Ex-Premier Reveals Saskatchewan, in 1995, Mulled Secession on Its Own as Quebec Independence Vote Neared

Roy Romanow, the former New Democratic Party (N.D.P.) premier of Saskatchewan, confirmed this week that in 1995, as Quebec prepared to hold a referendum on independence from Canada, a secret cabinet “‘constitutional contingencies’ committee” met to plot possible moves in case the result was a “yes.”  One of those possibilities was for Saskatchewan to proceed with its own secession.  The committee’s existence had just been revealed in excerpts, in the Canadian news magazine Maclean’s, of a forthcoming book by the journalist Chantal Hébert titled The Morning After: The Quebec Referendum and the Day that Almost Was.

The committee included Romanow (pictured at the top of this article), two or three cabinet members, and his minister for intergovernmental affairs, Ed Tchorzewski.  “It would have been absolutely foolish to talk about it at the time,” Romanow told the Saskatoon Star–Phoenix this week, when asked about the need for secrecy at the time, adding, “You had to have the committee meeting in secret; otherwise, you’d have headlines [like], ‘Romanow considering pulling out.’  The key word is ‘contingency’—contingent on a successful vote for Quebec separation.  What were our options?”

In addition to secession, the secret committee mulled possibilities such as annexation by the United States—something also openly contemplated at the time in the Maritime Provinces of New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, which would have been cut off by a Quebec secession from the rest of Canada.  But Romanow says now that neither that nor independence were considered by the committee viable.  As he put it this week, “ The separation idea simply was not on. It would not make sense economically and socially,” he said.  “It would offend everything with respect to my personal history.  I didn’t go through patriation and the Night of the Long Knives and the Charlottetown accord for that—these are things I believe in passionately, so [secession] was simply not on.”

The flag of Saskatchewan

More likely, if the referendum had succeeded, would have been a strengthening of ties with British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, and the northern territories, Romanow said, mainly because the remaining parts of Canada would have to find new geopolitical orientations.  As the Star–Phoenix summarized this thinking, “If Quebec separated, Atlantic Canada would be ‘an island,’ Ontario would likely strengthen its ‘north–south’ economic partnerships, and the western provinces would be on their own.”  In the event, the secessionist cause lost by a handful of votes.

For the most part, Saskatchewan has been very nearly the least separatist among Canada’s Anglophone provinces.  Alberta is the most independent-minded, although their main separatist party, the Western Block Party (W.B.P.), hung up its hat (pictured above) earlier this year (as discussed at the time in this blog).

The 1995 referendum was a nail-biter for all Canadians.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, is now in the layout phase and should be on shelves, and available on Amazon, by early fall 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook.]

Related articles from this blog:

“Tense Standoff Eases as Gitxsan Nation Suspends Evictions from British Columbia Land; All Hinges on Aug. 25th Talks” (Aug. 2014)
“Deadline in British Columbia for ‘Eviction’ from Gitxsan Aboriginal Lands Arrives; Chiefs Plan ‘Direct Action’” (Aug. 2014)
“Gitxsan Chiefs in British Columbia Serve Eviction Notice on Fishermen, Railroads, Logging Industry across Vast Territory” (Aug. 2014)

“‘Western Canada’ Separatists Throw in the Towel” (Feb. 2014)

“Quebec Free-Love Saucer Cult Joins Muslim Headscarf Debate, Suggests Censoring Religious Texts” (Oct. 2013)

“Separatists Challenge Canadian Tolerance with Proposed Islamic-Headscarf Ban” (Sept. 2013)

“Vancouver Islanders Hope to Be Canada’s 11th Province—and Its Greenest” (Aug. 2013)

“Which Part of Wet’suwet’en Territory Don’t They Understand?” (Nov. 2012)

“Quebec Cracks Down on Crimes against the State—Like Playing Hopscotch in English” (Nov. 2011)

