Blood and Belonging

by Michael Ignatieff

  What can you say to such a deep myth? It is a feeling, and notoriously feelings cannot be argued with. But they may be as productive of mischief as my childhood belief that there were Frenchies at the top of the cemetery cliff who would steal our bicycles if they could.

  It is late at the Two Clowns and time to go. As I draw my winter coat around me in the frigid arctic air outside, one of the young men who had said nothing all evening comes up and whispers quietly, “It’s strange how loud we talk, isn’t it? As if we Quebecois were still trying to convince ourselves of something.”

  TWO CONVERSATIONS

  Lise Bissonnette is my age, pert and businesslike, a newspaper editor, a columnist, a complicated and subtle supporter of sovereignty for Quebec. I talk to her in the new offices of her paper, Le Devoir, founded by the great nationalist hero of Edwardian Quebec, Henri Bourassa.

  No, she said, she didn’t want to be called a nationalist. “The narrow sense of a nation, you know, the ethnic meaning of the word ‘nation’”—she made a gesture of distaste—“it’s foreign to me.” It is curious how few people anywhere, when seen to be nationalists from the outside, think of themselves as nationalists from the inside. The word, she says, suggests closing in on yourself, and for her, culture in Quebec should be open to the world.

  I ask her whether being a nationalist, in the Quebec context, necessarily means a commitment to the sovereignty of an independent Quebec state. Through most of its history in Canada, Quebec nationalism has been about getting more from Canada, not about getting out of Canada. So I tell her the old joke—“What Quebec wants is a sovereign Quebec inside a united Canada”—and ask her whether it remains true. “Of course,” she says. “Why not? Everywhere in the world, people want it both ways. There are risks to independence, so Quebecers may not love Canada, but they like it, and they want to keep the links, as a kind of reassurance.” Even when they voted for Trudeau, she says, Quebecers were not necessarily voting for federalism and for Canada. They were voting for one of their own. “They were playing tribal politics.” Trudeau himself would be surprised to hear this. His view of Quebec nationalism was that it is a language game played by the local elite to wrest maximum advantage from Ottawa and to ensure their domination of provincial politics. Ordinary voters, he insisted, see through the game, and when they voted for him, they voted for Canada.

  But why, I persist, do you need a state if you already have exclusive jurisdiction in so many fields? Not true, she counters. Federalism in Canada “is getting to be more centralized by the day. The federal government is entering the field of education and manpower training and we must resist that.” That is not how English-speaking Canada sees it. It has rejected proposals for the further decentralization of the federal system on the grounds that the country itself will not survive further provincial autonomy. Again, what is or is not true is not at issue. The crucial point is that our imagining of the same community barely intersects at all.

  Why, I ask her, do Quebecois invest so little emotion in the idea of federalism, in the vision of two peoples living together within a single state? She leans forward on her desk and is briskly dismissive. “First of all, English Canadians have been saying that for a very short time. You didn’t hear much about that in the sixties, when people were still fighting against the simple idea that French could be an official language in this country. In my view, the dream of the binational state is a Toronto cultural establishment way of seeing the country, and it is not shared by the majority of the people.”

  But, I persist, in a world being torn apart by ethnic nationalism, isn’t there something to be said for a federalism that keeps ethnic groups living together in peace? She won’t budge. That’s an English Canadian idea, she says, politely but firmly. Canada has failed. It says it is a bilingual, bicultural state. But go to Halifax or Vancouver and you’ll see it’s not true. The only place that approaches the ideal is Montreal. Quebec, she seems to be saying, has turned out to be better at practicing the multi-ethnic, multicultural ideal than Canada itself.

  She’s not sure she’ll ever see a Quebec with its own foreign embassies and its own seat at the United Nations. But she does believe that all the momentum of Quebec’s history is leading it away from Canada.

