QUEBEC VISTAS

...So much is this the case that a reader may be forgiven for thinking that Jacobs's book is as much an indictment of Canada's unimaginative, imitative, resource-exploiting, and "branch plant" economy as it is a whole-hearted confrontation of the question of Quebec's sovereignty...

...Despite Jacobs's multidisci-plinary sensitivities, she perceives and assesses the issue of Quebec's separation dominantly in economic terms...

...Jacobs's examination of both Claude Ryan's pre-referendum "Beige Paper" for a "renewed federalism" and Rene Levesque's "White Paper" on "sovereignty-association" makes clear her preference for Levesque's once-rejected alternative...

...Although Jacobs claims an emotional identification with Canada, with or without Quebec, she confesses that Quebec seems to her already "separate and different" from her own "national community...

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...Mindful of the fact that new nations that split off from other countries usually come to birth in violence, Jacobs goes out of her way to discuss an exception: the peaceable secession of Norway from Sweden...

...For one thing, she contends that the changed status of two great cities, Montreal and Toronto, is at the core of Quebec's changed and changing relationship to the rest of Canada...

...She insists that Quebec is the single province in Canada, by reason of its federal-provincial economic "equalization," for which independence is realistically possible...

...While the huge growth surge from 1940 to 1970 in Montreal's French-speaking population undermined Quebec's old rural culture and transformed Montreal into French Quebec's cultural metropolis, Toronto surpassed Montreal both in rate of population and economic growth, and gradually supplanted Montreal as Canada's national economic center...

...A native of Quebec, he returns there regularly for visits and on-the-spot study...

...To be sure, this is a questionable analogical move...

...Although both separatists and non-separatists do exploit economic data for purposes of persuasion, it is not economics but issues like cultural pride and preservation, self-determination, and nationhood that are fundamentally at stake in the Quebec-Canada tension...

...Morever, invoking the biologist Haldane's principle that big animals are not big because they are complicated but vice versa, she gives the case for smallness and concludes that "the only promising arrangement" for increasingly busy government is "small nations...

...Santoni (Ronald E. Santoni, professor of philosophy at Denison University, is co-editor of "Social and Political Philosophy...

...To use Quebec's size as an economic argument against independence is patently disingenuous: Were Quebec to separate, it would have a population half again as large as Norway's, for example, and whereas Norway's domestic market is, "obviously," dynamic and powerful, Canada's much larger domestic market is, "equally obviously," impotent...

...Although Levesque's "sovereignty-association" has defects—not the least of which is its self-defeating proposal to reconcile Quebec's independence from Canada with a shared currency with Canada—it nurtures cultural diversity rather than uniformity and, generally speaking, suggests the right "connectors" for a "natural" and necessary balance between separateness and interdependence...

...Two peoples so numerically unequal cannot have equal legislative and organizational power within a workable federation...

...Finally, it strikes me as inconsistent that while Jacobs expresses her "unshakable feeling" that Canada's behavior toward Quebec's independence movement "will do honor to civilization," she offers us the chilling reminder that "thoroughly centralized governments have always, finally, required the special environment of oppression to maintain themselves...

...Opposed to the view that because Canada has two "founding peoples," English and French, it should have a new constitution and federation which place these two peoples on an equal footing, she argues that the issue as formulated will never be resolved because it is "inherently insoluble...

...In her understandable attraction to smallness, Jacobs does not confront some tormenting consequences of the proliferation of small nations and sovereignties in today's "global village...

...Jacobs's book is a challenging work with fresh insights on a frustrating topic, but it has flaws...

...In spite of Quebec's differences from Norway, Norway's successful secession clearly becomes the model from which Jacobs evaluates the possibility and advisability of Quebec's independence...

...The way of the status quo is the way of economic and cultural death for Quebec...

...and goes on to reveal her unorthodox rationale for Quebec's separation: On the assumption that dependence is stultifying and independence often unleashes previously untapped energy, initiatives, and originality, she contends that there is no good reason to suppose that a sovereign Quebec would fare worse than the province of Quebec...

...Further, although many books have been written on the economic feasibility of Quebec's separation from Canada, none exceeds The Question of Separatism in analyzing these concerns in terms of Canada's "profoundly colonial approach to economic life...

...Moreover, although she rightly contends that "every different articulate culture enriches us all," she offers no compelling argument that either Claude Ryan's proposals for a looser federalism or Pierre Trudeau's plan for a bicultural Canada would fail to accommodate the enriching French Canadian culture...

...n her first book in more than a decade, Jane Jacobs, the distinguished author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, gives us perspectives on the Quebec situation that one does not ordinarily encounter...

...Is she, for example, prepared to extend to each new sovereignty the "sovereign right" to develop nuclear capabilities for its defense...