It’s my fault. I heard Stephen Harper and Jack Layton call their parties “federalist” enough times that I started to believe it. Sure, they are not seperatist, but why isn’t the Prime Minister jumping on Mr. Layton for this “50% + 1” nonsense. Where is the government on this, and why does it fall to Stephane Dion to defend national unity?
If the Liberal Party was looking to revive itself with a bread-and-butter issue, this is it. It appears we are the only party that will wrap itself either in the Clarity Act or the Official Languages Act, all because everyone thinks seats on Eastern Quebec are up for grabs in 2015, or whenever the next election is.
In the meantime, however, it seems The Liberal Party of Canada and it’s 34 members represent the entirety of the federalist caucus in Ottawa, ready to defend the rights of the anglophone minority in Quebec and the fair process of a clear question for seperation referendums.
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Joanna Smith Ottawa Bureau
OTTAWA—A separatist government in Quebec is far from certain and the supersized New Democrat caucus has only just said hello, but already Jack Layton faces endless questions on how he would handle a referendum.
“What constitutes a majority is 50 per cent plus one,” Layton finally told reporters this week after having earlier refused to give a number when Quebec media hounded the leader for being too vague on the issue.
This is the new reality for the leader of the official opposition, with Quebec MPs making up more than half of the caucus — including several with rather loose commitments to federalism — and ambiguous answers to hypothetical questions taking on more weight and getting different reactions from different parts of the country.
The Sherbrooke Declaration is the policy paper that spells out the NDP position on asymmetrical federalism and what happens after a referendum on sovereignty.
The document says the NDP would recognize a “majority decision” — mentioned as 50 per cent plus one — “of the Quebec people in the event of a referendum on the political status of Quebec” and then goes on to say it would be up to the federal government to figure out the process “in the spirit” of the 1998 Supreme Court reference on secession.
There is no reference to the Clarity Act, the federal law in response to the Supreme Court reference that governs any negotiations involving a separation of Quebec from Canada.
One of the architects of the Clarity Act says the lack of mention hardly matters.
“I think they tried to be ambiguous to please their nationalist wing without repudiating the Clarity Act,” Liberal MP Stéphane Dion, who shepherded the Clarity Act through the legislative process when he was intergovernmental affairs minister under then prime minister Jean Chrétien, told the Star in a recent interview.
“They will try to please everyone as usual, but it’s the law of the land and no declaration — as ambiguous as it may be — of a politician may remove from Quebecers the right to stay in Canada unless it is clearly decided to leave Canada,” said Dion — who, like Chrétien, had pushed for a law rather than a political declaration in response to the Supreme Court reference, because it could not be disregarded on a whim.
“A declaration of a politician that wants to please the nationalist wing of his or her party cannot change that,” said the former Liberal leader, who was re-elected in his Montreal riding earlier this month.
The Clarity Act details a series of hoops a province must jump through before it could legally separate, including having the House of Commons decide what constitutes a clear question and a clear majority, and eventually a constitutional amendment ratification process that could ultimately leave the fate of an independent Quebec in the hands of provincial politicians in Ontario.
Dion was pilloried in Quebec when he introduced the legislation in 1999, and it remains a divisive issue in the province.
It is not surprising the NDP, in its successful attempt to woo soft nationalist voters away from the Bloc Québécois, tried to avoid talking about the Clarity Act while quietly insisting it is there in spirit.
