35. For once ideologically restrained and tight-lipped

Unpublished
October 31st 1995

Dear Letters Editor:
Lead by Rhéal Séguin and André Picard, your news coverage and analysis of the referendum campaign was remarkable for its sensitive interrogation. Even your senatorial opinion-makers were for once ideologically restrained and tight-lipped.
Following this brief respite, come the day after the decision, the editorial economists are back to their old tricks decreeing that the Québec government must return to “its real problems”, namely its D-E-B-T; it must also lose its “goal of independence”. (Editorials, 31st October)
If this is any indication of what federalists call ‘a change of attitude’ towards Québec (or similar aboriginal demands for self-determination) we will ironically continue burning the dwindling resources of scant funds and common political patience.
In hoping for resumed negotations, editorialists and provincial leaders should be made to repetitiously recite the post-referendum line emanting from the elected government of Québec: “we don’t want to be distinct, we want to be a nation”.
Canada has already been broken by the current gaggle of provincial overlords and slavering federal anti-statists of all parties and so any further devolution of federal authority will, in the last instance, only exacerbate the fears of most innocent, maple leaf-waving, Canadian patriots.
In a true liberal federation, sovereign demands by the majority of aborginal peoples and the close-to-majority of Québeckers would have been accommodated. If we as a ‘smart, mature and caring country’ had been counselled by less self-serving and self-glorifying politicians, opinion-makers and financiers, we might have arrived at a more amicable consensus long ago.