The Lost Massey Lectures (34 page)

Fluctuations in currency can be helpful, especially among close trading partners. It depends, of course, on what causes the fluctuations. If the causes are changes in trade balances, then fluctuations can work very well as correctives. That is, a drop in the value of a small country's currency can help it boost and diversify its export trade precisely at the moment the boost and diversification are needed. The drop means the country's exports become cheaper. It also means imports become more expensive, and so the drop can help stimulate replacement of some imports by locally made goods, precisely at the moment the stimulation is most needed.

In a big country like Canada, embracing many and widely differing regions, currency fluctuations cannot serve those corrective
purposes the way they can in a small country. That is because one region of our big country may badly need its exports boosted at the same time that trade surpluses in the country, taken as a whole, are pushing up the value of the currency, therefore making the exports of the region in question more expensive, not making them cheaper which is the help the region needs. The reverse also happens; then a region with a trade surplus must pay more for imports than it would have to if its own currency were at work. The more important the foreign trade of a region, relative to domestic trade, the more serious and regionally harmful these contradictions are.

This is a built-in economic difficulty. The value of Canadian currency that may be beneficial at a given time to Alberta, say, may not be the value beneficial at the same time to Nova Scotia. The value beneficial to Ontario may not be the value beneficial at the same time to Quebec, and so on. Indeed, it would be rather a miracle if the currency's value at a given time were actually beneficial across the country. It does not distinguish among the widely varying realities in the varying regions, or reflect them.

If in due course an independent Quebec were to acquire a currency of its own, Quebec would have a built-in economic advantage it now lacks, an advantage that countries like Norway and Ireland have. That would not solve the problem of Canada's less sensitive currency, but at least it would help a little by diminishing the range of regions our Canadian currency must try to serve so clumsily.

Quebec is the only province for which independence is realistically possible in the foreseeable future. The chief reason for that is equalization. Under our equalization policy federal tax yields from all the provinces, rich and poor, are pooled and then redistributed. They help pay for public services and social programs the poor provinces could not maintain on their own. In addition, Ottawa tries to help out the poor provinces with special, and usually very expensive, development schemes.

In theory, equalization is not charity. It has been intended to rejuvenate the economies of the poor provinces and to help them become self-supporting. But it has not really worked out that way. The poor provinces remain poor. Nevertheless the funds distributed from Ottawa do make poverty easier to bear and do help disguise the economic stagnation in the poor provinces.

The poorest are the Atlantic provinces, but Saskatchewan and Manitoba are also on the receiving side of the ledger. In any
conference among provincial premiers, those from Saskatchewan, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland can usually be depended on to support strengthened central government. Quite apart from the emotional attachments of these provinces to Confederation, strong federalism is their bread-and-butter.

Ontario and Alberta are of course the two richest provinces, but British Columbia is also on the giving side of the ledger. In any conference of premiers, the three from these provinces can usually be depended on to press for greater provincial autonomy, more leeway to run their own affairs and make their own decisions, meaning looser federalism.

Neither the have-not provinces nor the haves are in a position to think seriously about independence. The have-nots are too dependent on the federal government. The federal government is too dependent on the haves. Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia are thus somewhat in the position of family bread-winners who have taken on heavy responsibilities for their dependants. They may complain about the burdens, they may grumble and insist on having their own way sometimes. But morally and practically, they cannot walk out on their dependants. The dependants, for their part, may grumble and envy, may even accuse their benefactors of having trapped them into economic dependency. They often accuse Ontario of having done just that. But the dependants can't walk out, either. What would they live on?

The bookkeeping of equalization is so complex and confused it is literally beyond understanding. And in addition to equalization payments, the federal government distributes many other funds and services. Nobody, whether in Ottawa or in the provinces, knows exactly what the balance sheets are, exactly what the difference is between tax revenues sent from any given province to Ottawa and the revenues and services received back.
Even so, the discrepancies between what is yielded and what is received are great enough in nine cases so there is no doubt about their financial roles in Confederation: three breadwinners, six dependants.

Quebec, the tenth case, is different. The Parti Québécois claims Quebec yields up more revenue to Ottawa than it gets back, and makes out a plausible sounding case to support that claim. Their opponents, on the other hand, say Quebec gets more than it yields, and make out a plausible sounding case to support that claim too. The very fact that both can argue this way shows how close the balance sheet must be. Walter Gordon has said that ten years ago, when he was federal finance minister, Quebec had roughly a quarter of the population, yielded just about a quarter of federal revenues, and probably got back just about a quarter.
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Things may have changed somewhat since, one way or the other. Nobody knows.

The point is, that whatever may be the exact truth concealed beneath the impenetrable bookkeeping, Quebec is clearly singular. At present, it could become independent without forcing serious financial sacrifices on either the other provinces or itself.

Sovereignty is many-sided. Its various aspects overlap and interlock. But keeping that in mind, we can think of René Lévesque's sovereignty proposals under three headings: cultural, economic and political.

Cultural sovereignty revolves around language. That is to be expected because language is at the heart of any people's culture. What Lévesque wants culturally for Quebec is sovereignty over powers concerned with communication, immigration and language.
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He defines communications as television and radio broadcasting. This seems to mean he wants a Quebec broadcasting company independent from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. As for immigration, he complains that for generations
“the federal government has maintained a very active network of immigration offices in England, Scotland and Ireland, while there has never been one in France.”

