Constitutional Hockey: Canadiens and Habitants in the Imaginaire of Quebec

This paper addresses Quebec's perspective on the Patriation through an extended allegory using Canada's national winter sport as a motif. The subliminal goal, of course, is to slake the thirst of the hockey-deprived by inviting them to see Canada's longest-running public entertainment -- constitutional politics -- as a surrogate. Fans of Montreal's National Hockey League team will recognize that the title and subtitle are drawn from the team's logo -- CH -- the C standing for constitutional and canadien (French Canadian) and the H for and habitant (an early inhabitant of New France). The terms of the subtitle might likewise serve as metaphor for two broad tendencies in the Weltanschauung of francophone Quebec -- the coureur de bois (runner of the woods; fur trader) and the hivernant (mountain man). Of course, our principal broadcasters could also be attributed the letters C and H -- the former being the long-time play-by-play commentator on La soiree du (Rene Lecavalier), and the H signalling the long-time voice of Hockey Night in Canada (Foster Hewitt). Need we add that in the very titles of these two television programmes -- the first focusing on time and substance, the second also mentioning political geography -- one sees a further reflection of the central duality in Canadian constitutional politics.A brief note on methodology: one of us has argued on several occasions that constitutionalism in Canada is deeply embedded in history. In this light, the Patriation Reference is not so special. It merely reiterates long-standing themes, and can be viewed as no more than a single event in the third period of a continuing game. Moreover, the arguments, tactics and strategies of constitutional politics as a form of symbolic interaction are not unique to constitutionalism. They mirror human interaction as symbolized in the larger ambient culture of a country. Hence our conscious use of hockey vocabulary to characterize the activity of political actors. Finally, we have chosen the voice of commentators in order to provide some distance in the framing of history and argument. Too often constitutional discussions in Canada have been epiphenomenal, with neither side willing to face up to the ideological can't helps that ground its position and interpretation.We are pleased to have been invited to participate in this celebration of the life and career of Ken Lysyk. As others have illustrated in their discussions of his arguments in the Patriation Reference he was a passionate and persuasive advocate -- so passionate and so persuasive, we believe, that had he been invited to argue the Quebec position in the Quebec Veto the result would have been different and many of the constitutional traumas of the past 20 years would have been avoided. Indeed, a major theme of this paper is that the very arguments the Supreme Court accepted in the Patriation Reference ought to have been persuasive in the Quebec Veto Reference. That is, if the first case was rightly decided, the second must be wrong -- a point the Supreme Court has now implicitly acknowledged in the Quebec Secession. Sadly, however, in 1982 Quebec did not have Ken Lysyk to argue its case.

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