Meech Lake

To most Americans, who are ignorant of both its constitutional origins and its political consequences, Meech Lake is a meaningless term — irrelevant even as geography. But in Canada, it is a location that connotes power, much the way names like Camp David or Watts or Bunker Hill do in the United States.

Lake Meech is located in a national park outside Ottawa. On its shores is a federally owned mansion, where the 10 provincial premiers and Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in 1987 crafted an agreement that has the potential to ease that country’s persistent bilingual and bicultural tension, while leaving intact the framework of Canadian federalism.

It is a fragile agreement that attempts in a single constitutional stroke to connect the culturally fractious elements of Canada’s past and present with its political future.

Although it’s objective — internal harmony is something nearly all Canadians want — the agreement is extremely controversial because it appears to residents of the predominantly English-speaking regions to be a lopsided effort to appease Quebec, a chronically demanding, linguistically isolationist and often rebellious province.

Conversely, the French-speaking majority in Quebec sees Meech Lake as a means to protect and preserve its cultural identity. The main part of the accord recognizes that Quebec “constitutes within Canada a distinct society.” It acknowledges the dual language heritage of the province, allows it greater freedom in establishing its own immigration policies, and even institutionalizes Quebec’s flexibility to “opt-out” of federal initiatives: It can accept program money from Ottawa, but without strings. Not a bad deal.

Meech is a great notion with significant implications for the United States:

If it succeeds, Meech Lake might allow regional economic ties to strengthen between the states and some of the more prosperous provinces, which would be able to make use of the greater political strength that would accrue from the accord. It also will have an impact on the relationship between Washington and Ottawa. Considerable power from Canada’s central government will be redistributed among the provinces, but the country presumably will become more stable politically. It’s a trade-off.

If it is not ratified by all 10 provincial legislatures by June 23, there are observers on both sides of the border who believe Meech could be a political time bomb that when detonated will permanently fracture Canada’s loosely knit confederation. This view holds that if Quebec is denied Meech, the province will leave the federation and become independent. When this happens, the fragments of Canada will fly apart. The poorer provinces in the Maritimes will be separated physically and culturally from Ontario and the wealthier Western provinces. They will have to look south, at New England and the U.S. for economic support, perhaps linking up as a 51st state.

It is an interesting scenario that one U.S. pundit has expanded into a grandiose scheme — another American manifest destiny stretching all the way to Greenland — but at the moment this neither is likely nor desirable for Americans or their Canadian neighbors, who share much in common but who also are separated by many significant political, philosophical and cultural differences.

Although the background and implications of Meech Lake (explored in today’s NEWS in a special assignments report on Page One and next week in a three-part series on these Editorial Pages), may suggest to some Americans that Canada’s disintegration is likely, even inevitable, there is a quiet patriotism north of the border and a social glue that will hold that country together for the immediate future, with or without Meech.

Half the provinces are either opposed to the document in principle (Manitoba and New Brunswick have not ratified it), or want it amended (Alberta, British Columbia and Newfoundland); but the negative implications of total, political melt-down in Canada are unacceptably high for everyone.

The provinces, through some creative compromise orchestrated by Prime Minister Mulroney and the federal government, somehow will hold together, the way they have for nearly a century and a quarter: very precariously.

Americans would be wise to wish him well in such an effort.