"Canada's flower children"

Quebec's pacifism and how it has until recently driven government policy: Jack Granatstein continues his series in the National Post.

Andre Boisclair was chosen to be leader of the Parti Quebecois in November, 2005. Young, good looking, and articulate, he and his lifestyle seem to many observers to embody the ethos of the young professionals who now drive Quebec society. But in his policy views, Boisclair harks back to older traditions. "We are a peaceful people," he told a meeting of his party's constituency presidents in March 2006. As an independent nation with its place in the United Nations, Quebec would be "ecologist, pacifist, expressing solidarity, and favouring an alternative vision of globalization."
[...]

...by the time of the Great War, Quebec had become an anti-military society or, to put it more exactly, a society against participation in British wars. In August 1914 anglophones hurried to enlist in Montreal, the Eastern Townships, and Quebec City, but the French-speaking hung back. There were 1,200 in the first contingent to go overseas in the autumn of 1914, but, by the time of Vimy Ridge in April 1917, the Canadian Corps of four divisions with forty-eight infantry battalions contained only one French-speaking battalion, the 22e Regiment.

The trend continued during the Second World War. To young men like Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 20 years old when the war began, the conflict was of little interest. Canada was not threatened, the fate of France was all but inconsequential, and, while Hitler was evil, Quebec should sit out the fighting and oppose conscription, though it would take any war factories that might be offered. To read Trudeau's wartime writings, to peruse the pro-Vichy wartime editorial pages of Le Devoir, to go over the nationaliste speeches against conscription and against Charles de Gaulle's Free France is to believe that a severe form of blindness afflicted the intellectual leaders of French Canada.

To this day, opinion polls demonstrate that a deeply pacifist and anti-military Quebec is the least supportive region of the country when it comes to the government taking steps to fix the Canadian Forces. An Ipsos-Reid opinion poll in February 2003 found that only 3% of francophones considered military spending to be a high priority.

Canada has had a run of long-lived prime ministers from Quebec -- Trudeau, Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien -- who, from 1968 to 2003, have been exquisitely cognizant of Quebec's attitudes and beliefs. The result is that Quebec drove policy in these years.

There are many examples, but let me cite just two recent events. The first was the decision to stay out of the Iraq War in 2003. It was shaped by the overwhelmingly negative attitudes in polls in Quebec, and by the coincidence of the Quebec provincial election, where all three party leaders wore anti-war ribbons during the leaders' debate on TV.

The second example was the overwhelmingly hostile Quebec poll numbers that drove the decision to refuse to join the United States in Ballistic Missile Defence in 2005. In a minority Parliament with another election in the offing, this issue mattered. Enmeshed in the sponsorship scandal, Prime Minister Paul Martin's Liberals could not afford to upset their Quebec supporters, dwindling day by day, by agreeing to -support BMD. It didn't matter that the United States asked -nothing of Canada, neither money nor territory. Quebec opposed the idea, and that was sufficient.

Via Spotlight on Military News and International Affairs.

Update: A review of Mr Granatstein's book, Whose War Is It?, from which the series of articles is drawn.