Blood and Belonging

by Michael Ignatieff

  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 Quie
t 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.

  All of Quebec’s anxiety about its modernization, its incorporation into the North American grain, has focused on preservation of language. La survivance is, above everything else, the survival of a language. The core demand of Quebec nationalist politics has been that Quebec become a unilingual nation. Nationalists fetishize language, yet the obsession that all signs, including STOP, should be in French is comprehensible if one is aware that signage is often the only sign that one is in Quebec, and not Minnesota or Vermont.

  Nationalism has often been a revolt against modernity, a defense of the backwardness of economically beleaguered or declining classes and regions from the flames of individualism, capitalism, Judaism, and so on. Until the 1960s, Quebec nationalism often spoke in this tone. It does not do so now. This in itself is surprising. Given the speed with which modernization of the society has occurred since then, it might have been expected that Quebec nationalism would become a vocabulary of regret for what modernity has done to the distinctiveness of Quebec society. On the contrary. Nationalists invariably stress that theirs is the cause of modernity, of the reforming, secular state: attacking the power of the Church in education and moral life, advancing women’s rights and sexual freedom, seeking to give Quebec a secure place at the very heart of the North American economy. In Quebec, being a nationalist means being a progressive, being modern, being a French North American.

  The contrast between English Canadian and Quebecois attitudes to the United States is striking. In English Canada there has been an anguished debate for generations as to whether Canadian culture can preserve its distinctiveness amid the nightly electronic deluge of up to sixty cable TV stations in most Canadian homes. At Videotron, Quebec’s largest cable TV company, they beam all the American soaps into Quebec homes, but they know that the most popular shows—the ones that get up to 80 percent of the Quebec population staying home at night—are the ones written and acted in Quebec. As long as they can see what they want in their own language, Quebecois believe their culture will be secure.

  Quebecois think of their language as a kind of invisible shield protecting their cultural integrity from the North American norm. The French language allows Quebecois a degree of cultural self-assurance toward the Americans that English Canadians can only envy. Yet the same Quebecois display none of the same self-assurance in relation to their own non-French-speaking minority. They incessantly fear that their declining birthrate and the rising tide of non-Francophone immigration will dilute the French presence in North America. They seek controls of immigration policy to maximize the selection of French-speaking immigrants. They legislate to restrict the rights of people to send their children to English-language schools. The language police are dispatched to happily bilingual towns in the Eastern Townships to photograph tiny English cardboard signs in corner stores. Storekeepers are prosecuted, much to the irritation of bilingual Anglophones and Francophones alike. There is a pettiness in language politics that belies the cultural self-confidence the Quebecois project about their capacity to survive and flourish.

  AT THE TWO CLOWNS CAFÉ

  At the Two Clowns Café in old Montreal, on an arctic night, I meet a group of half a dozen nationalist Quebecois to talk about language. On my part, this encounter is charged with the same expectation I felt, age eight, climbing that cemetery hill. Now, as then, I am going to meet the Other. This is ridiculous, I know. After all, don’t we have the same passports? Drink the same beers—Molson, Labatt? Aren’t our memories full of the same heroes—Maurice Richard, Jean Béliveau, of the immortal Montréal Canadiens of the 1950s? Yet our political assumptions turn out to be so different that we might as well be living in different countries.

  In the group at the Two Clowns is Nicole, exactly my age, an organizer for Quebec’s teachers’ union, the Centrale d’Education du Québec, or CEQ. Her union is independentist and so is she. Nicole and I discover that we share sports heroes, literary ones, too (Parisian writers), and an affection for the hard bright winter mornings after a snowfall. We also share a memory: the October crisis of 1970. For me, it was the moment when the Canadian government broke the back of radical nationalism in Quebec. The Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, ordered the arrest of more than five hundred Quebecois intellectuals and militants, following the kidnap and murder of a Quebec politician, Pierre Laporte. For Nicole, it was the moment she discovered she could no longer call herself a Canadian. For she was among those arrested, held without trial, and then just as suddenly released. “And why?” she says angrily stubbing out her cigarette. “Not because I was making bombs in my basement. I wasn’t. But because I had certain friends.” This was a moment of fissure between us, a moment which mutual goodwill and an affection for the same things could not overcome. For me, Trudeau remains the champion of that ideal of federalism I have wanted to believe in all my life. For Nicole, he is the betrayer, the native son who would stop at nothing to smash the nationalism of his own people.

