Thoughts on the PQ's Recipe for Chaos...

ik - from this week's Maclean's...

In a grassroots party like the PQ, disproportionately influenced by the hard-core separatists known as "caribous," the program is hammered out paragraph by paragraph at policy conferences. The current program is the product of a party base that was badly upset by Bernard Landry's 2003 election rout. Boisclair, seen by some in the PQ as too business-friendly and Anglo-friendly, has embraced the program wholeheartedly to prove his separatist bona fides. And it's this program that led federal Environment Minister Stéphane Dion to say that Boisclair's "moderate veneer won't hold up. He's a radical."

How so? Because the latest PQ program abandons two central tenets of Jacques Parizeau's 1995 sovereignty plan: a Quebec-Canada "partnership" and a year's worth of negotiations between a referendum and a secession. Instead, the PQ now calls for a unilateral "declaration of national sovereignty" immediately after a referendum, along with a law "declaring that only the government of Quebec may raise taxes among the Quebec population."

Could a Quebec government simply do that? Declare itself independent and order its citizens to ignore a federal government that contested the secession? "Of course not. It would be chaotic," says Robert Young, a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. Young was once considered such a congenial expert for Quebec sovereigntists that the PQ caucus invited him to brief them in 1995. But now he says a contested secession could result in a fundamental and prolonged clash of legitimacies.

Here's what that means on the ground. Are federal government benefits still worth anything in Quebec? Can Canada Post deliver them to your home? When it comes time to collect payroll taxes, to which government should a business pay them? What happens to decisions in Quebec courts under appeal at federal courts? Governments in Quebec and Ottawa would be giving contradictory instructions. "This would be particularly tricky problem for federally appointed judges serving in Quebec," says Sujit Choudhry, a University of Toronto law professor.

The relevant section in Young's 1999 book, The Struggle for Quebec, is called "Meltdown." A contested unilateral secession "involves a level of disorder and violence that contradicts the normal view of Canada and Quebec as stable, tolerant societies," he wrote. And this scenario begins, not with Ottawa doing anything dramatic like sending in troops, but simply with the federal government continuing to enforce laws and provide services while the Quebec government insists it stop.

These dilemmas would bring profound uncertainty directly into the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Quebecers. And perhaps the most interesting thing about the recent PQ race is that this warning -- that the PQ platform is a recipe for chaos on a massive scale -- is shared, not only by federalist academics in Ontario, but by the most experienced of the defeated PQ leadership candidates.

Louis Bernard was among the most trusted advisers to René Lévesque in 1980 and to Jacques Parizeau in 1995. Nobody questions his desire for a sovereign Quebec. But his surprise candidacy turned into a lonely crusade against his own party's radically irresponsible program. "A declaration of sovereignty or independence is a solemn gesture from a country declaring that, henceforth, its government exercises complete and sovereign control over its territory, to the exclusion of all other authority," he wrote during the campaign.

Unfortunately, if the federal government won't pack up and leave -- and the Clarity Act forbids it from doing so if Parliament finds either the referendum question or majority unclear -- then the secession "will inevitably be chaos," Bernard wrote. "It will be impossible for Quebec to take over and ensure the continuity of federal programs and services, because it will have neither the information, the civil servants, nor the money to do so." And finally, because "foreign countries, even the friendliest, won't want to alienate Canada by immediately recognizing a sovereign Quebec."

So this is the analysis of the PQ's finest mind (and of serious observers outside Quebec): that the route to sovereignty Boisclair endorses is a straight path to chaos. Which may be all the reason anyone needs to fear the PQ's callow and popular new sorcerer's apprentice.