Vive le Quebec libre!

For centuries, our neighbor to the north has been grappling with an intense, often caustic and even violent debate about whether the province of Quebec should remain a part of Canada.

It shouldn’t, both for the interests of the people of Quebec and the people of the rest of Canada.

Quebec has never had a particularly good relationship with English Canada, dating from when England conquered New France (present-day Quebec) in the 1700s to October of 1970, when the Canadian Army occupied Quebec, arrested hundreds of pro-independence individuals without trying them and suspended all civil rights in Quebec.

There is some residual persecution of Quebeckers by Anglophone Canadians (a cursory glance at a Facebook page discussing Quebec’s independence

reveals an awful lot of Quebec-bashing: “Out of my country,” “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” etc.), and institutionalized discrimination against Francophones persists to this day.

While all that is certainly true, the principal reason why Quebec should be independent is that the province — which is officially recognized as a nation by the Canadian Parliament (albeit as a “nation within Canada”) and as having a “distinct society” — deserves the right to self-determination and full sovereignty over its own national decisions.

The Quebec sovereignty movement is not so much about separation as it is about self-determination, something largely denied to Quebeckers for about 400 years.

While Quebec does have some limited self-determination as a Canadian province, its position is inferior to that of Canada as a whole, a nation from which it has a completely separate and distinct culture, language, political system and society. It also has a relationship that makes it a coequal of the other Canadian provinces (all of which are culturally and linguistically English and Canadian), which are just subunits of Canada’s culture and society as a whole.

An analogous situation would be if Canada somehow came to own the United States and declared it would value the entire United States politically and culturally as a single Canadian province. A similar thing has happened to Quebec, and it’s more than somewhat insulting.  

Canada would end what has become a half-century long political struggle between Quebec and the rest of Canada by allowing Quebec to become independent. The bitter rhetoric between federalist and separatist politicians would finally be put to an end, and Canada and Quebec could move past this long and bloody debacle.

Quebec believes itself to be — and, in fact, is — a culturally and societally equal partner to Canada and not merely an inferior subunit of it. It is time that Canada and the international community started treating the province like one.
 

E-mail: zammerma@indiana.edu