Thinking English Canada

J.L. Granatstein is a professor of history at York University, the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s, and the author of The Good
Fight.

University of British Columbia political scientist Philip Resnick has
become one of the better-known commentators on Canada’s constitutional
debates, not least for the way he has approached the idea of “the rest
of Canada” or what will be left if Quebec separates. In this book,
published before the 1995 referendum in Quebec but after the Bloc
Québécois became the Opposition to Jean Chrétien’s Liberals,
Resnick raises many of the questions that trouble federalists. Is there
an English-Canadian nation? Can it survive without Quebec? Or can it
survive with Quebec and an unreconstructed Constitution? Good questions
all, and even if Resnick’s answers all presuppose that massive changes
are needed to Confederation, there is much here to chew on. But does the
country really not work? Quebec’s complaints are frankly spurious, as
any who see what Quebec City can already do on its own should surmise.
But are British Columbia’s and Alberta’s demands any more
reasonable, any more deserving of a hearing? Must we reopen the
Constitution? Do the claims of aboriginals for self-government (never
defined) really deserve credence? And should huge land claims be
entertained?

Resnick doesn’t really claim that the whole house has to be
renovated, but he does write as the agent for the contractors, ready to
send in the workers with crowbars. Perhaps we need this, but I for one
believe that the house can be saved and modernized without wholesale
structural changes. Despite the breastbeating, Canada does work. The
country regularly ranks at the top of the UN pecking order, and there
must be some reasons for this. Surely the system can’t be as broken
down as Resnick and others suggest.