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The exchange was interesting enough and well-moderated, but it left me with an uneasy feeling that unless Prime Minister Mark Carney is doing a great deal more heavy lifting in policy terms than appears from his hectic schedule of intercontinental photo opportunities and energetic posturing, as in last week’s outrageous call for the trial of the prime minister of Israel by the International Criminal (Kangaroo) Court, we could be in for quite a sleigh ride. It is clear that Chrétien and Harper have both effectively abandoned the Pierre Trudeau policy of defending the cultural rights of both official communities throughout the country. They simply minimize the implicit impact of Quebec’s sovereignty in fragmenting the country and completely discount the rights exercised by English-speaking Quebecers for the last 260 years, while conceding that French Canadians outside Quebec, apart from the right to communicate with the federal government in French, have rights in no way distinct from those of non-Anglophone immigrants. This was a perfect case of Irving Layton’s description of Canadian foreign policy in the 1960’S: “The spitefulness of the weak as moral indignation.”
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Harper’s reference to “serious problems” if the federal government does not approve the pipelines necessary to take Alberta and Saskatchewan oil and natural gas to the markets clamouring for it (east, west, and south), was a genteel euphemism for what he must have known to be the overwhelming likelihood that Alberta would simply secede, become a landlocked republic, renegotiate the XL pipeline with the United States to get its energy to the U.S. and through it to the Gulf of America (Mexico). It could then eliminate all transfer payments and personal income taxes, and operate simultaneously as a petrostate and a tax haven state and rush forward into fantastic self-enrichment. In those circumstances, it would be right to choose that course.
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The casual person attending the C.D. Howe discussions would have no idea that if the federal government does not promptly promise a serious plan to build pipelines Alberta wants and does not start to defend the rights of cultural minorities in Quebec and elsewhere then there will be more than Stephen Harper’s cool-headed conjuration of “serious problems.” And neither reflected that Quebec is purporting to write its own Constitution, having claimed to have abolished any status for the English language in Quebec, including in federal government offices. Only the importation of large numbers of Haitians, North Africans, and Lebanese to replace Quebec’s post-Christian collapsed birth-rate with some sort of francophones, but people relatively uninterested in Quebec nationalism, might prevent an independence victory in the next referendum.
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Neither speaker ventured guidance on the course likely to be taken by Prime Minister Carney. No one is really defending federalism in Quebec or Alberta or anywhere else on any basis except habit and vague future potential. The new prime minister has spoken of great projects of the kind that built Canada, such as the transcontinental railway, the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, the Saint Lawrence Seaway, the Montreal World’s Fair, and a number of giant hydroelectric project from Niagara Falls to Manicouagan 5 (the Daniel Johnson Dam) to Churchill Falls. There is some reason to hope that Carney has some ideas about uplifting Canadians. But if he clings to his public record of economic self-strangulation through the green psychosis, and a nagging authoritarian state slapping down personal material ambitions as insufficiently altruistic, his government and the country will disintegrate with startling speed. There was little hint of this last week, in the name of C.D. Howe, one of the greatest builders of Canada, (American though he originally was).
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National Post
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