Goodbye, Quebec?

A few years ago I wrote a book with the central proposition that Canada would be better off without Quebec. It was published in 1999 under the title Time to Say Goodbye: The Case for Getting Quebec Out of Canada. In it I suggested that the political values of Quebec and the rest of the country are incompatible. One indication of this is the independence movement, supported by slightly more than half of Quebec’s francophone population. But the mismatch is equally evident in the attitude of the other half, which overwhelmingly sees Quebec as its one and only political home and believes that the federal government should hand over an undefined but ever increasing share of its revenues, responsibilities and status to the Quebec legislature. To make their position perfectly clear Quebeckers consistently elect the majority of their members of Parliament from the Bloc Québécois, a political party whose only discernible idea is the achievement of Quebec’s independence, and...