  ALAIN DUBUC is chief editorialist for La Presse, Montreal’s largest French-language daily. He describes himself as a “non-separatist nationalist,” someone who believes, in other words, that his nation is Quebec but that his state remains Canada. Mind you, he says, “I don’t really care about Canada. I don’t have much energy to put into that country. All my energies go toward Quebec.”

  But if you feel so little for Canada, I ask, why do you want to stay in confederation? “Because,” he says, with an engaging laugh, “we’re stuck with it. We’re two organisms that have grown together and created some bonds, and these are strong.” After all this time, separation would be cumbersome, expensive, risky.

  If that is so—and it must be true that the separation would be costly and traumatic—why do some Quebecois nationalists continue to insist upon it? You must remember, he says, that our parents did really suffer. They were not black South Africans, but they were poor, and they didn’t have as many chances in life as the Anglophones in Quebec. They had to bow to the English, and they had to speak English when they didn’t want to. We still have this image of being porteurs d’eau, hewers of wood and drawers of water. It is part of our folklore, and our nationalism is also part of our folklore.”

  But that would imply, I suggest, that the nationalist agenda is merely about settling old scores. And if it’s just about settling old scores, is it relevant to today’s Quebec? Dubuc smiles and shrugs. “Of course it’s not. How do we adapt to globalization of the economy? How do we deal with thousands of people arriving from other cultures? In an independent Quebec these problems would be exactly the same.”

  In that sense, therefore, the separatist agenda in Quebec is irrelevant? Dubuc nods. “The separatist nationalists have a very nineteenth-century conception of the state, which has a government, an army, a flag, a place in the United Nations, this kind of thing. Having a state is a very costly tool, and it’s not obvious that if you separate, you will solve your problems. So having your own borders, boundaries, and flags …” He waves his hand dismissively. “It’s a kind of dream.”

  But then why has the ideal of a bilingual, binational Canada never caught on in Quebec? Dubuc smiles. “The irony is,” he says, “that the only place in Canada which approaches this ideal, the only place where you find French- and English-speaking people working together, is in Montreal.”

  So, I say, “Quebec is the only place where the Canadian dream—my Canadian dream—actually worked out.”

  “Exactly,” he says with an ironic smile.

  IF THESE TWO CONVERSATIONS were any kind of guide to what writers, journalists, and editorialists of Montreal argue about, it is clear that there is no impassioned and convinced defense of federalism left in Quebec. Trudeau and his generation of Quebecois labor leaders, writers, and civil servants fought for a Quebec at home in Canada, but the only people they seem to have convinced with their idea of the binational, bilingual state have been English Canadians. And this conversion, which began in the late 1960s, came too late, for by then the tide of Quebecois opinion had moved irrevocably away. What my conversations with these two journalists seemed to show was that Trudeau’s generation had had no children in Quebec.

  This does not mean that there are no defenders of Canada in Quebec. The polls seem to indicate a three-way split: a steady third of the electorate opposed to any variant of the sovereignty option, a third in favor, and a third who can be convinced either way. But what seems evident is that if Canada has defenders, they are like Dubuc—disabused, unemotional ironists who think that sovereignty is an outmoded nineteenth-century abstraction, irrelevant in a modern global economy. On the opposing side are figures like Lise Bissonnette, who argue that the struggle to keep Canada together is a wastef
ul diversion of the Quebec elite’s attention. It should turn its eyes exclusively to the business of building Quebec’s culture and economy. Thus the essential argument within the Quebec elite is within terms set by nationalist argument, i.e., between those who believe a nation must have its state, and those who believe the nation can achieve everything it wants without one.

  English Canadians still ask, with anguish and perplexity, what is the grievance of French Canada that would justify separation? But that may be the wrong question. Nationalism in Quebec has long ceased to be the nationalism of resentment. The old scores have been settled. It is now a rhetoric of self-affirmation. The basic motive driving it is no longer the memory or myth of past injustice; the motive that counts is the sense of power and accomplishment. It is a nationalism less and less hostile to English Canada, simply because for most Quebecois, as Anglo-Canadian domination of the economy has receded as an issue, English Canada as a whole has become less and less relevant. As Alain Dubuc said, “I like visiting there, but it is still a foreign country.”