Puerto Rico Libertarian Proposes “Micro-Independence” and Partition of Island

The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico has held several referenda—including major ones in 1967, 1993, 1998, and 2012—on the question of its future status.  Today, the island nation is as self-governing as any of the 50 United States of America, but it has no voting representatives in Washington and Puerto Ricans cannot vote for U.S. president without relocating to one of the fifty states.  Most of the previous referenda have offered Puerto Ricans three choices: (1) admission as the 51st state—61.13% opted for that in the 2012 vote; (2) “free association” (the status currently enjoyed by three former U.S. colonies in the South Pacific, which rely on the U.S. for defense but have United Nations seats) (33.33% in 2012); or (3) independence (5.54%).  (See a previous article for a fuller discussion.)  The 2012 referendum was non-binding, so while most national politicians advocate statehood in principle, it is essentially blocked by the divisiveness and intransigence of the U.S. Congress, whose job it is to approve the addition of any new stars to the flag.

Puerto Ricans have their own Olympic team, but can’t vote for their own president
(you know, just like Cuba).

But Puerto Rican independence—an idea which was buoyed in the 1950s and ’60s by Cuba’s revolution not far to the west and has traditionally been associated with leftist radicalism and thus demonized and suppressed by the U.S. government—is persistent in the Puerto Rican consciousness, despite its low numbers.  But this does not mean those not choosing independence would be happy with statehood or the status quo.  In the 1998 poll, 46.6% voted for statehood, but the fourth option, “none of the above,” got 50.5%.  Since the U.S. snagged the island in the Spanish-American War, there has been discontent in Puerto Rico, and a feeling of nationhood, but nervousness about its viability as an independent state (the most prosperous Caribbean nation-states are tiny, low-population tax havens; no one wants to be the next Haiti).  The Puerto Rican electorate also worries about the political consequences of a long, divisive push for secession—especially if it ends up failing.

One Puerto Rican, Frank Worley-Lopez, founder of the Libertarian Party of Puerto Rico, has a proposal for a way toward more self-determination that mixes some of the benefits of the others.  In a recent editorial, he calls the idea “micro-independence.”  It involves giving something to different camps in the status debate by partitioning Puerto Rico, with one half becoming a U.S. state and the other half becoming an independent nation, with or without the “free association” apron-strings currently loosely tethering the Marshall Islands, Palau, and the Federated States of Micronesia to the mother country.  But if you’re picturing a bisected island which mimics the line that runs through neighboring Hispaniola to separate Haiti from the Dominican Republic, the partition wouldn’t need to be exactly into halves.  As Worley-Lopez puts it, “Even if the portion that becomes an independent ‘micro-nation’ is only a handful of the island’s 78 municipalities, it would still allow those who truly support independence to achieve their stated goal, while allowing others to reach theirs.”  (Puerto Rico does not have counties or the equivalent.)

Frank Worley-Lopez

But is this idea viable?  For one thing, it would not eliminate the problem of getting a statehood bill through Congress, or the trickier problem of how to negotiate independence.  President Barack Obama, after all, in 2012 gave a firm thumbs-down to the idea of secession in the wake of a tsunami of post-reelection secession petitions uploaded to the White House website.

Secondly, there is the question of how to draw the new border.  Worley-Lopez seems to suggest asking each municipality to pick a side.  In reality, this may not end up creating a very clean line.  It might be a wild gerrymander, with lots of exclaves.  This could lead to disruptions at the administrative and economic levels; it could also prove to be more divisive at the community level than even the multiple-choice referenda have been.

Referenda in Puerto Rico do not follow clear regional patterns.

Finally, we can look to places where something similar has been done.  In Switzerland, the seven districts of the contested Jura region of the Canton of Bern each had a chance, in 1979, to choose whether to stay in Bern or form a new canton or join the neighboring Basel-Land.  But the referendum was so designed because the divide was both geographical and linguistic and would not create a difficult border—though Switzerland already has plenty of crazily wiggly lines dividing its cantons, including lots of exclaves.

