Beyond the Crystal Ball: Modelling Predictions about Quebec and Canada

Any discussion of a defense relationship between an independent Quebec and United States must be framed, at least initially, around several matters: political conditions which produced separation of Quebec from Canada; domestic and foreign policies announced by Quebec; emerging diplomatic relationship between Quebec and Canada; and, finally, American assessments of future of truncated Canada and viability of Quebec. Owing to United States' political, economic, and military power, American national interests will be enormous factors in emerging defense dialogue with a sovereign Quebec. These, in turn, will be affected by several other issues: geo-strategic conditions; global political convulsions that have shaken world since breakup of Soviet Union; current questions being raised about how to define national security in evolving international environment; internal and external political, economic, social, and cultural pressures which are being placed upon present defense arrangements to respond to these two conditions; and the analytic requirement that must underlie any sort of robust institutional transformation (1) of current security arrangements. This latter point provides members of international community, including a sovereign Quebec, with an unprecedented opportunity to engage in a substantive global debate on how to define national security in a rapidly changing world. But before Quebec joins this dialogue, it will need to establish its legitimacy as a nation-state. After being granted diplomatic recognition by United States, obvious path to affirm it, agree both Parti Quebecois (PQ) and Bloc Quebecois (BQ), is to seek admission to NATO and NORAD. The question then boils down to willingness of United States, dominant power in both Atlantic Alliance and NORAD, to accede to Quebec's application to enter these security arrangements as a partner. Quebec will need to devise a political/diplomatic strategy, with appropriate tactics, to make its case to administration and to Congress. This will not be easy for a number of reasons. First, new 105th Congress seems to be somewhat more isolationist than its recent predecessors. In addition, agenda of new Congress, if president's 1997 State of Union Address is any indication, will probably be a domestic one. To extent that administration has addressed itself to foreign policy and defense matters, they have been discussed against backdrop of an economic agenda. The enhancement and enlargement of Department of Commerce, along with its politicization, seem to confirm assertion that expanding trade is nation's principal foreign policy objective. The delinking of human rights concerns with trade in case of China tends to confirm this. This should not, however, be taken to mean that promotion of democracy is not or will not be an important part of America's foreign and defense policies. With regard to new northern sovereignty, United States will be very interested in type of government set up in an independent Quebec. Unfortunately, in aftermath of 1995 Quebec Referendum, Mr. Parizeau made some intemperate remarks regarding province's ethnics that have not gone unnoticed in United States despite sincere and energetic efforts of Premier Bouchard and PQ to distance themselves from them. Will former premier's comments affect a nascent Quebec-American defense dialogue? (2) The military threat to United States has diminished dramatically since collapse of Soviet Union in 1991 even though successor state, Russia, still possesses a vast nuclear arsenal. (3) The facts that North Warning System is operating at a reduced level, that NORAD was quietly renewed in 1996 by both nations, that Clinton administration revealed its new defense policy in 1994, and that 1994 Defence White Paper continued with process of scaling back size and missions of Canadian Forces point convincingly to conclusion that military threat to North America has substantially receded and that this is understood in both capitals. …

