Just over 30 years ago, senior Quebec bureaucrat Jacques Parizeau left Quebec City for a train trip to Calgary to attend a federal-provincial meeting. In some ways, that trip changed Canada.
Parizeau says he left home a federalist and returned a separatist. He bought a membership in the nascent Parti Québécois, became a driving force in the sovereignty movement and eventually became the premier who in 1995 took sovereignty within 50,000 votes of winning.
This spring, Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe has embarked on his own journeys into the heart of Canada, presumably something of a 20th anniversary present to himself since he became the first elected BQ MP in a summer 1990 byelection, vowing to stay in Ottawa no more than a term or two until Quebec was independent.
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Twenty years later, with a handsome federal pension waiting when the 62-year-old decides to retire and with support for the separatist project apparently at a low ebb, Duceppe is in Atlantic Canada and Toronto this week and will soon head west to a public debate in Calgary.
He will speak to students, meet privately with academics and business representatives and put himself as much as possible on English-language television.
But don’t expect this to be a Parizeau trip in reverse, with Duceppe returning with a newfound respect for Canada. The motives are about bolstering the sovereignist cause.
The BQ leader’s English Canada tour has a two-track purpose.
For his English audiences, the goal is to come across as a reasonable, respectful, passionate democrat who has rejected Canada but not Canadians. “Canada is a great country,” he likes to say, “but it’s not my country.”
The message will be that the breakup of the country is inevitable so accept it.
Parizeau liked to talk about sovereignist arguments as an unending trip to the dentist. Eventually, you just want the pain to stop.
For his Quebec audience, Duceppe says his trip is to take Canada’s pulse, to see if there is any appetite in English Canada to give Quebec the quasi-independent status it wants as the price for keeping it in a loose version of Confederation.
No matter what Canadians tell him, Duceppe will conclude there is no Canadian appetite to accommodate nationalist demands. This message will be delivered with all the passion and hyperbole he can muster.
Canada doesn’t understand you! Canada will never accommodate your aspirations! We need our own country!
The wild card in this trip, the one Duceppe’s handlers are no doubt praying for, is some intemperate reaction to him, some heckler in Calgary with an anti-French epitaph, people being rude or (the potential mother lode) demonstrators stomping on a Quebec flag.
Any rudeness or provocation will become part of the Quebec sovereignist propaganda machine.
A film of a tiny band of rowdies in Brockville, Ont., wiping their feet on the Quebec flag in 1989 during the Meech Lake debate remains a staple in the separatist portrayal of Canada. With spirits flagging in the movement, an intemperate moment in Western Canada would be a gift that keeps on giving.
