The Bloc Quebecois (BQ), a bourgeois nationalist party based in Quebec that calls for Quebec sovereignty, had earlier introduced a motion that simply recognized Quebec as a nation. Harper added the phrase “within a united Canada.”

At first the BQ said it would oppose Harper’s motion but soon decided to support it. “It is a fact, we are in Canada,” said BQ leader Gilles Duceppe. “It is always better, when we are fighting for a sovereign Quebec, that Canada recognizes that Quebeckers are a nation…. When we will be facing the international level with other countries, even Canada is recognizing that we constitute a nation. That is good for us.”

Tory leaders, however, were quick to explain the legal significance of this motion—none. “There is no legal consequence to this recognition,” said Harper’s Quebec lieutenant, Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon, adding that the party has no intention of giving it any constitutional meaning.

At the same time, the motion’s adoption is a registration of the gains won by the Quebecois in decades of fighting to determine their own future as a nation. It shows that the Quebec question remains at the center of national politics in Canada.

None of the capitalist parties in parliament, including the BQ, recognize that Quebec is an oppressed nation within Canada whose aspirations for sovereignty have been suppressed, sometimes violently, and that the Quebecois have faced more than a century and a half of discrimination because they speak French. This has meant lower incomes, inferior educational and health services, and lower life expectancy for them.

Quebec’s workers and farmers have been at the forefront of mass struggles to resist national oppression and more and more of them have come to support independence for Quebec. At the same time, their fight has won them respect from trade unions and working people in the rest of Canada.

“Although no major actions defending Quebec’s national rights have taken place since the 1995 Quebec referendum, this grudging recognition of their national status by Canada’s rulers reflects an advance in the debate on Quebec’s national rights,” said Joseph Young, Communist League candidate for mayor in the recent municipal elections in Toronto.

“The systematic denial of the national rights of Quebecois by Canada’s rulers is still the source of the deepest division among working people in this country,” stated Young. “Supporting Quebec independence is key to building working-class unity and to a common struggle to establish a workers and farmers government in Ottawa.”

None of the main parties in Canada’s parliament—Conservative, Liberal, or NDP—support Quebec’s right to national self-determination. These same parties backed the adoption in 2000 of the Clarity Act, which gives Ottawa the right to decide if any future referendum in Quebec meets its conditions for legitimacy.

Adopting the latest motion on “Quebec as a nation” is a result of maneuvers by capitalist politicians and parties.

The federal Liberal Party had been gearing for months for a leadership election in early December. Its Quebec wing adopted a motion this fall calling on the party to recognize Quebec as a nation within Canada. In a bid to win backing from delegates in Quebec, Liberal front-running candidate Michael Ignatieff seized on the motion, declaring his support, a move a number of Liberal politicians opposed.

To embarrass the divided Liberals, the BQ introduced its motion in federal parliament. Harper, leading a minority government that might have to face voters again soon, including in Quebec, introduced his own revision to the BQ motion, which passed.

Ignatieff’s act to bring the whole question back into the middle of national politics played the major role in his defeat at the Liberal convention December 2. Stéphane Dion, who is from Quebec and a hard-line supporter of Canadian unity, won the vote on the fourth ballot. He had the endorsement of the Globe and Mail, one of Canada’s two main national dailies. Dion was the minister in the government of Jean Chrétien responsible for the Clarity Act.

The Globe and Mail summed up the Christmas wish for many among the rulers in Canada in an editorial in its November 28 issue. “What is important now is that Canada not try to ‘officialize’ the recognition, to use—for what we hope is the last time—that horrible crowbar of a word with which the Liberal Party’s Quebec wing, supported by Mr. Ignatieff, seeks to pry open this country’s very own Pandora’s box,” it said.  
 
 
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