Canada’s May 2011 election resulted in the eclipse of the Bloc Québécois as a significant actor on the federal stage, and in the months that have followed the Parti Québécois has experienced severe internecine conflict. It would be tempting to assume, as a number of commentators have been prone to do, that the issue of Quebec sovereignty is a thing of the past and that Canada can now proceed to forge a stronger national unity than before.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In many ways, not least because of the quite diverse voting patterns in Quebec and in English-speaking Canada on May 2, Canada remains a country with multiple national identities. No Quebec government, whatever its stripe, can renege on certain core principles regarding language, provincial autonomy or the search for an evanescent model of Quebec identity. Nor are aboriginal Canadians, despite the archipelago of territories or cities that they inhabit, about to be assimilated into the...
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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