"Quebec is not an island in mid-Atlantic. Its separation from Canada would spell the death of Canada," wrote André Laurendeau in one of his Le Devoir articles of the early 1960s. A trifle grandiloquent perhaps. But an appropriate point of entry to the two books under review.
There is no need to belabour the place that Quebec has occupied in the English Canadian imaginaire over the past 50 years, ever since the Quiet Revolution. A modernizing nationalism, the rise of the Parti Québécois, Bill 101, the 1980 and 1995 referendums on sovereignty, the Supreme Court reference case on Quebec secession, the emergence of the Bloc Québécois at the federal level—all are testament to this. Yet the debate about Quebec’s relationship to the rest of Canada is no closer to resolution today than it was at the time of the epic battle between Pierre Trudeau and René Lévesque 30 years ago.
Reconquering Canada: Quebec Federalists Speak Up for Change...
Philip Resnick is a political scientist, long associated with the University of British Columbia. He has published widely on political topics, books such as Letters to a Québécois Friend (McGill Queen’s University Press, 1990), The Masks of Proteus: Canadian Reflections on the State (McGill Queen’s University Press, 1990), Twenty-First Century Democracy (McGill Queen’s University Press, 1997), The European Roots of Canadian Identity (Broadview Press, 2005) and The Labyrinth of North American Identities (University of Toronto Press, 2012). As a poet, he authored a number of collections in the 1970s and ’80s, primarily on Greek-rooted themes. His most recent collection of poems, Footsteps of the Past, was published in September 2015 by Ronsdale Press.
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