  It could almost be said that Quebec was bound to Canada only so long as it could construct a rhetoric of resentment around the relationship. Federalism in this case was like some marriages that cohere, paradoxically because both parties are united in their grievances toward each other. Now that these grievances are ebbing, they have less and less reason to share the same bed.

  Quebec has ceased to define itself in terms of Canada. Both sides in the political debate in Quebec take it for granted that a place like LG-2 has given Quebec the economic independence, the confidence in itself, that a people needs to become a nation-state. Both sides of the argument, in other words, feel the power of those Quebec turbines beneath their feet, as reality and as symbol. The only remaining question is whether they need to run up a sovereign state’s flag over the powerhouse.

  TRIBE AND NATION

  One essential problem with the language of self-determination and nationhood is that it is contagious. Quebec has discovered a people within who also call themselves a nation.

  About sixty-five kilometers away from the big red door that leads to LG-2 sits a trapper’s cabin in the middle of a vast, flat expanse of snowy pine forest. A fire is going in the stove, and I am readying my snow gear for a day with Billy.

  Billy is a Cree hunter, and these frozen forests are his kingdom. We are in the middle of the Cree nation, a huge territory of forest, river, marshland, and lake roughly the size of Germany. Billy’s people, now numbering about eleven thousand, have been hunting and fishing in this land for five thousand years. Like many aboriginal peoples, they have taken up the European word “nation” to describe themselves, and while the word may not be native to their language, they definitely seem to be one. They have their own language and oral tradition, a way of life, based around cabins and traplines, and a knowledge of their environment so detailed it could be called a science.

  Billy slings his carbine over his back, starts up his snowmobile, and gestures to me to get into the blood-smeared sled he has hitched up behind. Then we are off, hurtling through the forest trails, with fir branches snapping against my goggles and plumes of snow flying up behind. From time to time, Billy stops to examine caribou tracks in the snow, while I stamp my feet and rub my face to keep from freezing.

  Suddenly the caribou break into the clearing in front of us, a pair of large males, the size of horses, with shaggy, cream-colored coats and ears bent in fear. They are close enough for Billy to get off a clear shot, but he pulls up instead, and we watch them bucking and plunging in the waist-high snow, struggling to make the safety of the tree cover. Within a few seconds they have vanished and the silence of the forest returns.

  Billy worries that the caribou are deserting his country. His traps are empty too, and the hooks don’t bring in the fish they used to. His village was moved to higher ground, his traplines were bisected by power lines and firebreaks. The mercury levels in the new reservoirs are poisoning the fish. His land is changing before his eyes. His misfortune, and the misfortune of his tiny nation, is that they stand in the path of the LG project. Hydro-Québec dammed Billy’s river, creating huge reservoirs and flooding his hunting grounds. The river is no longer his. It belongs to the white man from the south.

  The word “belong” and the idea of property that goes with it are as alien to the Cree as the word “nation.” Nationalism may be one form of Western romanticism about nature, but in the Western tradition, patriotism is related to property and implies unlimited dominion over nature. To Crees, this is an alien and offensive concept. Billy does not believe he owns the land; he believes he is part of it, one of the creatures who depend upon it, not only for his life but for his vision of the world. Western nationalism, when seen beneath Billy’s frozen blue sky, sixteen hundred kilometers north of Montreal, is not a rhapsody to the land but a song of domination and capture. Nationalism celebrates the land of a nation the better to subdue it to human purposes. Billy’s claim is to be its steward and servant.

  The Cree have had money rained on them in compensation—hundreds of millions of dollars—for the taking of the land. They have trailer homes now, four-wheel drives, snowmobiles, and a guaranteed annual income from the government. Their village has a new community center, and there is a supermarket where you can buy fresh apples and tomatoes. There is a new hockey rink where the teenagers can play in the evenings. But nobody forgets what has been lost. Even the teenagers circle the ice wearing hockey shirts that say “Ex-Hunters of Chisasibi.”

