Thinking the Unthinkable: Canada Without Quebec

Thinking the Unthinkable: Canada Without Quebec During the 1995 Referendum campaign in Quebec I was in Edmonton and, from that vantage point, I had two angles. One was that I wished that we could replay the 1980 Referendum campaign when sovereignty association was on the table (I felt very strongly that this notion represented our best chance to keep Quebec in Canada). The other was the ambivalence I felt about the mass rally of federalists in Montreal in the eleventh hour of the 1995 campaign. I knew very well that, whatever might be the worthy sentiments expressed before the fateful Referendum, after the Referendum it would be business as usual for Albertans, for example: francophobia. On the other hand, there was another aspect of the rally that affected me very deeply: the outpouring of English Canada's patriotism. I felt that the passion with which so many citizens from that Canada expressed their desire for elusive national unity was in fact a kind of displaced anxiety, not to say anguish, about the future political and cultural integrity of the country they live in: English - speaking Canada. For artists and intellectuals, the challenge is to confront the possibility that we in English Canada (aka Canada tout court) are approaching an historic turning point as a national community: the reconfiguration of Canada and Canadian culture in the light of the inevitability of Quebec's secession from Confederation (in some arrangement or another). In fact, the Canadian ground is crawling with intellectuals on the case, thinking the unavoidable about Canadian culture. Interestingly, many in English Canada seem already to have accepted the essential separateness of Quebecois and Canadian cultural destinies. Quebec is rarely referred to in their arguments, as though it were a fait accompli that the rest of Canada stands on its own at the cusp of twenty - first century's cultural revisioning. And Canadian intellectuals are poising the question of Canada's cultural prospects not in constitutional or national terms, but rather are asking Is Canada a postmodern country? Is this good or bad? The metaphorical landscape is littered with brow - furrowing texts about the naivete of taking seriously meta - narratives of the so - called real world rather than accepting post - modernism's ludic strategy of decentred, non - totalizing, and self - reflexive representation - in which we live in habitats, not countries; socialities, not communities; and fluid pluralities, not classes. Given post - modernism's current cachet, it is surprising how much of English Canada's cultural introspection is a case of modernism fighting back. In a recent essay for FUSE magazine, Susan Crean (author of the modernist classic Who's Afraid of Canadian Culture?) concedes that cultural nationalism has been ambushed, co - opted and discarded as a grass roots movement over the last 20 years. En revanche she proposes not a pomo act of reflexive self - constitution (i.e. depressing thoughts of political futility) but the careful care - taking, by communities of all kinds, of culture, collective memory and imagination - new meta - narratives that might not sit easy with a poststructuralist. In a recent issue of Border/Lines Lisa Henderson has astutely pointed out that it is all very well for the intellectuals of powerful nation states (read the United States of America) to luxuriate in the decentred subject when they are already at the universal centre of subjectivity, but the rest of us need the nation state as our only basis of policy in a post - NAFTA reality. …

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