Switzerland’s Jurassians had to leave some territory behind
when they seceded from Bern in 1979.

Another example is Quebec, where Anglophone opponents of the province’s separation from Canada have reacted to independence pushes by suggesting different parts of Quebec choose whether to stay in or out.  In fact, indigenous groups staged their own counter-referenda in remote parts of Quebec in parallel with the failed 1995 independence vote.  But Puerto Ricans should take note that such talk was designed specifically to divide the Québécois nation and stifle national aspirations.  Some would say it worked.

Quebeckers, too, have had to contemplate what their independent state
might look like it if they couldn’t secede with all of its territory.

Perhaps the closest example is the curious path taken by some municipalities in Spain’s separatist autonomous region of Catalonia.  Starting with San Pere de Torelló in 2012, more than 200 jurisdictions within Catalonia have now declared themselves independent of rule by Spain and part of what they call Territori Català Lliure (Free Catalan Territory).  Since it is not just municipalities but sometimes whole districts as well taking these measures, by now about a fifth of Catalonia’s land has this status—at least by self-declaration.  But no one wants Catalonia divided.  This is a mostly symbolic gesture, seen as a strategy to be used on the way to independence for the entire country.

Scattered bits of Catalonia have already seceded—but not as a final goal.

On the whole, if you ask Chinese and Taiwanese, and if you ask Koreans or Germans—or Ossetes, to take a more extreme example discussed in this blog—none of them would say that there is anything inherently desirable in having a nation divided into two different state entities.  Albanian nationalists in Kosovo, Azeris in northern Iran, and Inner Mongolians in China tend to feel the same way.  And so do Ukrainians, of course.

I love Azerbaijan so much, I am happy that there are two.

Worley-Lopez writes, “The idea of allowing independence supporters to retain a small portion of the island is not new.  It’s been proposed multiple times by multiple people, including myself in the past. Yet so far, the Puerto Rico Independence Party has steadfastly—and curiously—refused to take the idea seriously.”  But I’ll reckon that most Puerto Ricans, and most Americans, find Worley-Lopez’s micro-independence idea highly problematic, and there is nothing “curious” about that at all.  Yes, nations and communities should be allowed to choose their own destinies, and, yes, referenda are for the most part the best way to do it.  But turn on the television, and you will see city halls in various parts of Ukraine ringed by burning tires and barbed wire while masked men with machine guns wave separatist flags.  Right now, this week, a town-by-town, village-by-village plebiscite does not strike most people as the way to peaceful co-existence—or freedom from colonialism.  Puerto Rico deserves a better solution to its problems; “micro-independence” probably isn’t it.

One face of “micro-independence”: a “People’s Republic of Donetsk”
separatist posing in his Archie Bunker chair.

Related articles from this blog:
“Venezuela’s President Maduro Urges Puerto Rico to Declare Independence, Join Latin American Bloc” (Jan. 2014)
“Puerto Rico Votes for Statehood—or at Least for Some Kind of Change” (Nov. 2012)

[You can read more about Puerto Rico, Jura, Quebec, Catalonia, South Azerbaijan, and other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

Raëlian Free-Love UFO Cult Comes Out in Favor of Independent Cascadia

The idea of an independent nation called Cascadia in North America’s temperate northwest, received a thumbs-up this week from an unexpected source: the Raëlian Movement, a mostly Quebec-based flying-saucer religion.

The most commonly seen flag of Cascadia (the “Doug Fir Flag”)

A spokesman for the group, David Dunsmore, said that Cascadia fits the Raëlian ideology of small communities and local government.  For one thing, subdivision of larger countries into smaller states “allows for humanity to become potentially more peaceful and harmonious because the dangers of smaller countries having large military to go to war with each other—they don’t have the means to do that.”

One proposal for Cascadia’s borders.  (There are many.)

