Preston Manning: How to remake Canada after a secession vote

National Post

2 days ago

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Exploring the potential parallels between the original confederation conferences and any Re-Confederation Conference a little further: who would be the present day equivalents of Charles Tupper and Leonard Tilley, vigorously championing the interests of Atlantic Canada? Who would be the equivalents of George-Étienne Cartier and George Brown, vigorously representing the divergent interests of Quebec and Ontario? Who would be the present day champions of those regions and interests conspicuously absent from the original confederation discussions — the champions of the interests of Canada West, the northern territories, and Canada's indigenous peoples? And would the re-founders include the equivalent of a John A. Macdonald — someone with the stature, skills, lubricating capacity, and luck required to even keep any Re-Confederation Conference from blowing apart, let alone giving birth to Canada Next?
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Finally, what might be the major demands and concessions that the principal participants in such a conference would bring to the re-confederation table?
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Quebec would of course be expected to press its sovereignty association demand in one form or another. And this time there is unlikely to be strong and charismatic champions, within or outside Quebec, for 'Please Stay, Don't Leave.' Certainly the current prime minister — an anglophone banker who speaks French poorly and despises nationalism — is ill-equipped to play that role. And under current circumstances, several of the western provinces might be inclined to support Quebec's ultimate assertion of sovereignty, provided one of the terms of its future 'association' with Canada was an ironclad agreement to provide an open energy/transportation corridor across its territory to the Atlantic.
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Conceding sovereignty association to Quebec, however reluctantly, might also cause Canada West to rethink its own position within any re-confederated Canada. What if Canada West were to simply take Quebec's vacated place within the federation — its 3 seats on the Supreme Court, its 24 seats in the Senate, and the majority of its seats in the Commons? Might Quebec conditionally 'out' and Canada West more effectively 'in,' largely alleviate the strains that both Quebec nationalism and western alienation currently place on the federation?
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Besides Quebec arriving at any future Re-Confederation Conference with its well thought out sovereignty-association proposition, it would behoove the other major components of the Canadian federation to think through how they would rewrite the constitution of Canada if they had the opportunity to do so.
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Canada West, in particular, should be prepared to come to any such conference with its own clearly thought out redraft of the current constitution — a redrafted constitution in which any future Senate is made democratically accountable and genuinely representative of regional interests; a redrafted constitution in which the currently inequitable equalization formula is made largely unnecessary because Quebec is now on its own and each of the remaining provinces is sufficiently equipped and responsible to carry its own weight; and a redrafted constitution now completely devoid of those current clauses which give the federal government the means of overriding the constitutionally defined division of powers between the central and provincial governments.