Monday, Dec. 26, 1977

The Specter of Separatism

A "worst case" for Canada

One of Washington's riskier specialties is considering the darkest possible consequences of potential crises. In offices at the State Department, the CIA and other agencies, reports TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott, resident futurologists are already thinking the unthinkable--or at least the unspeakable--about what could eventually happen if Quebec Premier Rene Levesque wins a referendum to be held in 1979 on separate status for his huge, French-speaking province. Talbott's report:

The year is 1990. French-Canadian separatists, under the banner of the Parti Quebecois, have succeeded--and seceded. The former province of Quebec is now a republic. English-speaking Canada is left geographically divided, politically unstable and economically vulnerable. The new constitution, adopted in a futile attempt to placate Quebec back in 1980, has deprived the federal government in Ottawa of the power to tax the energy-rich western provinces and industrial Ontario in order to share the wealth with the impoverished, now isolated Atlantic provinces. Big Canadian money has fled south. The outbreak of anti-Americanism in the early 1970s has long since given way to Balkan-like tensions within the increasingly fragmented country.

At this point the script, from an American point of view, turns from a worst case into a most complicated, delicate and intriguing one. The predominantly English-speaking provinces and territories--led by British Columbia, the Maritimes and Newfoundland, followed reluctantly by the prairie provinces and Ontario--sue for union with the U.S. After playing suitably hard to get, Washington says "Welcome aboard" to eleven new states. The U.S. has suddenly nearly doubled its size and quadrupled its natural resources. The Soviets are aghast but helpless over the aggrandizement of the rival superpower. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, still vigorous at 71, comes out of semi-retirement--he is professor emeritus of constitutional law at Simon Fraser University outside Vancouver--and runs for Congress from the third district of British Columbia. Fadeout.

Heaven and the Civil Service Commission help government officials if they should dare to bandy about prophecies of the dissolution of Canada. The U.S. genuinely opposes such a development and is anxious to avoid any appearance of gloating, preaching or wishful thinking. Publicly, State Department officials will say only that the problem of Quebec is an internal matter for the Canadians to decide; privately, they argue that a weak and fractious Canada would be bad for the security and economy of the West.

That very speculative possibility that English-speaking Canada some day might join the U.S. is regarded in Washington with ambivalence. If it is a tantalizing idea, it is also dangerously indiscreet. No responsible policymaker wants to encourage suspicions that Washington stands to benefit from the breakup of its neighbor and therefore may be covertly abetting French-Canadian secessionism. For that reason, a Government foreign policy expert was told to scrap a long-range analysis on the program of the Parti Quebecois. "What if it leaks?" his boss asked. "It may look like some sort of policy paper or contingency plan."

Says a CIA specialist on Canadian affairs: "Even around here, the whole subject is supersensitive." He might have said, "Especially around here." The CIA has, from time to time, been accused in the Canadian press of making mischief north of the border. A few years ago, the Soviets' KGB outpost in Ottawa provided some nationalistic Canadians with phony documents printed on the CIA letterhead, purporting to prove that the agency was aiding the extremist Quebec Liberation Front in order to "destabilize" the central government.

Thinking out loud about a U.S.-Canadian merger may be premature, provocative and even irresponsible, but it is also irresistible--and it has been going on for some time. Ten years ago. an academic turned bureaucrat on the State Department's policy-planning staff wrote a classified study of French-Canadian nationalism. It mentioned the possibility that if Quebec were to secede, the rest of Canada might look south for its salvation. The thesis was of personal interest to the author. A Polish emigrant, he had grown up in Canada and attended McGill University in Montreal before going to the U.S. His name: Zbigniew Brzezinski.

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