The collapse of Canada’s Meech Lake accord is not likely to have dramatic consequences for the United States, but it still is an extremely important development for this country. The U.S. will share in Canada’s political anxiety as that country sweeps away the pieces of Meech and attempts to build another agreement to support its fragile national unity.

The accord was a compromise fashioned in 1987 by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and the 10 provincial premiers to reassure Quebec that its cultural and language distintiveness would be preserved within the framework of the Canadian constitution, a document that was not written until 1982, and which Quebec still refuses to ratify.

The three-year process to gain unanimous consent for the agreement ended abruptly last week when Indians in Manitoba and anti-Meech sentiment in Newfoundland forced those two provinces to withdraw their support.

The Meech Lake accord did not die because it was unpalatable to non-French interests in Canada, or because provinces resented the way it made Quebec a favored child within the Canadian family. The death of Meech was an act of political suicide performed by that country’s historically powerless and estranged minorities.

If the French in Quebec feel threatened or diminished culturally by the majority in that country, Newfoundland is at a lower depth of self-image. Poor, it is the butt of jokes for English Canada. Many of its people subsist on transfer payments and direct subsidies provided from tax revenue generated in the rest of the nation. It is a provincial welfare state that bristles at criticism, but aspires only to survival.

Lower still on the Canadian cultural ladder are the Indians. Like American Indians, they have been pushed around (forced to move whenever their land base was needed for natural resources or dams), assimilated where it was convenient, handed checks and housing and maintained by the government.

The Newfoundlanders and the Indians had three things in common last week. From the perspective of the rest of Canada, they had third-class cultures (Quebec’s had a lock on second place). They were demeaned by English-speaking Canada. Until Meech, they were politically powerless. In the end it was Newfies and Indians 2, Canada 0.

Canada still must find a way to reassure its large and influential French minority that their cultural integrity will be protected. The fragile union of provincial interests must be kept in balance — the U.S. states and the provinces need each other, but as friends and trading partners, not as political family. Canada also must deal with dormant issues relating to the legitimate demands of its native Americans, who have an obligation to themselves to ask why Quebec should be privileged, when they were there first and as a cultural minority, have suffered most.

Then, Canada must find another compromise, something just like Meech perhaps, and this time pass it. The union of Canadian provinces, however fragile, is too important to Canadians and to all North Americans, to be allowed to fall apart.