The coming to power of the Parti Quebecois in Quebec has focused much attention on the climate of opinion in Quebec and the rest of Canada, particularly with the prospect of a future referendum on independence. Using data from a national election study and from recent public opinion polls in Quebec, this article examines the strength and stability of support for independence in Quebec and of electoral support for the Parti Quebecois which led to its victory. The data suggest that support for the Parti Quebecois is neither a transient phenomenon nor unrelated to support for independence, which has remained relatively constant over a number of years. Finding that support for both independence and the Parti Quebecois is highest among younger, better educated respondents, and that it relates to fundamental attitudes toward the country, the article hypothesizes that the struggle for independence in Quebec is likely to be a protracted one whose outcome is as yet uncertain. Lawrence LeDuc is Professor of Political Science, University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario. POQ 41(1977) 347-355 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.123 on Mon, 18 Jul 2016 05:09:46 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Globalization seemed like an irresistible, unstoppable force. Political plasticity seemed to be pushed to higher levels, as globalization accelerated and impacted all humankind. The development of larger units such as the European Union signaled, for many, the end of the nation state – a borderless world. Economic and technological forces seemed to be forcing globalization, and all humankind, down a one-way road. On closer examination, however, we realize that globalization has been taking place in a fractured manner: Just as economic and technological forces have been pushing us toward the global, basic identity needs have been pulling us back toward the local. Thus, just as Europe is integrating, there is Brexit and Basque and Scottish independence. Just as the North American Free Trade Agreement comes into place, there is Quebec nationalism and the effort by Quebec nationalists to break away from the rest of Canada. The deglobalization movement has been accelerated by the rise of authoritarian strongmen and their extremist nationalist supporters. As this chapter shows, it seems that basic identity needs and allegiances to local groups and nations have influenced developments, so that political plasticity remains limited in this domain.

The victory of the separatist Parti Quebecois (P.Q.) on November 15, 1976, set off the liveliest public debate in Canadian history. For the first time since Confederation the unity of the country is seriously threatened.After the election the Toronto Globe and Mail made a cool analysis of the situation and concluded that the P.Q. victory “leaves us with no excuse for failure to recognize that this country is in great danger.” Donald Creighton, dean of Canadian historians, stated bluntly that the country now faces’ ‘division and possible ruin.''No one doubts that the dangers are well founded. The P.Q. was rowned in 1967 for the express purpose of establishing political sovereignty in Quebec. Rene Levesque, the dynamic and tough-minded leader of the party, has declared on numerous occasions that independence is “an absolute necessity.” His government has already issued guidelines for a referendum and set the fall of 1979 for the first vote.

The election of the separatist Parti Quebecois (PQ) in September 2012, after a decade on the opposition benches, was greeted in the rest of Canada with mass indifference, along with a dash of media...

Preamble The first part of this article was presented at the Trilateral Symposium in February 1995. It is reproduced here with only minor modifications. Part II is an addition and extension made necessary by a profound shift in Canadian attitudes consequent upon the unexpected (at least in Canada outside Quebec) closeness of the 1995 Quebec referendum on sovereignty. My purpose at the symposium was to show how the obvious challenge to the Canadian state posed by the advocates of Quebec sovereignty was in itself compounded by other challenges, including a serious fiscal crisis and emerging notions of aboriginal sovereignty and self-government. After that event, my purpose in the second part is to show how these other challenges, including the continental integrative forces set loose by the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement and by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), alter perceptions about the viability of a sovereign Quebec and, at the same time, are bound up in some future resolution of the Quebec sovereignty program. The changing relationships between the three nations of North America are, certainly for Canadians and probably for Americans and Mexicans, in part dependent on the popular and political answer to the question of whether or not there are three North American nations or whether there are, in some future reality, four nations (or more) with legitimate claims to international recognition. Part I--Challenges to the Canadian State Canada may be thought of as a work of fiction. As a kind of text. As a sign, a symbol that stands in opposition to a political fragmentation that is in fact presupposed by the federal bargain that was effected in 1867. (1) Canada, the idea of Canada, signifies a unity that never existed. Canada is a nation-state built on the principle of division and that principle defined This division is traditionally defined by French and English By accident, the English General Wolfe defeated the French General Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham. Prophetically, both leaders died there. It was no accident that the English could not, as a consequence, subdue the French. It was no accident that the French could not persuade the English. Canadians ever since have lived in what Hugh MacLennan later called the two solitudes, each with a very different idea of a place called Canada. In understanding this primal division between French and English, we recognize that the impulse many French-speaking Quebeckers feel is to separate from Canada, and the idea of a sovereign Quebec is, quite precisely, a challenge to the idea of a sovereign What I want to argue here is that this is not the only challenge to the idea of a sovereign and unified Canada, and that the multiplicity of challenges to the Canadian state, the emergence of new challenges, means that Canada can never again be what it once was. Finally, I want to show that what Canada will become is not something that Canadians will, by themselves, determine. Beyond the Quebec sovereigntist program, the other leading challenges to the Canadian state are at least these six: - Canada's fiscal crisis is severe and increasingly defined by the concerns of the International Monetary Fund. The public debt--both federal and provincial--comes to almost 800 billion dollars. Per capita, the debt is half again the U.S. public debt. In 1996 it amounted to almost $26,000 for every man, woman, and child or, thought of differently, to almost $57,000 for every Canadian in the workforce. In the context of the challenges to the Canadian state, Canadian governments have reached the limit of raising additional tax revenue; therefore to bring down the debt they must significantly cut public expenditures, which means cutting programs, many of which were designed to hold the country together. (2) - Aboriginal claims to self-government remain unsettled. Again, this is a matter of incompatible views. …

