Canada: a great northern paradox?

• Author: Fulford, Robert

A CHARACTER IN AN EARLY PLAY by Roberston Davies, who was a playwright long before he became a novelist of international renown, remarks sadly that Canada is not really a country you love: "It is a country you worry about." As it happens, I do love Canada, and most Canadians I know share this love; but it remains as true now as it was when Davies wrote it forty years ago, that Canada is first of all a country you worry about, puzzle over, diagnose. It is a country whose citizens are more or less incessantly taking its temperature, always expecting the worst. Publicly and privately, in English and in French, in Parliament and in the newspapers and universities, we worry about Canada's identity, its future, its place in the world, and above all, its chances of surviving as a political entity in its present form. In the minds of Canadians, those nervous and cautious people who have finally joined the Organization of American States after considering the idea for seventy-nine years, the most striking fact about our country is that at almost any given moment it seems--if you follow the rhetoric of its leaders--to be on the verge of ceasing to exist.

For as long as any of us can remember, Canada has lived a peculiar contradiction--it is boundlessly promising and simultaneously fearful of the future. To describe it is to sound as if you are describing a talented but troubled adolescent. In fact, we often speak of Canada as a young country, and it is commonplace for visitors or newcomers to remark on the newness, the freshness and sometimes the innocence of the place. Taken literally, this is nonsense--Canada has been in business for a long time. French immigrants, a mixture of peasants and priests and nobles, created New France on the banks of the St. Lawrence River (now the province of Quebec) in the 17th century; and even earlier there were fishing villages in Newfoundland, the island province out in the Atlantic. In 1867, before Germany and Italy were countries, Canada came together as a new kind of nation, a "dominion" from the Atlantic to the Pacific that was linked to Britain and loyal to the British crown but was understood to be moving toward independence. That event, Confederation, defined the political shape of the country; it was complete in 1949 when Newfoundland became the tenth province.

But "completed" is probably the wrong word to use about any element of Canadian history--Canada is a place that is always in a state of becoming, always transforming itself, always redefining its goals and its nature. Everything is contingent, and nothing is ever thought to be completed. Other countries--the United States being the leading example--may work out a constitution and a set of values and then spend centuries living by that constitution and those values, doing the job well or badly as the occasion permits. Canada, on the other hand, changes not just the circumstances of its national life, but the very philosophical underpinnings of that life. In a few decades we change our national beliefs, ideals and emotional connections.

In 1867 Canada was proud to call itself "a British Dominion," even though a large fraction of its population was French-speaking. For a long time Canadian statesmen paid elaborate homage to England and the English monarch, but in the twentieth century that connection began to appear (in the eyes of many Canadians) to be both unnecessary and dangerous. In the First World War and the Second World War, Canadians fought as part of the British Empire or, as it was called later, the British Commonwealth. But a great many French Canadians resented the fact that they, a minority within Canada, were drawn into way by the English-speaking and British-descended majority.

Before the twentieth century was half over there arose the idea that Quebec was in some ways a distinct part of Canada, requiring its own status and privileges within Confederation. Although only a quarter of Canadians were French-speaking, they began to assert their belief that they deserved separate and distinct rights. By the 1960s there was a popular movement within Quebec to withdraw from Canada and create a separate state. That movement is still very much alive in 1990, and remains a major reason why Canadians worry about their country's survival. Were Quebec to separate from Canada it would still be the major trading partner of Canadians on either side of it; but, they would be on either side of it--two chunks of Canada, separated as...