1 An Attempt to Reconcile the Irreconcilable by Greg Marchildon (edited by John Richards, 31 March 1996) You have to respect Richards and Milner’s courage in building a Plan A ship at a time when Plan B has become the vessel of choice and the destination one of preparing for national breakup. Given our constitutional failures in 1990 and 1992, and the “near-death experience” of the 1995 Quebec referendum, it would indeed be unusual if attitudes of inevitability about Quebec’s secession were not ascendant. As normal as this psychological reaction is, however, it has the dangerous potential to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, fuelling the growing frustrations and misunderstandings currently dividing the two solitudes. I agree with Richards and Milner: it is too early to write off the country. Instead, we must put our energy into finding a solution that will keep Canada together, and to do this, we must carefully examine our options. In this article, I shall review the two main recommendations of their artic le in terms of ends, means and underlying assumptions. I shall follow it with a critique of the means proposed. The Quebec clause Richards and Milner propose a constitutional Quebec clause that would give the Quebec government exclusive jurisdiction over language and culture. The objective is clear: to guarantee the Quebec government and, by extension, Quebec francophones, the legislative power to protect the French language and culture in perpetuity. Is such a guarantee necessary? Probably it is. Aware of the dismal statistics concerning linguistic assimilation of francophones outside Quebec, francophone Quebecers constantly fear for their own linguistic survival, often likening themselves to a cube of sugar within a North American cup of coffee. I know what this means in personal terms. My ancestry is “pure laine;” my forbears were among the original settlers of New France. My paternal ancestors left Quebec immediately following the Patriotes rebellion of 1837 to help found a tiny francophone community in Ontario; subsequently, my grandfather and his younger brother came west in 1910 to establish yet another francophone community, this time in Saskatchewan. My maternal ancestors lived in Quebec from about 1660 to 1920, when my grandfather left to homestead in Saskatchewan. Those members of my paternal family who stayed within the protective womb of their community or moved back to Quebec have remained resolutely francophone, but those who moved to other parts of Canada assimilated within one generation. My paternal family, outside the protective cover of a francophone community after 1920, has now been completely assimilated. I do not need to be convinced that strong measures are necessary, but I also know how difficult it is for non- francophones to understand Quebecers’ fears, and the extent to which language policy continues to be at the core of the misunderstanding between the two solitudes. Take, for example, the conflict surrounding unilingual commercial signs. In 1977, René Lévesque’s government pa ssed Bill 101 making French the sole official language within Quebec – albeit the legislation still afforded a considerable role to English within the provincial jurisdiction. After passage of the 1982 Constitution Act it was only a matter of time before the Supreme Court of Canada would be called upon to determine whether sections of Bill 101 contravened the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In 1988 that happened. In December of that year, immediately after the general election, the Supreme Court ruled those provisions of Bill 101 requiring unilingual French commercial signs (Ford v. Attorney General of Quebec) violated the freedom of expression provisions (section 2(b)) of the Charter. I was living in a francophone neighbourhood of Montreal at the time, and I well remember the sentiment that decision provoked. How dare les Anglais tell us Quebecers what we could and could not do in matters of language! My roommate, a journalist, hung a sign from our balcony proclaiming the sentiments of the great majority of francophones: “Ne Touchez Pas à la Loi 101.”