December 5, 1998

Quebeckers Think Dentist Trips Hurt Less Than Self-extraction

Eric Ellis Vancouver

ARRIVAL at Vancouver's stunning international airport is a lesson in Canada's cultural quirkiness.

Supporting the voluminous arrivals hall are towering totems, a local nod to the myriad "First Nation" indigenous bands that had their homelands seized by last century's European settlers.

Waiting patiently at immigration are hundreds of Hong Kong Chinese, Taiwanese, Koreans and Japanese seeking safe harbour from the financial storms buffeting their other home back across the Pacific. They form queues next to anglophone Canadians scanning newspapers that report this week that francophone Quebec is again on the boil. "Go figure," says a bemused immigration official.

In the francophone heartland of Montreal and Quebec City, the English term ROC is spat from the collective Quebecois mouth with the derision many not so secretly nurse for the Rest of Canada. But in British Columbia, where the second language after English is the combined dialects of Chinese, the same term is better applied to the new arrivals from the Republic of China, Taiwan.

The perennial Quebec independence issue irritates BC and ROC about as much as it agitates the Quebecois themselves, who have re-elected the separatist Mr Lucien Bouchard to another five years as provincial premier.

That means that separation remains on the Canadian agenda, though hardly with the ringing endorsement that exclusionist Parti Quebecois radicals had hoped for.

The PQ ended up with 75 seats in Quebec's 125-seat provincial assembly, against the pro-unity Liberals 49, and an independent. That was five short of the basic 80 seats PQ separationists had sought as the eloquent statement that Quebec's 7.5 million people, 30 per cent of Canada's population, wanted independence.

"I have to say that I was looking for more," said Mr Bouchard.

If the seat allocation wasn't proof enough, a tally of the popular vote showed the Liberals, at 43.7 per cent, polling higher than the PQ. The pro-unity Liberal Party won strongly in safe seats, while the PQ were returned in their francophone (75-80 per cent of Quebecois are French-Canadian) seats with reduced majorities, an electoral map that Joh Bjelke-Petersen might recognise.

This skewed result proved polls that showed Mr Bouchard, a former federal minister and official proponent of Canada as one-time ambassador to France, would be returned because he'd done a decent job with health and the economy.

They also that the bulk of Quebecois are less than convinced it is a good idea to go it alone, having narrowly turned that down in a bitter 1995 referendum.

For the ROC, it means more of what Bouchard's crankier predecessor, Jacques Parizeau, described as Canada's "permanent trip to the dentist" -Quebec's perennial efforts to get more of the national pie, the real issue many Canadians suspect is behind the separatist front.

In Washington, US planners view a unified Canada as an anchor of a NAFTA extending south to become FTAA, the Free Trade Area of the Americas. The US pointedly said this week it "valued ties with a strong and united Canada".

In the ROC, the view is one of bored impatience.

"Why should they (the Quebecois) have a referendum and we do not?" asked Ingrid Hagerlund of West Vancouver, herself a recently naturalised Canadian. "If they want to divide my country, I think I should also have a say if I want it to be divided."