More or less inspired by Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 novel Ecotopia, which imagined an egalitarian, environmentally-minded state formed by Oregon, Washington, and most of California seceding from the United States, the idea picked up in a vague and directionless way through the 1980s and ’90s.  A flag was designed in 1994, and in 2001 the Cascadian National Party (C.N.P.) was founded, but timing was not on its side: it was announced on September 9th, and two days later the nation’s attention focused elsewhere.  (By an eerie coincidence, another Pacific Northwest regionalist movement had the same publicity problem, down to the number of days involved: the imaginary State of Jefferson, built out of parts of northern California and southern Oregon, had its first gubernatorial election on December 5, 1941.)  The C.N.P.’s original idea was to form Cascadia from Washington, Oregon, and Canada’s province of British Columbia.  The map on its website today omits B.C.  The rival Cascadia Independence Project has a more bioregionalist vision: its Cascadia has as its eastern border the Continental Divide along the ridge of the Rockies; it stops just short of Anchorage, Alaska, in the north and just short of the San Francisco Bay Area in the south.  It is not clear which version the Raëlians, or their leader Raël, formerly a French race-car driver named Claude Vorilhon, prefers.

Based on Raël’s book, Aliens Took Me to Their Planet, published, coincidentally, the same year as Ecotopia, the group teaches that humanity is the product of genetic seeding by extraterrestrials and is enthusiastically sex-positive, pro-nudist, and anti-clerical.  Last year, as reported at the time in this blog, Raëlians came out in opposition to Quebec’s separatist ruling party, the Parti Québécois (P.Q.), for its bigoted campaign against the display of religious symbols.  The Québécois proposals were designed specifically to target Muslim religious dress, in a bid to pander to francophone anti-immigrant sentiment.  Oddly, a Raëlian bishop opposed the banning of religious displays but opined instead that all religious texts that contained homophobic, religious-chauvinist, or patriarchal ideas should be censored by the state.

Raël

Raëlians have a history of flamboyant bids for media attention.  In 2002, they claimed—falsely, as it turned out, that the Raëlian-based genetics firm Clonaid had created the first human clone; ...

...; since 2008, Raëlians have promoted a national and international “Go Topless Day”; ...

...; earlier this year the Raëlian-run company Clitoraid was chased out of Burkina Faso for founding an institution called the Pleasure Hospital, whose mission is surgical reparation of damage done by female genital cutting; ...

...; and, in a surprisingly tone-deaf public-relations move, they continue to promote the revival of the swastika as a positive symbol ...

They claim to be the numerically largest U.F.O. religion in the world.  On the other hand, that is not so surprising, considering that some of their competition do not exactly have very effective membership-growth strategies ...

(Heaven’s Gate, 1997)

The Cascadia movement has long thirsted for some kind of legitimacy.  They may still have a bit further to go.

[You can read more about Cascadia and many other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]

Related articles from this blog:
“Greenpeace Declares Independent ‘Glacier Republic’ in Chile’s Andes” (March 2014)

“‘Western Canada’ Separatists Throw in the Towel” (Feb. 2014)

“Quebec Free-Love Saucer Cult Joins Muslim-Headscarf Debate, Suggests Censoring Religious Texts” (Oct. 2013)
“Quebec Separatists Challenge Canadian Tolerance with Proposed Islamic-Headscarf Ban” (Sept. 2013)
“Vancouver Islanders Hope to Be Canada’s 11th Province, and Its Greenest” (Aug. 2013)
“Which Part of ‘Wet’suwet’en Territory’ Don’t They Understand?” (Nov. 2012)

“Western Canada” Separatists Throw in the Towel

It ended quietly.  On January 28th, Canada’s electoral commission officially delisted the Western Block Party (W.B.P.) as a registered political party after it failed to raise the 250 necessary signatures.  Originally founded in the 1980s as the Western Concept Party, the Western Block advocated the secession of Canada’s four southwesternmost provinces—British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba—as a separate nation, generally envisioned under the name West Canada or Western Canada.  A Republic of Western Canada, with under 10 million people, would be the 12th-largest country in the world and an oil-exporting giant.

