PUBLICATION:

PUBLICATION:	Montreal Gazette
DATE:	2006.07.02
EDITION:	Final
SECTION:	Insight
PAGE:	A13
BYLINE:	HUBERT BAUCH
SOURCE:	The Gazette
ILLUSTRATION:	Colour Photo: MARY LANE, ISTOCKPHOTO.COM / They call it theNational Assembly, but it's still just a provincial legislature. Or is it? Before it was named the National Assembly, it was known colloquially as the Salon de la race.
WORD COUNT:	1226

What, exactly, is a nation?: Is Quebec a nation? Is it like being sovereign? Harper opened debate about what makes

Stephen Harper caught it from all sides for not wanting to come out and say that Quebec is a nation.

Mind, he should have expected the question when he came to Quebec for St. Jean Baptiste Day, and he implicitly said as much when he expressed his delight at being among Quebecers for their "fete nationale," which literally translates as national holiday.

Separatist party leaders Andre Boisclair and Gilles Duceppe were, of course, effusively offended. "It as if I were to say on July 1 that I refuse to recognize the existence of the Canadian nation," said Bloc Quebecois leader Duceppe. "It would be a huge scandal, and rightly so."

Piling on was NDP leader Jack Layton, a son of the Quebec nationalist hotbed of Hudson, who was down home for the occasion. "I came to celebrate my city and I came to celebrate a nation," he said at the Montreal festivities.

And also Liberal leadership candidates Michael Ignatieff and, surprise, Stephane Dion, the great separatist scourge and the only Quebec candidate in the Liberal leadership race.

It is evident that Quebec is a nation," Ignatieff declared in a speech to South Shore Liberals a few days ago, prompting a heartfelt round of applause from the mostly francophone gathering. Speaking to reporters later he said he said he could envision Quebec's nationhood being recognized in the Canadian constitution, though he allowed that doing it would involve boggling complexities to which he doesn't have answers at this point.

Dion was more circumspect. "There is no problem to recognize Quebec as a nation as long as it's in the sociological definition of the word and not the legal one," he said.

In other words, if it's just saying it, not doing anything about it. He suggested that Harper could have avoided the flap if he'd just said that.

Maybe. But Harper also got it largely right when he called the whole fuss over whether Quebec is a nation "a semantic argument that doesn't serve any real purpose."

More to the point, he might have said, "Yes, no, and so what?"

According to the generally accepted definition in poli-scientific circles, the word nation has a range of meanings and is therefore malleable in the mouths of politicians. In some ways Quebec is a nation, and in some ways it isn't. Simply calling it one doesn't make any difference in fact, other than to make some people feel warm and righteous, and some others feel nervous.

Along with the national holiday, originally held in celebration of the province's patron saint, Quebec's parliament is officially known as the National Assembly, though it is in fact the provincial legislature. That the Assembly adopted a motion proclaiming Quebec a nation hasn't altered the fact that it is a province of Canada, albeit one with special distinctions and dispensations that enhance its sense of nationhood. Quebec City has taken to billing itself La Capitale Nationale, though it remains one of 10 provincial capitals in the country, albeit more alluring than the rest.

"The empirical definition of a nation is not very clear," said Concordia political science professor Guy Lachapelle. "Nation is a political concept than can be applied in various ways."

The term can be applied to a country, which Quebec is patently not. It can apply to an ethnic group, or even a tribe with a common racial ancestry, which again doesn't apply to multicultural modern Quebec. Across Canada, various aboriginal groups claim nation status, a designation more readily accorded than Quebec's claim to the same. Acadians are readily recognized as a nation on ethnic grounds, though they are a diaspora scattered over several countries.

Where it does apply to Quebec in a way accepted, even by federalist as staunch as Stephane Dion, is in the civic or sociological sense. As Ignatieff put it, to a society with a predominant shared language, attachment to a specific territory, a history and a collective memory, and a tradition of shared social and cultural values with which people identify.

Quebecers tend to have a more strongly developed sense of national identity based on their province than other Canadians largely because of its language difference. But other Canadians also have a strong sense of identification with their home provinces, and according to the civic/societal definition, Newfoundland and Labrador, Alberta and even much maligned little PEI can legitimately claim nation status; there are duly constituted nations, such as Andorra and St. Kitts and Nevis with less than half the island province's population.

In that sense, Canada is a nation of nations, as are most of the countries in the world, said Dion, noting that there are more than 3,000 human groups that define themselves as nations and qualify under one definition or another, but fewer than 200 countries in the United Nations. If every certifiable nation in the world were to be an independent country, the planet would explode, he suggested.

This doesn't deter Quebec sovereignists who have their own take on the meaning of nation, or better, several takes that are trotted out as they serve their purpose.

Harper also got it right when he suggested the sovereignists use the Quebec-as-nation concept as a smokescreen. "It is to avoid the central issue, which is their determination to have another divisive referendum on the subject of dividing this country," he said.

Besides being predictably miffed, the separatist party leaders were typically disingenuous in their reaction to Harper, both saying that you don't have to be a sovereignist to acknowledge that Quebec is a nation. "Above and beyond the debate on the national debate, whether one is nationalist or federalist, one must admit that Quebecers form a unique nation," said Boisclair.

Note the Freudian slip. He must have meant to say sovereignist or federalists, otherwise the sentence doesn't scan; the "national" debate he refers to is over whether Quebec should separate from Canada. Not all Quebec nationalists are sovereignist, but all Quebec sovereignists are nationalists, and for them the terms tend to be interchangeable.

Sovereignists pay lip service to the civic nation concept, but push it to mean that Quebec's national imperative is to break away from Canada and become an independent state, because that's what self-respecting nations do. It was clearly put by former Parti Quebecois premier Bernard Landry who weighed in on the subject last week. "The sovereign nation state is the indispensible instrument of a complete national project. Free nations want to remain that way, and others want to become that way."

Another thing that makes some people uneasy about the Quebec nation thing is that Quebec nationalism is deeply rooted in the traditional ethnocentricity of native-born francophones in pre-Quiet Revolution days, and to this day many still believe they are the only true people of the Quebec nation, and that anglos and immigrants don't count.

Jacques Parizeau said it loud and clear last referendum night, and he's still a major force in the sovereignist movement. Before it was re-baptized the National Assembly, the Quebec legislature was colloquially known as the "Salon de la race."

Liberal Senator Serge Joyal, who prominently served in Pierre Trudeau's cabinet as national unity minister, said federalists who toy with the N-word to appeal to soft nationalist voters in Quebec are playing with fire.

"Those kinds of buzz works encourage ambiguous notions about the Canadian identity," he said in an interview last week. Some don't realize that, in playing with the word, you fall into the trap of words."

hbauch@thegazette.canwest.com