Philosophizing with a hammer? A critique of Mirowski's markomata informed by continental philosophy

Almost from the very beginning of economic science the notion of capital has been the subject of numerous controversies. The main reason for the concept's controversial nature is that it explains interest and profit. In Marxian theory, where 'manner of production' determines forms of activities, mutual relationships and life of individuals, capital appears as a social phenomenon i.e. social relation. Goods and money are not capital by themselves but become capital in the capitalist way of production. Economics mainstream is based on methodological individualism upon which explanation of social phenomena and processes must be derived from individual behavior and motivation. Capital, therefore, is not a product of capitalism as a socially and historically specific form of economic organization, but is rather perceived as connected to the individual and his or her rational behavior. Rational choice is the basic and sometimes the only explanatory factor in the neoclassic theories of capital. Although theories of human and cultural capital point out the interdependence between individual activity and choice on the one hand, and social position on the other hand in the process of capitalization, the connection remains in the background and somehow unclear. A more explicit indication of the interdependence between social structure and choice can be found in the theory of social capital. The goal of this paper is to explore the role of rational choice theory in explaining the nature of capital.

Reviewed by: The Sixties: Passion, Politics, and Style Alvin Finkel The Sixties: Passion, Politics, and Style. Edited by Dimitry Anastakis. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008. Pp. 208, $75.00 cloth, $27.95 paper Efforts to capture the essence of the 1960s are becoming popular in the historical literature of Western countries, including Canada. This collection of papers attempts loosely to find the zeitgeist of the decade in movements and individual actions that challenged the ubiquitous hegemony of modernist ideology during the early postwar period. Though the emphasis is on Canadian developments, most of the essays attempt to draw parallels with developments elsewhere, specifically the United States, and at least one essay deals entirely with the United States. Overall, indeed, a limitation of this collection is that any real sense of a set of changes with truly global reach, or even just a reach across the industrialized nations, simply does not emerge. After a modest introduction for a set of essays drawn from papers for a conference, the book begins quite badly with a rambling reminiscence of the Quiet Revolution by journalist Gretta Chambers. Disappointingly, one of the other two Quebec articles in the collection also seems to have no place in the book. Olivier Courteaux outlines Charles de Gaulle’s reasons for supporting Quebec independence publicly during his visit to Canada in 1967 – reasons that said very [End Page 582] little about Quebec and a great deal about de Gaulle. If de Gaulle himself symbolized something particular about the 1960s, this biographical piece does not reveal what that may be. But The Sixties does prove effective in presenting several identifiable sub-themes for its emphasis on the divide between modernism and its challengers. Frances Early’s essay on the Voice of Women (VOW), the only piece in the collection that deals with social activists, makes use of that organization’s changing discourse and activities throughout the decade to demonstrate the shift from maternalism to second-wave feminism in left-wing women’s public activities during the decade. In practice, though, the organization found that maternalist tropes could be subverted towards radical ends. So, for example, in 1966, vow began a knitting campaign to provide clothing for Vietnamese children as a means of publicizing its opposition to the American-led war against North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam. The ways in which changing notions of gender affected women’s ideas of their place in Canadian life, explored in the Early article, is picked up by Kristy A. Holmes in an article on artist Joyce Wieland and her ambivalent attitudes to Pierre Trudeau and his notions about the necessity to have reason triumph over passion. Holmes presents Trudeau’s notions of citizenship marked by dispassionate reasoning as male and technocratic. Unfortunately the imprecision in Holmes’s touchy-feely interpretations of Wieland’s work make Wieland’s gender challenge to Trudeau unclear and unconvincing. Christopher Dummitt is on steadier ground as he examines the challenges to automobile culture in the 1960s, particularly as represented by the figures of Ralph Nader and Jane Jacobs, the former with an exposé of the flimsiness of the vehicles produced by the Big Three, and the latter with a demonstration of the bankruptcy of the modern city with its fixation on the automobile as the centrepiece of urban planning. Defenders of the modernist vision ‘found shelter behind the ideal trait of manly modernism: reasoned objectivity’ (88). Dummitt suggests that Jacobs’s critique of planning was gendered, the viewpoint of someone who lived in the communities that modern planning was creating rather than someone who drove through those communities on freeways meant to take middle-class male suburbanites to downtown offices. Several articles on urban architecture and urban renewal provide the most interesting and interconnected papers in The Sixties. France Vanlaethem, putting the spotlight on Montreal, notes the questioning evident by the sixties regarding modernist architecture in Quebec and [End Page 583] the rest of Canada. An interest in rehabilitating the past clashed with the architectural philosophy, with its emphasis on innovation and gigantism, that had characterized the 1950s. Meanwhile, as Krys Verrall argues, in Halifax and Nova Scotia generally as...