Doug Christie, wearing his trademark 37.85411784-liter hat

The W.B.P.’s founder, who died in March 2013, signaling the decline of the movement, was Doug Christie, a Winnipeg-born attorney in Victoria, B.C., who became notorious for defending neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, and others in free-speech cases.  In the United States, this would be considered a moral stance, but in Canada, where most citizens are content to have their government decide which kinds of political speech are acceptable, the public presumes that only those with actual far-right sympathies would take on such a case.  Christie, though he swore up and down he was not a neo-Nazi, was indeed an ultra-conservative, and he tapped into many of the resentments rural western Canadians tend to have for government, urbanites, East Coasters, indigenous people, and, of course, French Canadians.  In fact, Western Canadian separatism has tended to rise and fall with separatism in Quebec.  But now, even though Québécois nationalism is on a bit of an upswing, with the Parti Québécois (P.Q.) in power in that province, it has taken on an intolerant, Islamophobic tinge (as discussed in this blog).  Maybe it is harder to rouse Francophobia on the prairies when Canadian sovereigntists tack hard to the right.  Or maybe it turned out to be only Christie that was holding the W.B.P. together, and that Western Canada never really made sense as an idea for a separate nation.  It’s also true that the rise of western-based Tea Party–style movements like the Reform Party in the 1990s stole a lot of votes from western separatists.

One proposal for a partitioned Canada.
Something tells me Newfies won’t like this plan.

Another separatist party, the Western Canada Independence Party (W.C.I.P.) (a.k.a. Western Canada Party, or W.C.P.), fizzled out in the late 1980s, though it still has some branch operations at the provincial level.  Its vision was a new nation consisting of the four western provinces listed above, plus the territories of Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut.  This would leave nothing in Canada but Quebec, Ontario, and the Maritimes.  The W.C.I.P. plan made even less sense than the W.B.P.’s.  If Christie and the W.B.P. had erred in thinking that the liberals of Vancouver and Victoria, B.C., would share the conservative views of Albertans and Saskatchewanites, it was a bigger error to think that the indigenous voters who dominate Canada’s north would be a good fit too.

The current flag of Alberta

There have been other separatist movements in western Canada.  The Separation Party of Alberta (S.P.A.) changed its name last year to the Alberta First Party and no longer makes independence a major part of its platform.  Alberta, with its oil riches and large religious conservative population (including communities of Mormons descended from those fleeing persecution in the U.S. in the 19th century), has earned it the name “the Texas of Canada.”  Its natural resources guarantee that it would be economically viable on its own, though landlocked.

The flags of Vancouver (the city), Canada, and B.C.

And in the 1950s and ’60s, British Columbia’s far-right-wing premier, W. A. C. “Wacky” Bennett, wanted to make B.C. its own nation—and take Yukon with him when he pulled out of the union.  Today, B.C. is politically divided between its liberal coastal rainforests and cities and its conservative interior deserts and tundra.

The sun finally set
on W. A. C. “Wacky” Bennett

What is left of active separatism in western Canada is actually mostly left-wing, not right-wing.  Last year (as reported at the time in this blog) saw the emergence of the Vancouver Island Province Initiative (V.I.P.I.), which aims to make the large island that contains B.C.’s capital, Victoria, into Canada’s 11th province.  Another group, the Sovereign State of Vancouver Island Party (S.S.V.I.P.), wants to take the island, which has long been ground-zero of the environmentalist and indigenous battle against clearcut logging, into its own republic.  In some ways it is an outgrowth of the quixotic, ecology-based movement to create an independent Cascadia from (in one common version) B.C. plus the U.S. states of Oregon and Washington.  But these movements are even more fringe than the W.B.P. once was.

