A A

According to the dreary word of the day, Canada is now “balkanized,” with untold hazards ahead due to Western separatism and a resurgent Bloc Québécois resulting from the election.

This ignores the fact that Canada is basically the product of serial separatisms going back to Confederation — movements that quickly turned into bargaining chips for a “better deal” and led to broad social/political horse-trading that made the country what it is today: essentially one of the most admired and best countries in the world, according to repeated international measurements.

This dealing is indeed usually fraught and full of hazards, but that’s what the West’s “separatism” (a thin construct over the basic “Western alienation”') amounts to: a challenge to overcome a divide.

The fact that the Liberals are now tempered by the NDP is possibly a plus in this (the Liberals needed this shave). Amid the 14 minority governments that have happened since Confederation, Liberal/NDP arrangements have a special place. Some of the most important legislation in Canadian history — medicare, the flag, the Canada Pension Plan, the auto pact — were passed in this way during the Lester Pearson minority in the 1960s.

Canada was into one of these crises on the day it was born. Although it’s been wrung out of the Canadian history books as Nova Scotia’s influence waned, Nova Scotia was on the brink of insurrection in the summer of 1867 after Canada’s July 1 birthday, once the government of the day suddenly, without popular consultation and without warning, had voted Nova Scotia in.

Nova Scotia was one of the four indispensable pieces to Confederation — with Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick. The issue was put to the test that very September in simultaneous federal and provincial elections. Separatists took 34 of 36 provincial seats to form government, and 18 of 19 federal ones. There was talk of seizing the new Canadian customs posts as soon as they went up and of armed resistance at the New Brunswick border.

The argument was that the new Canadian tariffs which would end free-trading would destroy the thriving Maritime economy based on local manufacturing. (Despite this overwhelming will, Nova Scotia couldn’t get out because Britain wanted Confederation, and that was that.) Nevertheless, Nova Scotia would “become poor,” predicted separatist leader Joseph Howe.

It did. It was the 1920s before that reality hit full force for the Maritimes. But the argument had become one mainly for a “better deal” (although separatism still reared its head as an argument) and it was still forceful enough to be one of the main factors in the creation of federal old-age pensions, unemployment insurance and equalization, mainstays of the national project.

B.C. used the threat of joining the U.S. in the 1870s and ’80s to hasten the building of the transcontinental railway. Even Newfoundland was registering some 30 per cent separatist sentiment a couple of decades ago when oil wealth loomed.

The big modern one was, of course, Quebec. That challenge brought about federal bilingualism — another initiative of the Pearson minority — and that, too, in large part, changed Canada from a residual British colonial thing to a modern state. No longer can nationalists complain that Quebec or the French language are being disrespected.

That leaves the Bloc Québécois with the weak argument that it’s there to “defend Quebec’s interests” on the even weaker assumption that Quebec is under attack. The Bloc’s 32 seats were the result of general disaffection, not of renewed separatism. (The Nova Scotia “anti-confederates” faction led to Ottawa by Joe Howe in 1867 was criticized by the more radical provincial separatists on grounds that if you sit in the national parliament, you’re accepting its rules. Goodbye, separation. True, and true also for the BQ.)

As for Western alienation, it’s hard to tell what will do the trick there. Blaming Ottawa for everything — including low world oil prices, when Ottawa is proposing to build a $5-billion pipeline — seems like the same old, same old that accompanies every separatist/regional grievance movement. Underneath the whining of rich, Americanized oilmen around Calgary who have always longed to have Alberta transformed into a suburb of Houston, however, there’s a real problem that now will be part of this broad societal bargaining.

What has to give on the Prairie side, however, is that Alberta and Saskatchewan must define themselves as something more than mere petro-states. (I find it interesting, for example, that little or nothing was said in the campaign about the heavy damage suffered by the Prairie grain crop by unusual fall storms — arguably a result of climate change). Mere oil is the road to nowhere. That was the real signal given by the election result. If there’s such a thing as a generic “Canadian genius,” this would be it: overcoming divisions in this broad land. It’s being tested again.

RELATED: