Last Best Hope: Quebec Secession-Lincoln's Lesson for Canada

Terry A. Crowley is a professor of history at the University of Guelph,
and the author of Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality.

The fate of the nation remains the most pressing political problem
facing Canada. The country’s inability to handle its constitutional
problems continues to raise the spectre of Canada’s dissolution. With
the number of francophone Québécois favoring some form of sovereignty
now reaching some 60 percent and with the return of the Parti
Québécois in 1998, the durability of the federal system remains in
doubt.

There are lessons to be learned from history, but most of them are
negative. The reorganization of the Nigerian federation, for example,
was accompanied by bloody armed insurrections. Similarly, the United
States fought a brutal civil war over states’ rights, in which the
question of slavery crystalized antagonisms over the larger
constitutional issue.

University of Manitoba law instructor Bryan Schwartz believes that
Canadians can be informed by the example of Abraham Lincoln because he
was the American president who insured that the nation prevailed. In a
short and rambling essay, Schwartz does not attempt to draw parallels
and contrasts between Canada and the antebellum United States in the way
that historians have. Lincoln’s thought here stands for what Schwartz
proposes as a “visible federalism,” but this concept amounts to
little more than an assertion of power by Ottawa. If “Quebec attempted
to separate unilaterally, Canadian authorities would not only have the
constitutional right, but the constitutional duty, to use the threat of
force or actual force.”

While this doomsday scenario has been contemplated by military
planners, Canadians would better concentrate on the more positive models
provided by the separation of Norway from Sweden at the beginning of the
20th century or the creation of the Czech Republic and Slovakia more
recently. On these developments, readers will find Robert A. Young’s
The Secession of Quebec (1997) much more valuable than this myopic and
misleading account that shows little genuine appreciation of Quebec’s
thrust for independence.