This was the flag of Vancouver Island,
when it was a separate British colony in pre-Canada days.

For now, at least, whatever happens in Quebec, Canada’s western flank is likely to stay in one piece.  A regional feeling of nationhood never really did gel.  There was never even an agreed-upon flag.  Look at the “Republic of Western Canada” swag pictured at the top of this article.  The only flag shown is a Union Jack.  It’s as if all the movement could come up with as a distinguishing cultural feature was: “French not spoken here.”

Related articles:
“Quebec Cracks Down on Crimes against the State—Like Playing Hopscotch in English” (November 2011)
“Which Part of Wet’suwet’en Territory Don’t They Understand?” (November 2012)
“Vancouver Islanders Hope to Be Canada’s 11th Province—and Its Greenest” (August 2013)
“Separatists Challenge Canadian Tolerance with Proposed Islamic-Headscarf Ban” (September 2013)

“Quebec Free-Love Saucer Cult Joins Muslim Headscarf Debate, Suggests Censoring Religious Texts” (October 2013)

[You can read more about West Canada, Vancouver Island, and many other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]

Quebec Free-Love Saucer Cult Joins Muslim-Headscarf Debate, Suggests Censoring Religious Texts

A discordant note has just been added to the passionate debate in Quebec, Canada, over the ruling separatist party’s reprehensible initiative to restrict the display of religious symbols and attire, in a thinly veiled attempt to target the province’s Muslim minority (reported in detail last month in this blog).  The latest condemnations of the Parti Québécois’s policy comes from a global but Quebec-based flying-saucer cult called the International Raëlian Movement.

Raëlian bishops have publicly announced that religious symbols should not be banned but that all religious texts should be censored in order to remove references to male dominance, intolerance of homosexuality, or the elevation of the superiority of any particular religion.  Raëlism considers itself in some ways a science rather than a religion and it voices respect for all faiths.  It also promulgates a free-love doctrine and freedom for all sexual orientations.

Raël himself

Founded by a French race-car driver turned U.F.O.-contactee named Claude Vorilhon, who goes by the name Raël, the group claims that human life on earth was seeded by extraterrestrials.  Raëlians have had their own controversies over religious symbology.  Their original logo was a swastika set inside of a Star of David (below, left) but a tide of complaints over the juxtaposition—especially when they tried to open an intergalactic “embassy” in Israel, where displays of swastikas are banned—led to its replacement by a more stylized version (below, right):

This has not mollified everyone—despite the Raëlians’ designation of July 20th earlier this year as “Swastika Rehabilitation Day.”  Raël points out (correctly) that, before its use by the Nazis in the 1930s, swastikas were primarily a religious symbol of good luck and harmony and other positive virtues, found around the world in traditional Native American, Egyptian, Buddhist, and many other cultures.  He also points out (far more debatably) that he saw such a symbol on the spaceships of the “Elohim” who contacted him and took him to their planet.  Adolf Hitler’s occultic religion of Ariosophy replaced a common Aryan (i.e., north Indian) counter-clockwise swastika with a clockwise one.  Some scholars believe that some swastikas were originally counter-clockwise because they indicated the direction of the rotating earth (as seen from above).

Other controversies in which the Raëlians have been embroiled have included nude parishioners distributing condoms in front of Catholic churches and, in 2002, a fraudulent but widely publicized claim by Raëlian geneticists that they had performed the first human cloning.

Raëlians celebrating August 25, 2013, as “Go Topless Day”

This week, Raëlians are offering to be the first religious group to submit their texts to a proposed international board of censors for the deletion of any homophobic, sexist, or religious-chauvinist passages—of which they say there are none in their 1975 founding holy writ, Vorilhon’s Space Aliens Took Me to Their Planet.

