Notes for a Parliamentary International Forum organized by the Parliamentary Centre at the Parliamentary Restaurant in the House of Commons, Ottawa, on Monday, 25 March 1996 at 6:30 pm.
By Desmond Morton
NATIONAL UNITY AND FOREIGN POLICY
Does the national unity debate affect Canada's foreign policy? Unless, like some diplomats and professors, you believe that our world voice is Olympian in its objectivity, dispensing moral precepts about world peace, co-operation, conciliation, democracy and other lofty goals, you will realize that our policies grow from home-grown realities. It is not a matter of shame but of common sense that the symbol of our first diplomatic venture should be a Halibut Treaty. Of course a leading trading nation wants world-wide peace or that we prefer order in China to democratic anarchy.
Canada's Problems are not Unique
Of course our domestic preoccupations will strike those with a world view as claustrophobic. Why can't we be rid of such tedious domestic concerns as the price of No. 1 Northern or the wanderings of Mr. Tobin's turbot or, above all, Quebec's wearisome preoccupation with its cultural and linguistic identity. Isn't thirty years long enoungh for any -- or was it really 130 years?
How odd, of course, that we would consider that such preoccupations were unique to their land? How long has Britain wrestled with the Irish question, and was the "Final Solution" of 1922 really the end? Have the French been so clever about Corsica or, for that matter, Britanny and the Basque country? Have the Italians resolved their own crises of internal unity, particularly in the Mezzogiorno? If Belgium is a working model for Sovereignty Association, one hesitates to know where to turn -- to Brussels to revisit the venomous hostility of Walloons and Flemish or to Quebec City to see if that is all Lucien Bouchard really wants?
Yes, the world is surprised that the prosperous and righteous Canadians should have issues in their own midst that Canadian precepts about conciliation, accommodation, democracy and peace could so obviously resolve. Canadians themselves, lacking any common historical understanding and with very little patience for analyzing their own experience, fail to understand their own evolution, not least in our own foreign policies.
Defence and Foreign Policy as Divider
It will be no mystery to the informed people in this room that foreign policy has been a traditional source of national disunion. War, "foreign policy by other means", Clausewitz called it, split French and English profoundly in 1899, 1914 and 1939, and even produced more muted differences in the Korean War of 1950-52 and the Gulf War of 1990-91. The fundamental inequality of the Quebec-Canada relationship was driven home in conscription crises of two World Wars.
Canada's profound isolationism between the world wars, and it caution and home front priorities, were shaped by an awareness of those divisions and by a sense that the cost of those wars included profound divisions within the Canadian nation. Arguably Canada changed almost out of recognition after the war. Conscientious, if reluctant commitments to full Québécois participation in the Canadian diplomatic corps and in the Canadian Forces were firmly, if slowly realized.
If Louis St-Laurent was bolder and more innovative at External Affairs than King, his initiatives still reflected a Québécois view of the world, from his embrace of the non-white and less-British members of the Commonwealth to his outrage at British (and French) imperialism in the Suez crisis of 1956. The Liberal defeat in 1957 owed much to the mobilization of anglo-Canadian resentment by John Diefenbaker and the Conservatives. In the 1960s and 1970s, Ottawa sought to promote involvement with la Francophonie as counterbalance to a traditional involvement in the Commonwealth., including the complicated game of inserting New Brunswick as a French-speaking province when France was eager to welcome Quebec.
In promoting peace, foreign aid and free trade, Canad's foreign policy makers have been sensitive to small, significant but, on the whole, shrinking differences between Quebec and Canada on the issue that was once among the most divisive.
National Unity as Diplomatic Baggage
If foreign policy no longer divides, domestic divisions now affect policy itself. While specialists in foreign policy and trade would probably prefer to forget about the minor distractions of domestic politics, there is nothing minor about a national break-up or in the preliminary rounds of alliance building which both Quebec and Ottawa have engaged in since 1976. In an open and democratic society, there is no possibility of concealment when Quebec and Canadian prime ministers make their way to Washington and New York, to London and Paris. A declaration of independence only has effect to the extent it is recognized by other nation states and, save where that consent is met with acquiescence or indifference, recognition is considered a profoundly unfriendly act. Hence a preliminary diplomatic battle in which the two capitals have been pitted for some time.
While Quebec may count on strong sympathy in Paris, particularly from a Gaullist president, and probably on much less support in London, all other countries pale beside the significance of American conclusions. Whatever its status as a world power, the United States will remain the dominant power in the hemisphere and its interests must be respected. It is easy to see how Queber, Canada and the nine other provinces include the Americans in their plan, Péquistes assure their followers that Washington will impose peace, order, equity and NAFTA membership for a soveriegn Quebec; some smaller, poorer provinces insist that becoming a state is a legitimate alternative destiny. Whatever the outcome, a divided Canada will court American support and pay a price for a favour that most Americans cannot understand and will resist.
While the world, on the whole, regards Quebec secession as a minor problem in a world plagued by hunger, war, poverty, and environmental catastrophe. Indeed, as a senior diplomat once said to me, it is an act of gross presumption for Canada to add its problems to a crowded and serious agenda. Among the costs of national secession would be a profound sense of sadness that such a country could not resolve its problems, possibly tinged with schadenfreude as a people sometimes tempted to preach righteousness revealed the hollowness of its message of compromise and conciliation.
If these conclusions seem gloomy, I will welcome being proved wrong.