I know and like André Pratte. But he needs to get over his self-indulgent preoccupation with his feelings about Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada’s Founding Values and address the substance of its arguments and the facts it presents. Yet I search in vain in his essay for a serious refutation of the “facts and figures” he so airily waves aside.
In his essay Pratte makes a plea for us to love and tolerate each other better. But it is often the unpleasant duty of those who love us best to say the things we least want but most need to hear. To describe a reasoned, factually supported argument “as if someone had emptied the contents of a garbage truck in my garden” is a superficially clever turn of phrase that impedes rather than assists intelligent discussion.
Would Pratte deny that Quebec nationalism after 1960 was primarily social democratic, devoted to expanding the welfare state and supportive of big government to the point of credulity, in distinct contrast to the older indigenous tradition of entrepreneurship and skepticism about the state? Or that the chief national policy response to the threat of Quebec separatism was to try to offer Quebeckers more and more lavish social programs in order essentially to buy their allegiance?
I simply cannot understand how Pratte deduces that because I make these arguments in Fearful Symmetry I wish Quebec ill. I take no pleasure in the destruction wrought on Quebec society over the last few decades by the bidding war for the loyalty of Quebeckers. And in Fearful Symmetry I also clearly argue that Canada lost its way quite badly in the second half of the 20th century because of the reaction of the national political elite to Quebec nationalism, placing most of the blame where it belongs—outside Quebec. And in conversation with me, Pratte, to his credit one of the signatories of the manifesto Pour un Québec lucide, has expressed the view that my suggested new deal between Quebec and the rest of Canada (more revenue and social policy autonomy for the provinces, in exchange for more power for Ottawa over, for example, protecting Canadians’ economic rights) offers a solid basis for progress.
We should love each other well enough to help one another recover from our mistakes, but the rest of the country is no longer willing to retard its own progress to placate a Quebec society determined to pursue its wrong turning jusqu’au bout. I agree with Pratte that when I look on what we have wrought, it is not pretty. Blaming the messenger, however, will not clean up the mess.
