MARIO LEMOINE. The Gazette. Montreal, Que.: Mar 31, 1997. pg. B.3
Mario Lemoine is a Montreal freelance writer.
That’s the gist of the argument in L’Obsession Ethnique, a revealing new book-length essay by Guy Bouthillier, a professor of political science at the Universite de Montreal, a long time sovereignist activist and the newly elected director of Montreal’s Societe St. Jean Baptiste. It’s a book that has everything to win the immediate and total adherence of sovereignists – hard-liners and soft-liners alike – just as it will be utterly rejected by other Quebecers, thus widening the gulf that separates those who in the last referendum voted Yes and No.
Ever since the military conquest of 1760, « Canadians » have been obsessed by a fear that the descendants of French colonizers might not assimilate into their Anglo-Saxon world. This fear has driven Canadian leaders to implement policies allowing for mass immigration – first from Britain, then increasingly from all over the world – with the aim, many times reiterated, of drowning French-Canadians in a sea of English-speaking people.
The plan succeeded, at least in terms of numbers, by making French-Canadians a minority within Canada. But it failed to snuff the spirit of independence of those diehard Gallic descendants, who for the last three decades have expressed their political will through the sovereignist project of Quebec nationalists.
So the Canadian game plan changed. Aiming to attack the legitimacy of the sovereignist project, federal leaders, particularly during the Trudeau years, cooked up an ideological soup that depicted Canada as a cultural mosaic in which all the tiles had equal value. The theory of « two nations, » of two founding peoples, was thus swept aside. French-speaking Quebecers became no more than an ethnic group among others and the project of those who wanted to make a country of Quebec seemed obsolete.
That’s the gist of the argument in L’Obsession Ethnique, a revealing new book-length essay by Guy Bouthillier, a professor of political science at the Universite de Montreal, a long time sovereignist activist and the newly elected director of Montreal’s Societe St. Jean Baptiste. It’s a book that has everything to win the immediate and total adherence of sovereignists – hard-liners and soft-liners alike – just as it will be utterly rejected by other Quebecers, thus widening the gulf that separates those who in the last referendum voted Yes and No.
It’s worth it, therefore, to separate the truth from the fiction in this controversial book.
Following a long line of authors (many of whom were not sovereignists like him), Bouthillier shows how, since at least the Treaty of Paris of 1763, « the French-Canadian problem » preoccupied the new masters of North America. In a sort of court of history, he summons one at a time such figures as Benjamin Franklin (one of the founders of the American republic); Jonathan Sewell, chief justice of Lower Canada at the beginning of the last century, and Lord Durham, who is called to account for his infamous report of 1839.
Then he refers to those responsible for the two great waves of Canadian immigration: the first prior to 1914, the second after World War II.
« During the time of the great immigration, that which occurred before 1914, four ministers, two Liberals, two Conservatives, all English Canadians would preside, from 1896 until World War I, over the greatest influx of immigrants in the history of confederation.
« More recently, four English Canadians, Walter Harris, Jack Pickersgill, Davie Fulton and Ellen Fairclough, would oversee the second wave, that which took place after World War II. » The author continues in this manner up to the present day, taking care to underline the extent to which Canadian immigration policy nonetheless affected Quebec less than other provinces. Bouthillier is, after all, a professor of political science.
Bouthillier the activist, however, passes over in silence the profound economic motivations that have always shaped Canadian immigration policy, and this oversight greatly weakens his argument.
The author seems to be on more solid ground when he addresses the policy of multiculturalism as championed by Pierre Trudeau.
He refers to the authors of the report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, Andre Laurendeau and Davidson Dunton, who in 1965 affirmed that « our country is no longer composed of two founding peoples. Owing to immigration, it is made up of a mass of ethnic groups, and our real problem is to fuse them into a united Canada and not to make of it two or many. . . . Canadians who belong to what one usually calls the other ethnic groups insist on an answer to this specific question: if two groups are privileged, are all the others second-class citizens? Some even fear reforms that would strip them of their acquired rights; the chairmen of the commission have noted the sometimes dramatic character of this fear. »
In the realm of politics, successive federal governments have exploited this fear. They have played on the legitimate fears of people, of whatever ethnic origin, who have the right to be considered as full citizens, to fashion a political weapon in their struggle to discredit the equally legitimate battle of French-speaking Quebecers to make for themselves a country.
« It’s not because they are Jewish, Greek or Italian, but rather because they are anglophones – Anglo-Canadian, English-speaking Canadian, Canadian – that these men and women vote No, » Bouthillier argues. « By dint of surrendering to the ethnic obsession and pasting ethnic labels everywhere in the fashion of Canadian multiculturalism, we had forgotten that there is no mosaic without cement, that, in the case in point, it is English Canada that is that is the cement and that, if there is a bloc, it is a linguistic one. (Does the ethnic mosaic serve to mask the cement of language?) »
This question of Bouthillier’s demands consideration. His arguments are liable to be absorbed, whole, by Quebec’s sovereignist activists as they seek to portray Canada as a country hostile to the interests of French-speaking Quebecers. If Ottawa’s multicultural policies provide the conditions for the growth of French within Canada, then the federalists should demonstrate to Quebecers, loud and clear, how. If not, federalists might wish to rethink the policies, before they contribute to the undoing of Confederation.