Is It All Quebec’s Fault?

Brian Lee Crowley begins Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada’s Founding Values by dating the onset of decline in Canada’s work ethic, family life and fertility with great precision—June 22, 1960—because that is the day the Union Nationale government of Quebec was replaced by Jean Lesage’s Liberals, whose “Quiet Revolution” he holds responsible for the unleashing of secular nationalism in Quebec. For the next 300 pages, he argues that the growth of Canada’s government sector, the decline in our productivity growth, the increase in our divorce rates, the rise in suicides, lack of self-control among youth and much, much else are caused by the Québécois nationalist dynamic and the “bidding war” it produced between federal and provincial governments for the allegiance of the francophone Quebeckers.

If his arguments are even half correct, we would all (even Quebeckers) have been far better off if the 1981 referendum had succeeded and Quebec had gone its...