We Are All Quebec: Toward A New Anglo-Canadian Nationalism

Provinces Can Resist Post-Nationalism

The current arrangement of power and representation disfavours a truly nationalist and pro-Canadian federal policy. Fortunately, the provincial level shelters a second and underfortified bastion from which to prevent the permanent degeneration of Canada into a post-national project of economic development.

In Ontario, the Progressive Conservatives have secured commanding majority after commanding majority since 2018. The Saskatchewan Party has held power for nearly twenty years. These mandates are long, powerful, and enable far-sighted structural planning. Yet the prevailing Liberal and Western Conservative political philosophy is one of business management, of bookkeeping and seat warming. The parties of the centre idle in anticipation of whatever next spendthrift party, surrendering our social future for lack of vision, ambition, and will to power.

There are significant opportunities for the national project by way of provincial empowerment, as well as by exploiting existing provincial powers in the areas of education, immigration, taxation, language, and culture. English-Canada must learn from the successes of Quebec. English-Canada must assert the reality of its identity, and of its right to prosper and persevere as a distinct society, bound together just as French-Canada, entitled to govern by local interests and principles.

Provinces Have Distinct Identities Worth Protecting

In the heroic age of pre-Confederation, it was commonly believed that all provinces joined Canada with a mind to preserve their constitutive pre-Confederation identities. Though such a sentiment is less salient in Ontario, it is particularly apparent in Canada’s early Maritime leaders. Notably, in premiers Samuel Tilley and Charles Tupper, and as late as the 1930s in premier Angus Macdonald, who argued that Nova Scotia, rather than an administrative unit, constituted a “separate political identity” and a “distinct entit[y]… held together by the tenacity of local sentiment” (Smith, 1998).

The position of Quebec, then, is more a contingency of power, representation, and political will than a reflection of any particular and inalienable quality had by Quebec and impossible to the other provinces. Certainly, Quebec is in many ways remarkable. But Québécois uniqueness lacks necessary relation to the realization of Anglo-Canadian potential.

The Last Remodelling

The sledgehammer renovations of Trudeau the Elder to Canada’s constitutional system fashioned a new and structurally liberal Canada. In place of traditional hardwood and weathered walls, of order and common law, these reforms stripped the flesh from our national core, making way for a new and revolutionary sociological project.

Courts and academics legitimized a new Canada from the top down, designed to self-reinforce through institutional power, legal precedent, and manufactured consent. The institutions of the new Canada, an empowered Supreme Court chief among them, drew upon human capital (and therefore interests and meanings) belonging near exclusively to liberal technical-patronage networks. The academy, our primary selection mechanism for future governing capital, produced successive generations of students well conditioned to support post-national hegemony. Captured education, and layers of precedent, bureaucracy, tribunals, legislation, and patronage monies carried us from our centennial optimism to the liminal grime-shot strip mall Canada of 2026.

Importantly, the French half of our founding compact never consented to the repatriation of the constitution, which the Trudeau Liberals legitimized by a constitutional amending formula which Quebec never consented to. Pierre Trudeau, aware that government legitimacy springs from capacity and time, proceeded anyway.

The 1982 reforms did not recognize Quebec as explicitly having special status, such an exception being contrary to the principles of Trudeau-liberalism. Nevertheless, the post-repatriation status quo has been one where Quebec is de facto recognized as a unique society, able to exercise exceptional autonomy.

Moreover, Quebec’s resistance and will to retain a sense of identity shaped the Charter, contributing to the inclusion of the Notwithstanding Clause, which retains for provincial and federal parliaments a softer and time limited political sovereignty – the ability to enact near any legislation notwithstanding Charter restrictions.

Even in the spirit of 1982, then, asymmetrical federalism is a product not of the exceptionalism of any one region, but of contingent dynamics of power. There is no reason whatsoever that English-Canada must assent to be melted down to mere units of commerce and administration. Constitutionally, all provinces are equally positioned to act toward positive social and economic visions, and have at their disposal the ability to select political exceptions and to mold our collective national future.