  The James Bay project is the powerhouse of a potential independent Quebec. Quebec calls it modernization, development, progress. Billy calls it an invasion. The rights of two nations are in conflict. One is very large, has multibillion-dollar resources to put into place. The other is very small. All it has on its side is an argument: if you claim self-determination for yourself, how can you deny it to us? For Billy and the Crees, the dams, the power stations, the Hydro lines, the reservoirs are a symbol, too—of their expropriation. The Cree are fighting back, and like aboriginal peoples all over the world, they are resorting to the language of nationhood and self-determination themselves. They are doing so because they shrewdly perceive that it is a language which hoists the Quebecois with their own petard. In documents filed with the UN Commission on Human Rights in New York, Matthew Coon Come, grand chief of the Crees, spells out his people’s claim.

  Self-determination is a right which belongs to peoples. It does not belong to states. It is a right of all peoples. It is universal and non-divisible, that is, either you have it or you do not. It is not a right that is given to peoples by someone else. Please understand, you may have to fight to exercise this right, but you do not negotiate for the right of self-determination because it is yours already.

  This rhetoric alarms Quebec. Self-determination appears to mean something different from self-government. Quebec has been quick to concede the latter while denying the former. “The only limit to aboriginal autonomy will be the integrity of Quebec territory,” a Quebec minister of native affairs said recently. He went on, “In this sense, there is no question of permitting the creation of ethnic ghettos where the laws of Quebec would no longer take precedence.”

  The Crees believe that self-determination is compatible with the territorial integrity of the state they live in. Self-determination need not be absolute; it need not imply formal statehood, flags, seats in the United Nations. In any event, the Crees are quick to point out, these are white men’s inventions. Self-determination means an end to permanent dependence on government handouts and an end to being the passive spectators of the destruction of their lands. It implies something more than exclusive fishing and hunting rights over territory in the hydroelectric development; it implies more than the right to put up a checkpoint on the road into the main villages to limit the inflow of alcohol; it means something more than municipal self-government. Above all, it means stopping further hydroelectric development. The Quebec government has its eye on th
e Great Whale River system, to the north of La Grande; as well as on the Nottaway, Broadback, and Rupert river systems to the south. If both were completed, the entire Cree nation—its rivers, forests, and encampments—would be bound hand and foot, imprisoned within a tight network of power lines, roads, dams, and powerhouses. The Crees would become survivors on their own homeland.

  And for what? The costs of development in the region are astronomically high—$12 to 15 billion. Already something like 40 percent of every consumer’s electric bill is spent servicing Hydro-Québec’s debt for existing projects. Cheap power, Quebec says, is the core of its competitive advantage in the North American economy and its electricity rates are among the lowest in North America. But they are cheap only if the debt load of development in the north is kept out of the equation. If the new projects go ahead, the debt load will become crippling, and if energy-efficiency measures cause demand to drop, that load could become catastrophic. In other words, national development is pressing up against the very limits, not merely of the Crees’ environment, but of the carrying capacity of the Quebec nation, too. The future demand for Quebec power is uncertain. The northeastern American states are not looking to sign new contracts for Quebec power; in several cases, the Crees have been able to persuade American regulatory authorities to cancel such deals.

  If Quebec were to say enough is enough, some compromise between the nationalisms in conflict in the north of Quebec might be possible. Self-determination for the Crees does not mean statehood; it means cultural and economic survival, which in turn means being able to preserve a hunting, trapping, and fishing economy in the interstices of a major economic development. Aboriginal ways of life have demonstrated enormous flexibility: the gun, the snowmobile, the CB radio are all effortlessly absorbed into the traditional Cree hunter’s way of life. But they need time to adjust, they need guarantees that further encroachments will not occur. There is no overwhelming economic argument for further construction.