LETTER TO ALL THOSE FUTURE ANGLO-SEPARATISTS...

 

In Ottawa, the capital city of Canada, there is a German embassy. There is also an embassy for Iceland, and one for each of the following countries: the United States of America, the Federation of Russia, the People's Republic of China, the Empire of Japan, la République française, Portugal, Finland, Norway, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil. And there are also embassies, of course, from smaller or lesser known countries, like Guinea-Bissau, El Salvador, Djibouti, Zambia, Bolivia, etc.

There is an interesting exception, though, to that list: there is no embassy from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. You may look round and round, all over the place, in every street of every neighbourhood of Ottawa, a city of over a million inhabitants, you would not find one. Not one. None. No British Embassy. Does it mean the United Kingdom has cease to exist? Did it sink under the waves? Did Brexit went too far? Did the inhabitants of Great Britain collectively decided to unplug a gigantic plug hidden somewhere on that island? Did the Northern Ireland part of the remaining country decided soon after the Great Plunge unto the Abyss to join the Republic of Ireland instead (and the European Union, by the same token)?

The United Kingdom is not the only country in that situation, it must be said. There are also no embassies from Jamaica, Australia, New Zealand, and many other countries around the globe. There is a reason for that, of course, and it is a simple one, even though it's not a good one.

To put it in a few words: all those countries are British kingdoms. Of all the fifty or so kingdoms of the world, a good third of them are British, which goes a long way to show the extraordinary extent of the old British Empire, the one over which it was often said that the sun never set. Some are small islands in the Carribean, some are rather large geographically, like Canada, Australia or New Zealand. Some are part of what a British writer once called the Anglosphere, which is to say all the lands and places where the English language is spoken, by the local inhabitants, as a first language.

Embassies are of course useful institutions. They exist to offer services to fellow countrymen visiting foreign countries or living in it. They exist to help and improve communications between national governments. They exist to serve as links between countries. If they still exist in today's mordern world, with its faxes, emails, tele-work and jet airplanes, it's because they still fulfill a need.

Embassies are use by countries. Real countries.

Canada is not a real country. And it is not even a country at all.

Canada thinks it is a confederation born in 1867. It isn't. What happened in 1867 was the amalgamation of four British colonies into a larger British colony. Period. Nothing less and nothing more. Call 1867 the birthdate of a new country, if you want, but it wasn't.

Canada thinks it reached full autonomy in the '30, with the Statutes of Westminster. What was reach then, in practice and in reality, is the simple fact that the accounts of the Canadian part of the British Empire were separated from the accounts of the rest of the British Empire. Nothing more and nothing less.

Canada thinks it is a country as real as the American republic. It isn't. It is a kingdom, yes, but with a twist, since there are a lot exactly like it, and depite being many, they all have the same head, like some kind of monster. Nothing more and nothing less.

Canada think it is a country, but its exact beginning is not clear. It is shrouded in mystery. It came to be, so it seems, as the result of the transfer of two former French colonies, Acadie and Canada, from one European kingdom, the French one, to another European kingdom, the British one, at the end of a world-wide war. Nothing more and nothing less.

Canada thinks it is a country, but it is more precisely a living compromise. That compromise was the result of a sort of social contract between two groups of orphans. The first group, called Loyalists in Canada, were political refugees from the United States. To remain faithful to their king and start a new life, most of those political orphans had to flew north. The second group was made-up by the North America-born French, economic orphans in their case, unable (sometimes unwilling) to go back home, contrary to the Metropolitan-born French, who constituted almost half ot the population of the two colonies, and who had the means to return. Two groups of orphans, two groups of losers, two sides of a binary entity still trying to unite as a single country, so many years later, almost a quarter of a millenia after its creation. Canada is like a couple having to compromise all the time to gain some respite.

Canada thinks it is a multiculturalist country. It is, in a way, if you think only in a narrow individualistic way, but it is not in another, more natural, more sane, more collective, manner. It it essentially based on a multitude of nations and societies, each built around its own language. Those natural groups calls themselves Inuit, Cris, Mowhaks, Canadiens, Micmacs, Acadiens, Abenakis, Attikameks, Innus, Métis, Algonquins, Ojibways, etc. Each of those is a nation, a tribe, a people, whatever the name you choose to describe them. The nature of that kind of denomination does'nt matter that much: a tribe is simply a small nation. a people is simply a larger one. There are also many immigrant communities originating from all over the world, mainly in the largest cities of Canada, but also in smaller ones.

Canada thinks is it made up of immigrants. It is. For once, it is right. All inhabitants of that vast territory came from elsewhere, whether as a quite recent immigrant, freshly arrived here, or as a native inhabitant, already born here, from ancestors who came from elsewhere, like France, England, Scotland, Bénin, Bolivia, China, or also like North-East Asia, as in the case of the First Nations, also known as Amerindians, who represent the very first wave of settlement, as opposed to the second wave (French people at the time of New France), the third wave (British people, after the conquest of said New France) or the fourth wave (mainly atfer the mid-XIXth century, from everywhere else in the world).

