I'm old enough to remember the first Quebec independence referendum in 1980, and it was a scary time. "I fear a PQ majority above all," I had written in a note to myself on the eve of the 1976 election that did, in fact, produce a PQ majority. And the next four years were surely the high point of the independence movement. The rejection of the independence referendum 40%/60% was no small relief to me. I guess I have been glad about that result ever since.
I feared it because I took it very seriously. Quebec had been going through an enormous change through the 1960s and 1970s. For a century before that, there had been a sort of consensus in francophone Quebec that what guarded its survival was being at base a rural, traditional, agricultural, and Catholic society.
Of course Quebec was never that monolithic, and the "revolution" of the 1960 was partly the decision of modern, urban Quebeckers to stop pretending that real Quebecers lived on small farms with big families beside even bigger churches. But Quebec's rapid shift from traditional values to modern ones, if one can put it so simply, must have been profoundly unsettling.
Had the change in Quebec doomed it to being swallowed up by Canada and by North America and ceasing to be seriously different. Did modernity make assimilation just so much more likely? If it did, then independence leading to a strong state able to create new institutions for a new kind of Quebec seemed absolutely essential to many Quebeckers.
If I had accepted that an independent state was the essential condition for a thriving, growing and evolving French-speaking society in Quebec, I might have accepted independence as necessary. I didn't accept it however. I believed Canada and confederation need not be a threat to that kind of Quebec.
And in the long run I guess I was right. There have been another referendum in Quebec, and several PQ majorities. But by then I was pretty confident that the new Quebec had rooted itself beyond challenge, and with that certainy the case for independence being essential faded. I did not take the election of Paul St-Pierre Plamondon twith any of the anxiety that the election of Rene Levesque produced in me.
It it has been the same with the independence movement in Alberta. I confess I have never taken its cause or its leaders very seriously at any time. The polls have not yet closed in Alberta as I write this. I certainly have some concern about the outcome. I mean no disrespect to the people of Alberta, but I don't respect Alberta's claim to need independence the way I did Quebec's claim forty five years ago. And I can't think of any significant thing independence would achieve for Albertans if it did, God forbid, become independent. On verra.
