It's war!: Landry on cloud nine

Bernard Landry is marching off to war. In recent days, he huffed and puffed, rattled sabres, threatened to "go all the way." Scary.

The apparent casus belli was Roy Romanow's report on reforming Canada's health-care system. The royal commissioner had the gall to propose that federal billions turned over to the provinces be subject to conditions.

"They will pay and they will pay without conditions," Mr. Landry blustered in the National Assembly, "and we will take every means to make sure that happens."

On Saturday, at a meeting of the Parti Québécois's National Council, he warned: "It's not true that the central government will change the Constitution without serious consequences. And we are ready to wage a battle without quarter." On Tuesday, back in the National Assembly, he waxed bellicose. "We are ready to go all the way. They ran over us in 1982, against the unanimous will of the National Assembly; that will be the last time in their lifetime."

Asked "what weapon he intended to use," he recalled what he had learned in the Canadian Officers Training Corps: "The first rule was, don't fire the atomic bomb on the first day of war. The second rule was, don't go blabbing your strategy to your opponents."

It's all part of the PQ's campaign to rally the separatists who've left the party, complaining that it's doing too little to promote secession. And so, on the weekend, the PQ unveiled a document, "Sovereignty, Solidarity, Prosperity," that will be submitted for approval by the party's policy convention in March -- the prelude to an election. Included was a proposal to create a unit within the government mandated to lay out a plan for Quebec's becoming sovereign. It would answer to a senior minister.

Mr. Landry said he favours appointing a minister to promote sovereignty. He announced the creation of a Council for Sovereignty to conduct studies related to Quebec's accession to sovereignty. With the status of a charity, it could offer tax-refundable receipts for donations.

Yesterday, Mr. Landry visualized the promised land. "If Quebec were sovereign, it would be at the United Nations and, perhaps, even a member of the Security Council. . . . It is high time that we have a republic, that Quebec be free and govern itself." The Péquistes can get away with peddling dreams because there is no one to blow the whistle on building castles in utopia. They present the campaign for secession as being merely a matter of convincing a majority of Quebeckers that an independent Quebec is preferable to a federated Quebec, and to vote accordingly in a referendum. Then, it is assumed, independence will follow, as day follows night.

There's no account taken of the Supreme Court's analysis of secession and its requirements, none of the Clarity Act, no recognition that the terms of secession would have to be negotiated, and would almost certainly exclude from the successor country the lands of the Indians and the Inuit.

The secessionists conduct their deliberations with both feet on cloud nine because Liberal Leader Jean Charest repudiates the Supreme Court's advisory judgment, and the rest of Canada is too polite to evoke hard realities.

It was on Dec. 9, 2000, that The Globe and Mail declared in an editorial, contrary to fact: "Yes, Quebec has the right to secede. Both the Supreme Court and Parliament have affirmed that." What more could Bernard Landry ask for?
wjohnson@globeandmail.ca