`Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!’ illuminating, penetrating

OH CANADA! OH QUEBEC! by Mordecai Richler, Knopf, 227 pages, $23.

Mordecai Richler’s gift of writing is gilded with wit and wisdom. Born and bred in Montreal, he brings to his perceptive analysis of Quebec’s insatiable hunger for separation from Canada a shrewd assessment of the high cost the turbulent province might have to pay to satisfy that hunger. The Parti Quebecois, Quebec’s language-obsessed separatist movement, already has announced (“definitely but not necessarily”) that in the coming October it expects to hold a referendum on independence. Given a pro vote, within 18 months Quebec could become the world’s 18th largest country.

Why is Quebec so fiercely determined to break away from Canada? A partial answer can be found in the gardens of the Place d’Armes in Quebec City. There, growing in flowers, one can see the somber motto, Je me souviens (I remember). For every Quebecois purist, these words conjure a bitter memory.

In 1608 Quebec City was founded as a fur-trading post by Samuel de Champlain. In 1759, after a two-month siege on the Plains of Abraham, it was conquered by the British when Gen. James Wolfe and his army scaled the cliffs under cover of darkness and captured the city. During the battle, both Wolfe and the French commander, Gen. Louis Montcalm, lost their lives. They now share a joint monument in the Jardins des Gouverneurs, below the Chateau Frontenac. Its inscription reads: “Valour gave them a common death, history a common fame, posterity a common monument.”

Under the authority of the British North America Act of 1867, Parliament in Westminster united the four existing provinces — Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario, Quebec — into the Dominion of Canada. When its land mass was increased with the addition of its northernmost Prince Rupert’s Land, Canada became the world’s second-largest country. But as the author notes dryly, “… the bulk of our undeniably vast domain remains uninhabitable, and to this day most of us are snuggled within a hundred miles of the 49th parallel, intimidated by the punishingly cold tundra on one side and American pizzazz on the other.”

One of the chief sticking points of Quebec’s rancor was language. Despite that the 1867 Confederation law gave Quebec the right to use French in its legislative bodies and courts. The rebellious province resisted the notion that English was to be its other language. In 1982, when English and French were declared to be the two official languages of the Dominion, Quebec angrily passed Bill 178 which prohibits exterior signs in any language but French. Rene Lavesque, then premier of Quebec (and founder of the Parti Quebecois in 1968) gave voice to Quebec’s animus: “Being ourselves is essentially a matter of keeping and developing a personality that has survived for three and a half centuries. At the core of this personality is the fact that we speak French. Everything else depends on this one essential element …”

After the passage of Bill 178 groups of volunteer vigilantes armed with cameras roamed the downtown streets of Montreal in 1990, snapping signs that were English or bilingual and turning over their evidence to the police who took appropriate, legal action against the offenders.

“Zealots who run Montreal’s French Catholic school board shocked even the separatist Parti Quebecois with a demand that immigrant students who were caught shooting the breeze in English in the schoolyards should be severely punished,” writes Richler.

Still, in May 1990, when the Parti Quebecois brought out its 46-pge manifesto, it made no bones about stating, “We must break the iron collar of a federal system which serves us badly, which will always subordinate our national interest to those of another majority.” The sympathetic New York Times aired its opinion that Quebec — “three times the area of France” — was capable of making it on its own. The author of the book dubs this “preposterous” on the grounds that “most of Quebec’s territory, say 98 percent, cannot be cultivated and is unlikely to be ever more than sparsely settled.”

In the event of Quebec’s secession, how would it affect Canada? John Buchanan, premier of Nova Scotia, said flatly two years ago that the Atlantic provinces would have no choice but to apply for American statehood. Bill Merkin, a key American player in the free-trade negotiations with Canada, is of the opinion that if Quebec chooses to become independent and incurs the wrath of Canada, the United States certainly would think twice about entering into any kind of relationship with Quebec. “The U.S. is going to be concerned with maintaining good relations with Canada,” he said firmly.

Quebec’s insistence on sealing itself off in a French-speaking bubble can work against its own progress. Richler writes that over the years Quebec has attracted less than its share of immigrants to Canada, relative to its percentage of the country’s populations, because most prospective immigrants see it as a quaint French-speaking isle … adrift in an English-speaking sea where opportunities abound. Some 350 million people worldwide use English as their mother tongue, he says, quoting statistics from a reliable current source, and three-quarters of the world’s mail, telexes, and cables are also in English, as is 80 percent of the information stored in the world’s computers. English is also the official voice of the air ad the sea. To put it in Donne’s succinct words, “No man (or country) is an island entire of itself.”

“Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!” traces the problem of Quebec’s refractory behavior back to its nexus and works forward to its present position vis-a-vis that province’s expressed determination to seek independence. A modern-day Herodotus, Richler — who ranks as one of Canada’s best and brightest writers — sprinkles his exposition with charming vignettes about such colorful personalities as Pierre Trudeau (the artistocrat from Quebec who served as prime minister for a total of 17 years, and the billion-dollar folly of the Big Tower (waggishly referred to locally as the Big Owe) that rises out of Montreal’s Olympic Stadium. He also fleshes out some of Quebec’s vagaries on its home turf, including the rift between French Canadians and Jews. This is an illuminating, high-energy, and penetrating probe of a topic that touches us all here in Maine.

Bea Goodrich’s reviews are a regular feature in the monthly Books in Review section. Goodrich also writes a review column and is the author of the award-winning nature story series, “Happy Hollow Stories by Judge Tortoise.”