-recognition, and further conflict in the politics of Canadian identity. If Parliament is going to follow this fool-hardy path, I'd at least like to see other MPs put forth the other resolutions that Dion proposed, and have them pass Parliament, and maybe even have Jean Charest (one of the chief negotiators in the final days of Meech, in case anyone has forgotten) pass a resolution through the National Assembly recognizing the united Canadian nation of which Quebec is an integral part (or some wording to that effect).

We may also come to the point where it is felt necessary to re-open the constitution, and re-allocate jurisdictions between Ottawa and the provinces. If this is to happen though, this must be part of an open process. Significant constitutional reforms should not slide in through the back door as the result of parliamentary gamesmanship.

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A misguided slippery slope of a resolution

Sigh. Federal politicians, it would seem, are a gang of short-sighted tools, with little regard or understanding of our country's constitution and history.

First off, I'd like to point you to the following post from Calgary Grit which notes, as I always find that I must, that all this talk of the "Quebecois nation" conveniently forgets the pan-Canadian French-Canadian and Acadian francophone populations. And try as many might to obscure this fact, demands for recognition of the "Quebec nation" are not coming from those who are not ethnically francophone. The Harper/Bloc resolution is about recognition of ethnic nationalism, despite the intellectual convolutions that misguided federalists might be putting themselves through to make this into a recognition of a civic nationalism.

Calgary Grit goes on in an earlier post, slamming the various party leaders, and rightly so. I'd also point you to Paul Wells' denunciation of the resolution as short-sighted, and the first step towards another constitutional fiasco.

If anyone thinks this is resolution will put an end to the discussion, they're sorely deluded. The Liberals passed a resolution through the House of Commons a decade ago recognizing Quebec as a distinct society. Why should anyone believe that this will close the constitutional Pandora's Box any more firmly?

Frankly, this entire debacle leaves me scratching my head about my future voting intentions. I've never liked the NDP's constitutional positions - Jack Layton is far too eager to suck up to nationalists. But now all of the Liberals are willing to go along with this misguided resolution, which is little more than an exercise in smoke and mirrors, more likely to further inflame passions than to cool heads? It boggles the mind, and depresses the voter. The Bloc has played the three federalist parties for suckers, and they deserve a collective slap in the head for having been drawn in to these shenanigans.

I'm not saying that our federal leaders should hide their heads in the sand and hope that this issue will go away. But I will say that constitutional issues should not be debated on the fly. They require serious consideration, and consultation with both experts and Canadians who would be affected by any significant changes. Neither Stephen Harper nor Michael Ignatieff was elected with a mandate to rework the constitution, and so I would humbly suggest that a bit more thought and consultation is in order before recklessly committing Canada to a particular course of action.

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