To many Americans, there is something off-kilter about the entire debate.  As in Europe, Canadian legal institutions and mainstream civil society seem to take it for granted that some forms of expression should be suppressed.  In Canada and much of Europe, it is illegal to deny the Holocaust or to “incite hatred” against minorities, however that might be defined.  As a result, Nazi sympathizers in those countries are emboldened by what they see as an official attempt to suppress the truth, and their logic is understandable: if Holocaust-denial literature is blatant nonsense, they reason, why are the authorities so desperate to prevent people from reading it?  Publishing Mein Kampf and displaying swastikas is illegal in Germany; consequently, Nazi symbology has acquired a rebellious mystique, and the sight of a swastika has a taboo allure about it in Europe which it does not in places like the United States, where it is commonly seen in historical references (and when fringe neo-Nazis make the news).  The U.S. has neo-fascists, but they are the fringe of the fringe.  And the U.S. has many forms of epidemic violence, but large gangs of neo-Nazi skinheads setting fire to immigrant and minority neighborhoods is not a recurring scourge the way it is in central and eastern Europe.  The global center of Holocaust-denial research, not coincidentally, is Canada.  And the suppression of some ideas naturally leads bigots like those in charge of the Parti Québécois to put forth a “Charter of Quebec Values” that sees implicit support for terrorism in the display of Muslim symbols—since where does one draw the line? isn’t jihadist terrorism as bad as neo-Nazi violence? and don’t many suicide bombers wear burqas? etc. etc. ... and then we’re right back where we started.

A German neo-Nazi.  Censorship won’t make this problem go away.

It’s not clear if the Raëlians are serious about their proposal to censor religious texts, just as it’s never clear if they’re serious about anything.  Mostly, I think they just like getting on the news.  But if they prod Canadians and Québécois to contemplate the absurdity of religious censorship, and to question the originally-well-meaning but deeply-illiberal approach to “bad ideas” and “bad symbols” prevalent in Canada and Europe, then they will be making a contribution.

[You can read more about Quebec and other separatist movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

Quebec Separatists Challenge Canadian Tolerance with Proposed Islamic-Headscarf Ban

It is a common self-deprecating joke of Canadians that their country had the opportunity to enjoy French cuisine, American industry, and British traditions, but unfortunately got stuck with American traditions, French industry, and British cuisine.  Like many such jokes, there’s some truth to it.  But now at least one corner of Canada is amending that list by indulging in a particularly French form of religious bigotry as well.  On September 10th, timed for the eve of the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, lawmakers from Quebec’s ruling separatist party, the Parti Québécois (P.Q.), announced a push for a law banning Islamic religious garb—following a trend in many parts of Europe, most notoriously France.

Quebec

The proposed law, as part of the party’s so-called “Charter of Quebec Values,” would forbid any specifically religious clothing to be worn by public servants while on the job.  (Elected officials would be exempt.)  Religious symbols that could no longer be worn include Muslim headscarves, Sikh turbans, Jewish yarmulkes, and “large” Christian crucifixes.  (How large is not defined—Jews do not seem to be able to sneak past the law with really really small yarmulkes—but this follows the language in similar French legislation.)  Though the law has no chance of passing, the proposal offers a taste of what kind of place Quebec would be to live in if it ever really separated from Canada.

Nor is it only Muslims who would be affected ...

Similar legislation is already in play in France, where, as in the rest of Europe, there are fewer constitutional protections of free expression than in Canada (where such a law, if passed, will surely be knocked down the first time it is tested in court).  Though it is ostensibly neutral—it pertains to all such religious symbols—everyone understands that such policies are designed to target Muslims.  Before 2001 and the cresting of anti-Muslim prejudice, no one was seriously worried about the disruptive societal effects of wearing large crosses (which few French do anyway); nor was there any kind of a widespread panic over nuns’ habits.  Last year, the French president at the time, Nicolas Sarkozy—who rose to power on a campaign promise to “powerhose the scum out of the ghettoes”—suddenly decided in the 2012 election season (as reported in this blog at the time) that it was necessary to crack down on animal cruelty among halal butchers (halal being the Islamic equivalent of Jewish kosher dietary rules).  Sarkozy was even such an animal sentimentalist that he took time away from his busy schedule of authorizing baton-swinging police raids on Gypsy encampments to tour halal butcheries and tut-tut over the nastiness of it all.  He did everything but pose for the camera with a quivering lamb in his arms and whisper in its ear that he would protect it from the big bad mullahs.  Everyone, of course, understood that he was playing to the Marine Le Pen vote, not the Brigitte Bardot one.  (He lost, thankfully.)

