A Sovereign Idea: Essays on Canada as a Democratic Community

Randall White, a political scientist, is also a Toronto-based economic
consultant and author of Voice of Region: On the Long Journey to Senate
Reform in Canada.

Though they have not given us a new constitution, the Charlottetown and
Meech Lake events of the late 1980s and early 1990s have bequeathed at
least the makings of a respectable equivalent to the Quebec sovereignist
movement in “the rest of the country.” Like some others, Reg
Whitaker, professor of political science at York University in Toronto,
has begun to think that “perhaps a sovereign Quebec” could be seen
“as an option for the death of Canada but for the birth of two new
sovereign nations”—a new Quebec and “a new Canada whose citizens
could begin to live in their own skins, at greater ease with themselves,
freed from a set of artificial bilingual and bicultural identities
imposed by Ottawa.”

The most provocative part of A Sovereign Idea is the tenth and final
chapter, “Quebec and the Canadian Question,” where Whitaker spells
out his particular reasons for entertaining such thoughts. Not everyone
outside Quebec will agree. This may not be what Quebec itself really
wants either, yet there is a cool and rational case to be made for the
view that the separation of Quebec, if it does happen, might actually be
a good thing for almost everyone else.

The other nine chapters in the book, consisting of essays originally
published between 1976 and 1987, help us understand the author’s
personal intellectual journey to Chapter 10. The topics range from
Mackenzie King and Pierre Trudeau to “Between Patronage and
Bureaucracy: Democratic Politics in Transition.” Nonacademic readers
may find Whitaker’s style somewhat dry. Those with strong
neo-conservative convictions are bound to find much with which to
disagree. But even without the last chapter, anyone who is interested in
the study of Canadian politics will find the book interesting. Taken as
a whole, it suggests that “the rest of the country” is making some
progress in understanding the subject. Whatever else, Canada’s future
constitutional debates will be somewhat different from those of the
past.