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Waves of nostalgia, waves of dread, waves of ennui: to read the government of Quebec’s new list of old demands for constitutional change is to return to a world I had thought we left behind. I lost a good part of my youth to the Twenty Years War over the constitution, 1980-2000; the thought of wasting the rest of my career in the same way is too horrible to contemplate.

What is astonishing — beyond the suicidal madness of the whole exercise — is how little has changed. It’s all there in the document (“Quebecers: Our Way of Being Canadian”), much of it written in that familiar, exalted style known as Nationalist Baroque, in which Quebec is forever serenely marching towards its rendez-vous with destiny and whatnot.

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There is the same tendentious history, the same omission of inconvenient facts or contrary interpretations. Thus for example the “compact theory” of Confederation is treated as if it had some significance to the people who actually negotiated it, instead of being dreamt up in subsequent decades to rationalize the ambitions of the premiers of Ontario and Quebec. Thus George-Etienne Cartier is quoted reassuring his compatriots that Confederation offered protections for the “French Canadian nationality,” without also mentioning his belief, proclaimed on more than one occasion, that it would give rise to a new “political nationality,” singular, that would transcend, without diminishing, our cultural and linguistic differences.