  Besides Nicole, who dominated proceedings with her outspoken convictions and raucous laughter, there were some young post-graduates finishing up their doctorates in law and anthropology, together with a young, soft-spoken blond woman who was the chair of one of the oldest moderate nationalist societies in Quebec, the Société Saint Jean Baptiste, which among other things organizes the great parade through Montreal on Quebec’s national day, June 24.

  It was a typically Montreal conversation, switching between English and French with astonishing rapidity. Why, I asked, did Quebec have to be unilingual, if all of them were so fluently bilingual? Because, the president of the Saint Jean Baptiste Society said, “there are six million of us, and two hundred and fifty million of you in North America.”

  Besides, said a young female anthropology student, “the immigrants arrive here and they all want to learn English, and if they do, we will lose Montreal.”

  “Lose Montreal?”

  “Yes! Lose Montreal. It will become an English-speaking island in a French nation, and that is intolerable.”

  “Intolerable,” they all said.

  “You all worry about survival. But you have survived, for God’s sake. Why are you so worried?”

  The woman from the Saint Jean Baptiste Society replied, “Yes, we have survived, but look at the cost. We would have been twelve million by now, but half of us left for the States.”

  “You want to stop them?”

  “Of course not. But the point is, we are surrounded by a foreign civilization and we must protect ourselves.”

  I still couldn’t understand it. The language is completely secure. The signage laws ban the public use of English. Quebec, alone among Canadian provinces, enjoys substantial jurisdiction over immigration and has secured the right to recruit French-speaking immigrants. The English public-school board is not allowed to accept pupils of French-speaking parentage (although private English schools are full of children of Quebecois who want their children to grow up bilingual).

  “There,” says one. “What other society allows a publicly funded school system in a lang
uage other than the majority?”

  “Fine,” I replied. “I’m not saying Quebecois are intolerant. You’re not. I’m asking why do you feel so insecure? Why do you believe your language needs a state of your own to protect it?”

  “We are not insecure,” Nicole says, with exasperation. “We just want to be at home, with ourselves.”

  “Yes, frankly we are tired of being a minority in Canada. We want to be a majority in our own place.”

  “Whoa,” I cry. “That sounds ominous. What about the tyranny of the majority?”

  “That’s not tyranny, that’s just democracy,” says one bespectacled law student.

  “Suppose you’re right,” I say. “Suppose you need a state to protect your language. Are you sure it’s viable?”

  “Of course. We are Quebec Inc.!”

  “But what if you’re wrong? You won’t pay the price—you all have qualifications. You know who will pay? The pulp workers in Trois-Rivières. They’re the ones who’ll pay for a nationalist experiment that goes wrong.”

  “What a vicious statement!” Nicole exclaims, in mock fury. “Apologize. Apologize.” She is laughing, but also half-serious.

  “Answer the question.”

  “I work for a union, dear. Don’t tell me about the workers. Don’t divide us, either. They are as much for independence as we are.”

  And so it goes, as the beer empties accumulate at our table, and the bar gets noisier and noisier. Some of the group say nothing, as if holding something back, letting the pressure inside them build. In a hush between songs from the bar band, a young woman anthropology student says to me, very quietly, “Look, we just want a place where they treat us like adults. We just want to be treated like grownups, not like children.” She is close to tears, and it dawns on me, in the silence that follows, that in her imagining of this community that we are supposed to share, she sees it as a family, where I, and my English kind, are the parents who never listen, and her Quebec is the young woman desperate to take her place in the world as an adult.