The Parti Quebecois' 1976 electoral victory precipitated Canada's recent constitutional crisis. Four years later the PQ suffered the defeat of its cherished referendum proposal for sovereignty-association. Yet, within a year the party swept back into power in the subsequent provincial election. This dramatic reversal of electoral fortune suggests the strength and durability of the PQ's partisan base. Analyses of cross-sectional and panel survey data gathered in 1974, 1979, and 1980 confirm this, and indicate that the PQ has profited handsomely from both conversion and replacement processes catalyzed by low levels of national regime and community support. Although the PQ has not achieved its dream of a sovereign Quebec, its protracted campaign to do so has shifted the grounds of constitutional debate to a polarity of moderate and extreme change. This fact, and the party's strong electoral base, ensure that it will be a formidable force in Quebec politics for the foreseeable future.

In just three decades rational choice theory has emerged as one of the most active, influential, and ambitious subfields in the discipline of political science. Rational choice theory contends that political behavior is best explained through the application of its supposedly “value-neutral” assumptions which posit man as a self-interested, purposeful, maximizing being. Through the logic of methodological individualism, assumptions about human nature are treated as empirical discoveries. My central argument is that by assuming that self-interest is an empirically established component of human nature, rational choice theory supports and perpetuates a political life which is antithetical to important tenets of normative democratic theory. Rational choice theory offers an incoherent account of democratic citizenship and produces a political system which shows a constant biased against political change and pursuit of the public interest. This article concludes by discussing the merits of democratic deliberation for achieving these transformative ends.

The years 1990-93 were a critical moment in Russia’s political development. This book provides a systematic explanation of outcomes of constitutional bargaining processes in Russia, which radically reshaped the institutions of the Russian state: removing Russia from constitutional subordination to the Soviet Union in 1990; creating a presidency and a constitutional court in 1991; and restructuring the relationship between the central state and its component federal units with the passage of three Federal Treaties in 1992. The book explores the reasons for these outcomes and identifies why there were consistent delays to the passage of a new Russian constitution as well as why negotiations eventually broke down. The book assesses the plausibility of different theoretical approaches to constitutional choice and argues that the role of uncertainty (and politician's strategic responses to uncertainty) in shaping constitutional outcomes has been under-explored by rational choices approaches to constitutional bargaining. Using a rich set of source materials - including roll call votes, parliamentary records, unpublished parliamentary and constitution commission documents, Russian newspapers - the book provides a detailed study of Russian politician's decision making about constitutional choices. It is a valuable resource to those interested in Russia and post-communist politics, the origins of political institutions, comparative government, democratisation and development studies.