Nicolas Sarkozy, born-again animal-rights champion

The P.Q. is doing the same thing.  Such laws will never pass Canadian constitutional muster—and the P.Q. does not have enough of a majority in the provincial assembly to push through laws on its own—but the separatist party’s leader, Pauline Marois, is pandering to ignorant xenophobes and preying on fears of terrorism to revive sagging poll numbers in the face of apathy on the question of secession from Canada, the party’s raison d’être.  (See an earlier article from this blog on language politics in Quebec.)

As one might expect, civil-rights groups and Muslim organizations in Quebec are up in arms.  Jewish groups are not happy either.  (Jews and Muslims each make up between 1% and 2% of the population of Quebec, which is about 84% Roman Catholic and about 6% non-religious.)

Pauline Marois looks down her nose at minorities.

Earlier this year, Marois backed a rule barring Sikhs from wearing turbans while playing soccer, on so-called safety grounds.  The International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) promptly struck down the rule—not the only time that Québécois cultural chauvinism has run afoul of more tolerant international bodies.  (Sikhs, though numerous on Canada’s on West Coast, barely register demographically in Quebec, numbering only about 8,000.)  Marois’s government has also been accused of intentionally scheduling 2016 elections to coincide with Rosh Hashanah, and thus suppress Montreal’s mostly anti-separatist Jewish vote.

Proudly Sikh, proudly Québécois, proudly Canadian—something Pauline Marois can’t get her head around

Opposition parties have reacted angrily to the P.Q.’s moves.  Thomas Mulcair, leader of the New Democratic Party (N.D.P.), said, “We’re categorical in rejecting this,” adding that such discrimination is “intolerable in our society.”  But this is part of the plan.  The P.Q.’s narrow-minded electoral base already scorns Anglophone liberals as contemptibly tolerant of minorities.

Within the separatist camp, there has been discord over the P.Q. proposal.  One federal Bloc Québécois member of parliament, Maria Mourani, spoke out strongly against the religious-garb ban.  But within days she was ejected from her party because of so-called irreconcilable ideological differences with the party line.  Mourani, a Lebanese-Canadian born in Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), who has in the past been outspoken on such issues as Tibet (as reported in this blog), will now sit as an independent.

Maria Mourani (left), excommunicated for her tolerance

But how much of a danger to society, and to the ruling party, are Muslims really?  Ironically, at her victory rally after winning office almost exactly a year ago, Marois survived a probable assassination attempt (as reported at the time in this blog) when a gun-toting lunatic was arrested after killing one person and wounding another; police think he may have been gunning for Marois next.  Who was this killer?  Was he an immigrant jihadist?  A turban-wearing Sikh terrorist?  Nope—the gunman, Richard Henry Bain, an Anglophone fishing-lodge owner from northern Quebec, is a born-again Christian who (as reported here) told media after his arrest, “I’m a Christian soldier, and we will never surrender to fight the evil separatists.  I fight for freedom, democracy, justice, and to speak one’s mother tongue.”  He said Jesus Christ had told him to embark on his shooting spree.  Gee, and he wasn’t even wearing a “large crucifix” to warn people that he was a nut.  You just never can tell who the problem people will be, can you?

Richard Henry Bain, who murders for Jesus (not covered by pending legislation)

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, is now in the layout phase and should be on shelves, and available on Amazon, by early fall 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook.]