Canada thinks it has its own head. It has not. That head lives in London (England), the city that is still the real capital of Canada, the other one being some kind of administrative center, run by a mere head of government, somewhat like the Prime Minister of France, the one whose name nobody remembers long, unlike the name of said president. The name of this country's head is Charles the Third. He's also the head of many other places, like Australia, Jamaica, New Zealand, etc.

Canada thinks it has a Constitution. It has not. It was never ratified by Québec's Assemblée nationale, and may quite never be. It is to be hope it will never be.

Canada thinks it has the last say in all decisions related to itself. It has not. The Canadian Parliement make laws, the government apply those laws, but only after they have been validated and confirmed and approved and signed by the head of state, the rightful sovereign of Canada, Charles the Third, already mentioned, who has a right of veto upon all legislation pertaining to the Canadian part of HIS worldwide dominions, HIS possessions, HIS crown lands, and also over all the subjects over whom he reigns and who, ergo, are not really citizens as such.

To put it simply, Canada his a sham.

It is a mystery, a little-known quantity, a large but cold and near-empty territory that spends too much time pretending to be a country. Canada is a sham claiming to be a country.

Canada is also a fraud.

It is as fraudulous as the shenanigans of the federal governement who, before the 1995 Québec referendum, meddled into the financing of the No side in order to make sure that the right side, meaning his own side, had more than enough money to convince as many Quebeckers as possible of the rightness of its cause and won the referendum, which it did, but only by the slightest and barest of margin (a few tens of thousands of votes cast, about the size of a small town, in a democratic exercise involving millions of voters). All this means that half of those millions of voters were possibly defrauded of their legitimate right to choose their own future.

Canada must separate from the British Kingdom

Canada is essentially a duality, made up of two halves, each half ignoring the other as much as possible. It is made up of two solitudes, as observed once, quite rightly, by an English-speaking sociologue. One solitude, the smallest at first, then the largest, reigns happily, feeling supreme because of its vast superiority in numbers, attained through its ability to attract as many English-speaking immigrants from the home country, till 1867, when English Canada became more populous than French Canada, and when the confederate charade began. The other solitude, first the largest, then the smallest, had to compensate lack of political power with larger demographic fertility. There is no real hate between those halves, the English one and the French one, to be honest, but very little love, most of the time. The rest of the time, think about two scorpios in the same bottle. Blood was shed many times through that quarter of a millenia.

A separation is becoming more and more necessary, even now.

English Canadians must mentally accept to detach themselves completely from their mother country, the United Kingdom.

French Canadians, of whom a majority, living in the British province of Québec, voted to separate from Canada at the 1995 referendum, despite the opposition of almost all and every Anglo-Québécois and the support of some of the Néo-Québécois immigrants, must be realistic and accept that a full indépendance is probably out of reach, at least at this very moment.

Both halves of Canadas must accept reality. The future may take many forms. Many formulas are possible. The creation of one republic (for the present Canada), with an autonomous republic (for its Québec component), one inside another, like Russian dolls, is a possible option. It may work, especially with the intended redistribution of powers among the many constituent parts of the new entity (more powers for francophones in order to better be able to resist assimilation and anglicisation, and to also preserve and protect our culture, and more powers for the very first custodians of this land, the Amerindians, in order to let them have larger territories and more control over their own fate, in a general manner). There are other options of course, like having two or three independant republics (Atlantic, Québec, Canada West, for instance), or a federation of republics, along the lines of the ex-Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), of old.

Great things take time, they say. It is true. Rome wasn't built in a day, they say. It is true. One has to spent years as a child before reaching adulthood, and that only after passing through the pains of the teenage years, they say. It is true. I saw the truthness of it as a child myself, once, and I'm seeing it again these days as a father. One cannot argue with the truth, one must simply accept it.

Can Canada evolve? Yes. Can Canada better itself? Yes. Can Canada change for the better? Yes. But only if most of us can agree on a possible future, whether we see ourselves as French Canadians, English Canadians, recent immigrants, members of the First Nations....

Two referendums were organized in Quebec, in the past. The first one was a clear loss, admittedly. The second one was almost a draw. A third referendum is far from impossible, one day, despite appearances to the contrary. The next Quebec provincial election is scheduled to be in 2026. The identity of the next Official Opposition may prove to be a surprise to some. 

Whatever happen, remember that the future belong to our children, not to us...

Voilà.

D'un séparatisse québécois qui commence à se faire vieux...

CM

* * *

PLUS:  @charles.millar3 (Twitter)