Canada's Continuing Identity Crisis

THE PROBLEM THAT WON'T GO AWAY

Foreign observers are often incredulous that Canada, with its long history of domestic tranquillity, heroism in war, and solidarity in the Western alliance, is again threatened by the secession of Quebec after 128 years of confederation. Astonishingly, a land that is almost as immaculate as Scandinavia and is almost the only serious country in the world whose general level of prosperity approaches that of the United States now faces the possibility of constitutional dissolution.

Canada's well?being is obvious. Almost none of its 28 million people live in what would qualify in the United States as a slum dwelling. The population is homogeneous: almost 90 percent of European origin. Polls consistently indicate that about 90 percent of both English? and French?speaking Canadians believe they live in the world's most pleasantly habitable country, and the United Nations has recognized Canada's quality of life as the highest of any country in the world for the last two years.

Yet in the autumn of 1994, Quebec, which is over 80 percent French?speaking and has about a quarter of the country's total population, narrowly elected a government pledged to achieve Quebec's independence through a subsequent referendum. The present federal leader of the opposition, the federalist turncoat Lucien Bouchard, heads a bloc of Quebec separatists in the parliament of the very country he wishes to sunder. Quebec's new premier, Jacques Parizeau, served in the only previous avowedly separatist government of Quebec, which held office from 1976 to 1985 and was defeated 60 percent to 40 percent by the voters of Quebec in a 1980 referendum to authorize negotiating Quebec's independence.