English-Canada Will Be What We Make It

A governing philosophy of any desirable kind will need to be future-sighted, with an interest in shaping a new and syncretic way of acting and self-conceiving. There is no strictly retrospective solution to the problems of identity and sovereignty, and how we will secure the country for our children and theirs after them. As in the structural institutional reforms of the latter twentieth century, a new self-understanding, though it will borrow from history, will be shaped by minority will and by institutions. English-Canada will be what we make it. And whatever is inauthentic now will become authentic with intergenerational transmission.

English-Canada Would Benefit From Quebec’s Immigration Arrangement

So what should Anglo-Canada do? A plausible first step for English-Canada is to pursue something like the Canada-Quebec Accord, which gives Quebec sole responsibility for the selection of immigrants according to provincial criteria.

Under the accord, Canada cannot admit into Quebec without its approval foreign visitors seeking medical assistance, foreign students, refugees, or temporary workers. Moreover, Quebec is entitled to interview candidates for family reunification.

Expanded provincial authority over immigration can be used to better safeguard the labour value of Canadians, to best manage limited resources and infrastructure, and to assert linguistic and cultural standards which the federal government has for too long failed to enforce. In combination with existing powers, such accords would help to manage a sustainable national character and strike a blow against unsustainable growth imperatives which pile profit in aggregate while Canadians flounder.

Conjob business lobbyists and internationalists cannot be allowed to concrete over our most beautiful and productive land. Only 5% of this country is suitable for agriculture. Six million hectares have been lost since the turn of the new millennium. The question should always be: Growth for whom? The reforging of national consciousness in English-Canada is necessary unless we are intent on the doom of Canada by standards of rule which are degenerate, unsustainable, and falsely neutral.

There Will Be Challenges

No matter the new value hierarchy, conditional federal funding and a lack of will for sustained negotiations are primary challenges which will need to be overcome. Quebec exercises substantially more control over taxation than the rest of Canada. It is the only province to have a provincial revenue agency and the least threatened by contingent federal payments. Building provincial revenue agencies is possible, but costly and bound to be contested, as it has been in Saskatchewan and Alberta from 2022 to present day.

Political capital can either be spent to build such provincial institutions, or we can become serious about the provincial responsibility to build fraternity and inculcate a love of history, culture, and rooted thinking.

Provinces Can Restore The Country By Restoring Our Schools

Among the most important issues we face is the chronic neglect and mis-education of our children. The reduction of Canadian identity can be undone as new social ends are selected. Social ends, importantly, which are not principally defined by our ability to attend the global commercial zone and the liberal notions attached to it.

Our children are increasingly unfit for tertiary education, progressively unimpressive relative to their foreign peers. Deep reforms are necessary.

No child should graduate without a grasp of the fundamentals of writing and mathematics, and a knowing of who they are and what they inherit. No child should be raised full of self-contempt. Our provincial parties have a duty to make heritage an inescapable part of life. It is the chiefest responsibility of the provinces in securing our strength and survival. It is a responsibility which, despite lying squarely within provincial control, has been pursued in too weak and half-hearted a way to give the impression that we have any serious parties in government.

The coming generation is conditioned for a post-national future. If we are to believe that we have any friends in power, that this is allowed to go on is a shameful unforced error.

Timid Leadership Is Not An English Canadian Value

The provinces have access to significant powers which are underexploited in English-Canada. Negotiations carry risk, electoral and practical, and if at the time appropriate, should follow after an intentional and prolonged series of measures aimed at shaping the community character. The Canada of tomorrow is bound to be a creative endeavour. Provinces which are responsible and future-facing may find that the character both of voters and federal Parliament evolves as a result of their institutions and policy, such that a pragmatic provincial autonomist footing is no longer useful to nationalist ends. The provinces of today shape at every level of government the voters of tomorrow.

