The blogosphere in the United States is talking about the impending collapse of Canada. Canadian bloggers need to be plugged in too.
Captain Ed looks at an essay by
Austin Bay about the breakup of Canada. It makes for interesting reading. I think Austin misses a key element of his future history in that any provinces that seek statehood would probably have to settle for territorial status with the United States, especially the more populous provinces. That's because the House of Representatives is limited by statute to 435 members. New states get new representatives by a process of reappropriation, which means the larger states lose one or two seats each that get redistributed to the newly minted states. The dilution of power would be resisted for some time, and until that gets worked out, there would be no statehood for the ex-provinces of Canada.
But that's not what I really wanted to write about. I've been wondering what brought us to this point. I think Canada may have been doomed from the start because of a decision to form a country along cultural lines instead of geographical ones. Here's what I mean.
The United States was formed out of 13 original colonies. Subsequent states entered the Union but always as a state, never as a cultural entity. Different states might have very unique cultural identities (Louisiana, Utah, etc), but no special federal recognition would every come of it (indeed, Utah had to agree to a common federal definition of marriage in order to join the Union). Given the growing number of states, there was stability. Even if one state or another felt dissatisfied with their lot in the federation, there were dozens of others who thought things were quite fine. In fact, only once in their history did the states align themselves so clearly on one side of an issue or another that the Union was threatened. That issue was slavery, and nothing since, no foreign war, no domestic crisis, has ever provoked such a destablizing polarization. With 50 states, it is unlikely anything ever will.
In Canada, we don't have 50 states sharing the effort to hold up our federation. We have 3 cultures on which the country was founded, of which only one still exists. When Canada was forged from the colonies of British North America, the thought was to recognize the English, the French, and the First Peoples (aka First Nations aka Native North Americans aka Indians). Remember at the time, the First Peoples were still a potent, if splintered, force. Only 50 years earler they had played a major role in the War of 1812. As for the French in Quebec, they had maintained their language and culture and religion, in part because of the vigorous work of the Catholic Church in isolating and nurturing Quebec. The French Revolution was boling over, and the rise of secularism in France, prompted that. As for the English, well, they were still British in mind and spirit, and part of the glorious British Empire that had yet to peak in its power.
Because the thinking was cultural and not geographical, the system could not grow, but only shrink. In the United States, the addition of new states (geographical entities) added to the stablity, as more and more players became committed to the success of the Union. In Canada, the First Nations went to their reserves and suffered cultural collapse. Today, they are a failed people. The English of English Canada, in the aftermath of World War II, and in a process that was accelerated under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and subsequent Liberal Prime Ministers, abandoned their "right" in the recognition of the growing numbers of non-British immigrants. "English Canada" became what is known as "the Rest of Canada". It is no longer tied together by loyalty to the Crown, but only by shared economic need -- hardly the stuff of which anthoms are written. The other cultural group, the French of Quebec, have survived (in no small part because of the indulgence and largesse of the Rest of Canada, who now outnumber them 3 to 1). More than survived, though -- they have maintained that unity of purpose that made them one of the three legs upon which Canada was built.
But the other two legs are gone. As a country, Canada stands only because the Rest of Canada continues to try and teeter the country on top of the only leg remaining. Federal money goes in large quantities to Quebec in order to entice them to stay in Confederation, to keep that single leg upright and continue to prop up the country. It's no wonder that many want to secede. For them, it is a mixture of a desire to make their own future unfettered by concerns in other parts of the country, other parts that have given up on their original role in keeping Canada together. It is also a realization that the effort spent by the Rest of Canada on keeping Quebec would probably better be spent on their own problems and on their own future.
The Rest of Canada is coming to that realization now. Anecdotal evidence suggests that more and more people in the Rest of Canada would just skip a referendum altogether and just send Quebec on its way. With all three legs gone, the system would collapse completely. But this might not be a bad thing in the end. Any engineer will tell you that a system that is wildly unstable is dangerous. It is also expensive, requiring constant work and input of energy to remain in a quasi-stable state. If it allowed to collapsed, the components will seek the low-energy state. From there a new system can be created, hopefully in a new configuration that is highly stable.
Our new national anthem: "The Highly Stable Configuration of Canada".
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AUTHOR:
DATE: 4/28/2005 10:02:00 AM
TITLE: Help out the police
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