People, Firms and Society - Three Proposals for Aligning Personal Motives, Firm's Goals and Societal Needs

Philip Resnick. Thinking English Canada. Toronto: Stoddart, 1994. xii + 129 pp. $19.95 cloth. David Bercuson and Barry Cooper. Deconfederation: Canada Without Quebec. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1991. xi + 180 pp. $14.95 paper. Robert Young. The Secession of Quebec and the Future of Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995. xiv + 376 pp. $17.95 paper. Gordon Gibson. Plan B: The Future of the Rest of Canada. Vancouver: The Fraser Institute, 1994. x + 217 pp. $19.95 paper. Alan Freeman and Patrick Grady. Dividing the House: Planning for a Canada Without Quebec. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1995. xii + 257 pp. A recent letter to the editor of the Toronto Globe and Mail reflected a deep-seated confusion currently besetting Canadians. (1) Under the heading Search of National Meaning, the writer questioned a recent article covering St.-Jean-Baptiste Day, referred to as Quebec's national holiday. How can this usage of the term `national' relate to the Globe's reference to itself as `Canada's National Newspaper,' the writer asked. Does this mean the Globe and Mail implicitly accepts the idea of Canada as two nations, or is Canada a nation which includes a province with a National Assembly and related national institutions which in turn includes Indian nations? A confusion of terminologies to be sure. Yet, more significantly, this simple letter hints at the broader and more complicated political and sociological confusion at the root of the country's past thirty years of constitutional wreckage. For, at the heart of Canada's unresolved and seemingly intractable unity debate lie profound disagreements over how to reconcile the concepts of state and nation. If the books reviewed here in some ways reflect this confusion, they also challenge the model of Canada as a single nation-state. In fact, if these books can be assumed to represent an emergent, yet quite divided opinion of the unity impasse from an English-Canadian perspective, then one's hopes for Canadian constitutional closure in the near future grow only dimmer. These volumes make a frank and, at times, bold attempt to delineate a new agenda for English Canada within the unity debate. Written amid the fulminations which have characterized the years since the Meech Lake and Charlottetown debacles, these volumes attest to a new and greater willingness on the part of English Canadians to carve out a constitutional agenda that perhaps, for the first time, genuinely reflects the concerns of what might be called a reluctant nation, English Canada. (2) This willingness to speak out represents a significant shock to the conventional political wisdom that necessarily included Quebec within all conceptions of the Canadian nation. For decades, any discussion in Canadian federal political circles about the issue of English Canada has clashed with this increasingly frayed federalist paradigm. Thus, as Reg Whitaker has written, the gospel of national unity, as it has been played out on the Canadian political stage over the past thirty years, has stifled the emergence of an authentic English-Canadian voice. (3) Yet, the period in Canada between the failed Charlottetown Accord and the recent referendum in Quebec has seen a thorough breakdown in the pan-Canadian federal model. A conflict has emerged from the context that Peter Russell calls mega-constitutional politics, in which agreement on the very essence of the Canadian political community has all but vanished. It is at this mega level, as Russell suggests, that disagreements over formal constitutional principles have become overshadowed by powerful, emotional divisions between different groups' perceptions of identity and of belonging in the Canadian polity. (4) Jane Jenson has similarly described this divisive period as one marked by the attempts of various groups to assert their collective identities--to name nations--wherein much more was involved than the division of powers in federalism, self-government for Aboriginal peoples, recognition of the distinctiveness of Quebec society, the composition and role of the Senate, or even the economic and social consequences of embedding a neo-liberal agenda in the Constitution. …

Bills of Rights as Instruments of Nation-Building in Multinational States: The Canadian Charter and Quebec Nationalism