Quebec uses the Notwithstanding Clause consistently and renewably every five years to advance Québécois society. Quebec is assertive about social values and uses all available institutions to perpetuate them.

Restraint is more in the character of English-Canada, but arguably, this is more from lack of vision than supply of morals. We hold few values anymore which jurisprudence can fail. It is jurisprudence, in fact, that informs us of our values as they evolve. Yet timid leadership was a late introduction to British North America. English-Canada will develop when it decides again that it exists. English-Canada will develop when an organized minority insists that it exists. The disprivileging of the organization of the Canadian majority is a socio-historical aberration that can be decisively ended in one or two generations.

Our new view should be total and structural. Organized interests can be fostered not just by patronage and education, but by privileging and helping to grow those sectors of the economy which are most rooted to a particular place over an extended period, and which best create secure conditions for the Canadian people. Empowering farmers, natural resource development, and manufacturing will cement an invested class not so easily liquidated and interchanged.

It is also here, in large part, that Eastern nationalists can best bring Western nationalists onside. Most naturally, but most unlikely if trusted to any party today, there is also the reallocation of patronage capital, the shattering of hostile distribution networks in favour of aligned ones, to be seeded and nurtured to exert effect on the culture. Over time, Canadians will respond to social and material incentives.

English-Canada Needs A Clear And Bold New Vision

Those willing only to think in increments of four years had best hang up their coats and go home. Your failure is as predictable as it is intolerable. There is no returning to 2015. There is no going back to the 1990s. At some point along our development we imbibed a disabling poison. Reverting to a previous stage of illness will be no help to our grandchildren.

What does it even mean to win an election when we are set to lose all that matters? What is it to extend the life of a nation in hospice? What is it to serve mammonite capitalism alone, and to placate the middle class while you barter away their birthright?

The question now is not whether a wrecking ball is required, but whether any existing party will be brought under influence or else dragged kicking into service. Every Canadian must do their duty, must speak their mind, must be ready to deny and reward on the basis of national rejuvenation alone. Canadians must see themselves as spiritual embodiments of the nation, as stewards who watch over the crib of our shared future. Organize. Repudiate. Participate.

We do not require tax cuts or culture war policy slop. We require the change making confidence of Pierre Trudeau. We require a willingness to forge and destroy institutions and to inform the country of the next and inevitable stage in our national development. No cry of execration from anyone would stop Pierre Trudeau from reshaping our social and political life. He did not apologize. He did not back down. He won. Today, most of what is said and thought of our Canada is an echo of a whisper from his mummied lips. Much of what is locked into our new constitution, from oft lamented transfer payments to nebulous ever-reinterpreted Charter restrictions, are the legacy of a man who was determined to transform a nation so totally that there would be nothing left to conserve but his dream. The legacy of a man who slammed shut what conversations were threatening, and cultivated consent after the fact.

To the Conservatives, I say that we had rights before 1982. We had a great country. And looking now to the left and to the right, reading of developments, walking outside, I do not see any of it. To your chagrin and mine, we have traded away our traditional English liberties, along with them the phenomenal reality of being left in peace by our government, for mere scraps of paper, for anarcho-tyranny, and for the politics of friend against enemy, tribe against tribe, state against people. The times have changed. And so must we.

We know that English-Canada ought to be more than a beaten-down strip mall, its best years behind it. We must look dawnward, to the rising of a new philosophy of governance. We must think deeply about our most basic assumptions about what is possible and acceptable. We will not defend as tradition those things which were the vision of our enemies; whose chief interest was for us to forget ourselves. The nature of Anglo-Canadian nationalism is indeterminate. But clear is our duty to fight, and no higher stakes could there be.

References

Smith, Jennifer. The Meaning of Provincial Equality in Canadian Federalism. Working Paper 1998 (1). Kingston, Ont.: Institute of Intergovernmental Relations, Queen‘s University, 1998.