When he speaks of language itself, he regrets that, as he puts it, “a fortress of laws” protects the rights of Quebecois to use their own language. He says one of the reasons he has dreamed of political sovereignty is “precisely so that we will not have to legislate on questions which should be as clear as the air we breathe.” In matters concerned with language, he wants Quebec to have, as he puts it, whatever is normal to a national community which administers its own affairs.

As to whether this is a good or bad cultural aim, I for one cannot help but think it is good. While I have been writing this, I have been entertaining myself after work by reading the translation of a charming Japanese novel written in 1913 about the Japan of the 1880's, and a novel about the pageant of English history, by Virginia Woolf. I love living these multiple lives. It is possible only because many different cultures have become wonderfully articulate, enriching us all. For the culture of French Quebec to languish rather than flourish on its own terms—which is the only way a culture can flourish—would mean some impoverishment for us all.

But those sentiments do not tell us why Lévesque and many other Quebecois have now become so aggressive about the elbow room their culture needs. The most thoughtful comments I have come across are those of David Cameron, an economist and political scientist at Trent University.
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He points out that before “the quiet revolution” of the 1960's, French Quebec's culture had managed to preserve itself behind a shell of isolation and unchanging tradition. It did little more than survive, but it did find the security to do that. Now, he points out, there is no security for the culture in resistance to change. Too much else has changed.
The only possible way to insure its own future is for Quebec's culture to initiate changes and ride with them. It has to develop or die.

Cameron and the authors he quotes have some interesting things to say about changing views concerning uniformity and diversity. I am going to comment on this point because it has a bearing not only on cultural sovereignty but on economic sovereignty too.

A few paragraphs ago I remarked that every different articulate culture enriches us all. That is such a cliché we might suppose it has always been self-evident. Not so. It expresses a rather recent point of view.

During what we call the Enlightenment, the European intellectual climate that dominated the 18th century and prevailed well into Victorian times and in many ways into our own, people took a view of Nature which has since been turned upside down. The Enlightenment view was that Nature itself seeks standardization, uniformity, universality, immutability. Spinoza, a forerunner of the Enlightenment, put it in so many words. He wrote, “The purpose of Nature is to make men uniform, as children of a common mother.” People always seem to want to believe they are in harmony with the world as it is ordered by Nature or the gods-that-be. Perhaps such a belief is necessary to human morale. At any rate, the concept of a natural order seems to wriggle into our thought about all kinds of things, and so it was with the thought of the Enlightenment. Universality and uniformity, as ideals, subtly influenced thought about education, politics, economics, government, everything.

In the meantime, naturalists went on studying Nature. What they found made it impossible to continue thinking of Nature as a force promoting uniformity. On the contrary, what they learned revealed Nature as a force which is forever wiping away uniformity
and casting up diversity. Today we think of standardization, and immutability too, as being unnatural. Thus an American paleontologist can now remark, with every expectation of being understood by a general readership, that evolutionary biologists like himself, “tend to equate goodness with the correlation between unconstrained smallness and innovation, and the sheer exuberant diversity of life.”
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As you may have noticed by now, that sort of view has worked a strong influence on me. It did so long before I was conscious of its source in the thinking of naturalists. One cultural historian quoted by Cameron says that in the entire history of thought there have been “few changes in standards of value more profound and more momentous” than the shift from belief in natural uniformity to belief in natural diversity, a belief he sums up this way: not only are there diverse excellences in many, or in all, phases of human life, but “diversity itself is of the essence of excellence.”
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That idea has not yet been assimilated into all the nooks and crannies of our thoughts, let alone our actions. We still find many cultural lags. But the belief that diversity is both natural and wholesome has come to influence thought and action in a thousand everyday ways. And we may be as sure as we can be of anything that as long as our current understanding of Nature's nature prevails, the belief that diversity itself is excellent will continue to be a powerful and growing influence on thought about all kinds of things.

At the time the underlying cultural rules for Canada were laid down, the ideal of uniformity and universality was still operating full force. As a heritage, it has left us with a deep uneasiness about the separateness of English and French Canada, and a feeling that our inability to dissolve the differentness has been some sort of social or political failure. That idea has been dinned into us by novelists, politicians, and especially by English-speaking Canada's historians.

But looked at in light of changing and changed ideas about uniformity on the one hand, and diversity on the other, the sense that we should dissolve the differentness of English and French Canada is antiquated. Looked at in that light, official bilingualism is an instance of cultural lag, a sort of last gasp of the Enlightenment ideal. We force English-speaking civil servants with no gift for languages to qualify in French, and we legislate the bags of macaroni and the announcements of postal rate increases into saying everything in both French and English, even where Italian and English, or Ukrainian and English, or Chinese and English or Italian and French might be more to the point. If we have failed at uniformity, well then, the bilingual policy tells us, we can at least still try for the standardization of universality.

But once we have come to feel in our bones that diversity is valid, then the vision of an artificially and uniformly bilingual Canada simply becomes arbitrary and silly. Then the separateness and differentness of English and French Canada no longer seems cause for uneasiness and regret on anyone's part. On the contrary, the whole stubborn tale comes to seem a triumph for the splendid principles of life itself. Lo and behold, here in our midst is differentness that simply would not be squelched, and that is now insisting on its right to flourish and flower, root and branch. Three cheers for the dogged persistence and mysterious vitality of diversity.