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Article published in Liberty, May 1996

Peace, Love, and Violence
by
Pierre Lemieux

 

Until quite recently, Canadians would have shrugged off the idea that the Quebec secessionist movement could lead to violence. Many are having second thoughts.

After the October 30 referendum, when 49,4% of the Quebec electorate voted yes to start the secession process, a few dissenters started a new movement that, they announced, would not rule out mild violence. Then, a few Montreal English Canadians noted that if the province seceded, regions of Quebec where a majority opposed secesion might choose to split off from Quebec and remain with Canada. If Canada is divisible, they reasoned, so is Quebec (a thought I had already expressed in a 1983 book). Their stace won approval from Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien and other federal politicians.

Ottawa politicians have treacherously challenged the Quebec government to commit itself to use no violence against such breakaway regions. Quebec politicians have requested a commitment from Ottawa not to interfere with a democratically decided secession of the whole province. Both sides claim to be the most democratic -- and neither deals with the issue.

Indeed, they cannot. Violence is inherent to the situation. Forcing somebody to live under a state he does not want may not lead to open violence if the victim does not take up arms because he has no chance, but it is still violence, albeit covert violence. At any rate, such is the situation under a Tocquevillian, administrative, intrusive state -- like both the present federal government and the promised sovereign Quebec. A large chunk of the population will be bloody angry whatever the majority decision is, and whichever majority makes it. The question is only whether violence would be covert and legal, or open and revolutionary.

Canadians are normally very patient subjects. They trust their government, even when it confiscates more than 50% of what they earn, or when it disarms them (as the recent federal Bill C-68 has moved closer to). In this respect, Quebecers are disturbingly Canadian. Federal Immigration and Citizenship minister Lucienne Robillard recently voiced the conventional wisdom: "It's not the Canadian way of doing things, it's not the Quebec way of doing things," she said. "We are a tolerant country, a peaceful country." But this may be changing with the increasing confrontation and frustration that always accompany growing state power.

There is another reason why politicians do not want to paint themselves in the peace-and-love corner. Irrational emotions are running very high. One half of Quebecers, and an awful lot of other Canadians, believe that Quebec secession would destroy the greatest country in the world, the country that has given them free medical care, cheap education, the Welfare State, wall-to-wall security -- even if the walls are cracking and liberty is being swept under the rug. The other half of Quebecers passionately long for "the Country" (as former Quebec Prime Minister Jacques Parizeau used to say with tremolos in his voice), even if all it would give them is a bit more of the same under their very own local tyranny.

The third reason for the politicians' dumbness about open violence is that they can find no rational answer to the partition argument. On the one hand, if Canada is divisible, so Quebec must be -- and so must be any region or subregion within Quebec, up to the sovereign individual. On the other hand, if none of these territories is divisible, why is North America, or the world, partitioned into different countries? What right has the Canadian government to rule on, to use Voltaire's expression, these "few acres of snow"?

The root of this logical contradiction lies in the definition of the sovereign, democratic state, where -- as Quebec prime minister Lucien Bouchard implied -- the majority of "the people" has the right to do anything. Once you get into this system, there is no way other than violence (open or covert) to define who "the people" is. The ones with the guns will win, the ones without guns will cave in. The interest of the present partition debate is that it raises fundamental questions on the nature of the state, questions that are long overdue in Quebec and Canada.

In some ways, French Canadians are clandestine individualists. They never made revolutions. They passed their turn when the French revolution was waged, and when American revolutionaries called on them. When authority gets too heavy, they quietly retreat in tax evasion, the underground economy, and other kinds of illegality -- provided they think they can get away with it. The recent report of Quebec's Auditor General is quite revealing in this respect: a whole chapter deals, in a kind of panicky way, with means to fight endemic tax evasion and the growing underground economy.

Some individualists are also coming out of the closet. For the first time in Quebec, libertarian ideas are making headway. A group of young Quebecers have created Les Amis de la Liberté ("The Friends of Liberty"). A sign of the times: the Canadian parliament refused to hear their brief against its recent firearm control bill. Another sign is the radicalization of ordinary people. The Quebec Federation of Motorcyclists, for example, is adopting a tough ideological stance towards police harassment of peaceful bikers.

If there is violence in this country, let's hope, for our children's sake, that it will be against state addiction, and not between two irrational and tyrannical brands of nationalism. Remember Jefferson: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."