McPherson's folly?
"Is Blood Thicker Than Water? Crises of Nationalism in the Modern World," to give the work its full title, was originally delivered as the Barbara Frum lecture at University of Toronto. This series, dedicated to the memory of the longtime CBC Broadcaster, is not the most even-handed of forums. Perhaps as a reflection of the influence of the Frum family--which includes the right-wing writer and former Bush Administration operative David Frum—it is known for supporting conservative viewpoints. Other authors featured in the lectureship series include John Keegan and Richard Pipes. McPherson, indeed, thanks David Frum for suggesting the topic that started him on his path.
Putting the company aside, however, McPherson's work is palpably one-sided. Contrasting Quebec’s “ethnocentrism” to English Canada’s
“liberal individualism,” he facilely dismisses Quebec's sovereignty movement as a form of dangerous ethnic nationalism akin to those of Eastern Europe or the antebellum American South. Admittedly, the nature of political forces in Canada and Quebec is a complex subject difficult even for Americans living here to understand, let alone the masses south of the border who share McPherson’s self-described “appalling ignorance” of Canada. McPherson would have done better to study up further before trying to draw tortured parallels between Southern domination of the Democratic Party in the 1850s and Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s bilingual nationalism. Worse yet, McPherson cites not a SINGLE French-language source, and his citations of commentary by Quebec nationalists come primarily from works by anti-Quebecois polemicists such as Mordechai Richler or by Lansing Lamont (who predicted that an independent Quebec would be an authoritarian regime dedicated to taking reprisals against English speakers). The result, as one might expect, is that McPherson’s descriptions border on caricature. For instance, he equates Quebec’s language laws with the “gag rule” and the censorship of all abolitionist material in the antebellum South. Considering that after 30 years of Quebec semi-autonomy, the largest single newspaper in Montreal, the GAZETTE, is English-language, and that the province of Quebec boasts three English-language universities, one would hardly say that the English language is being suffocated. A Canadian scholar who undertook a study of , say, Hispanic American politics and bilingualism in California without knowing anything about American politics or bothering to consult any Spanish-language sources would rightly be considered arrogant, and the scholar’s conclusions untrustworthy.
One may, with good reasons, support or oppose Quebec nationalism (or, like many people, Anglophone, Francophone and other, feel decidedly ambivalent about it). However, it is undeniable that its supporters have made a serious effort to build a multiracial and diverse society, with French as primary language, and to encourage openness. Canada’s praiseworthy present-day policy of individual rights notwithstanding, civic nationalism and multiculturalism are not historical policies—Canada’s Charter of Rights and its policy of official multiculturalism and both date from the Trudeau years. Canadian national identity, save perhaps in the negative sense of NOT being American, is arguably no less a modern invention than is the Quebec variety, and one whose origins may be traced to a distinct (British) ethnic identity. An understanding of these forces is not served by the efforts of uninformed scholars who create false dualisms and refuse to attempt to understand all sides.