Federalism vs. the Unitary State: Options for English Canada in the Event

of the Separation of Quebec

DAN USHER*

The two principle institutions of Canada as it is today-bilingualism and federal government--are designed to accommodate French-speaking people and English-speaking people within a single nation. Neither institution would be appropriate for the largely English- speaking country that remains if Quebec secedes. In that event, English Canada should reorganize itself as a unitary state with no constitutionally-sanctioned provinces at all. That would avoid the welt-known inefficiencies of federal government, the duplication of bureaucracy, and the needless tax competition among jurisdictions. A nationwide sharing community would develop the common interest and common loyalty that an ethnically-diverse country such as English Canada requires for self-preservation. Without Quebec, there would be no geographically-concentrated languages or cultures which the provinces might conceivably protect. (JEL Hll)

My contribution to this discussion is to put forward and defend a proposition that is almost the reverse of Gordon Gibson's proposal. He has argued that the appropriate form of government for a Canada without Quebec would be a looser federation than Canada is today. By contrast, I assert that the only rationale for Canadian federalism is to accommodate English-speaking Canadians and French-speaking Canadians within a single country and that federalism would serve no useful purpose in the English-speaking country left over in the event that Quebec chooses to go. In that event, English Canada should move at once to the very opposite of Plan B. A Canada without Quebec requires no constitutionally-sanctioned provinces and should reconstitute itself as a unitary state like the United Kingdom, France, Sweden, or Norway, rather than as a federation like Belgium, Switzerland, Yugoslavia, or the United States. Four preliminary observations before stating my reasons for this view:

First, in speaking of English Canada, I am speaking about language, not national origin. For the purposes of this discussion, an English Canadian is one who, in this bilingual country, prefers to communicate with his fellow Canadians in English rather than in French\ An English Canadian need not trace his ancestry to the British Isles. His parents or grandparents may have come to Canada from Germany, Sweden, China, Poland, India, Lebanon, or any of a hundred other countries. He may prefer to speak a language other than English at home or among friends. He is an English Canadian all the same, as long as he prefers to speak English rather than French in transactions with his fellow Canadians in the public domain.

"Queen's University- Canada.

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Second, an ethnically diverse society such as English Canada has become requires for its cohesion that a clear line be drawn between the public and the private sectors. In the private sector, I may be as ethnically distinct as I please. I may speak or transact business in whatever language I please. I may form associations with whomever I please. In the public sector, I have the same rights and obligations as every other citizen, and I relate to my fellow Canadians as an individual, not a member of this or that ethnic group. A clear line is essential, for, without a clear line and if public rights become attached to the group rather than to the person, a diverse society tends to disintegrate as every ethnic group becomes the enemy of every other in a general scramble for public largesse.

Third, Canada as we know it is the product of a two-fold compromise between the English and the French. It is a compromise over language and a compromise over the institutions of government. The compromise over language is straightforward. Our Federal institutions are bilingual. Provincial governments adopt the language of the majority in the province with some rights for significant minorities in the other language. The language in the private sector is, with some exceptions, a matter for individual choice. The compromise in institutions is over the powers of the provinces. These are more extensive than is in the interest the English (a point that Gordon Gibson would be inclined to dispute), but less extensive than is in the interest of the French. Both parts of the compromise are essential for the preservation of a country that includes Quebec.

The fundamental interest of French Canadians is the preservation of their language. The French language is inevitably under pressure because French-speaking people are a minority within Canada and because of the role of English as the international language of commerce. There is always a danger of assimilation. A smaller and more dispersed minority would have no choice but to take up the language of the majority. The French minority in Canada with its territorial base in Quebec is large enough to preserve itself, and it means to do so. A minority in Canada but a majority within their province, the French in Quebec would never have accepted the common country in 1867 and would not consider remaining in Canada today without bilingual Federal institutions and without constitutionally-sanctioned rights in Quebec to conduct their own affairs in their own way. The more extensive the powers of the provinces, the better the protection of the French language and culture is likely to be.

On the other hand, it is no small burden for English Canadians to live in a country where Federal institutions are conducted in two languages, one of which most English Canadians do not speak and may not even hear from one year to the next. There is a cost of speaking French and a cost of not speaking French. The cost of speaking French is the (more or less) year of your life you must devote to learning a language that may in the end be of no use to you at all. The cost of not speaking French is to cut yourself off from employment (with any reasonable chance of advancement) in Federal institutions, including the army, and to restrict participation in public life in certain parts of the country. Obviously, the compromise is fuzzy with room for dispute at the edges, especially about the boundary between the powers of the Federal government and the powers of the provinces.

Fourth, in advocating a unitary state for the English Canadian country that remains in the event that Quebec chooses to go, I am not advocating a highly-centralized state. I am not advocating big government. I am not advocating the abolition of municipal government or of some degree of regional self-government in practice. I am advocating the removal

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from the Canadian constitution of all reference to the provinces, so that regional governments would have no constitutional sanction and would be subordinate to the central government in exactly the same sense that the municipalities are now subordinate to the governments of the provinces.

How then, in the event that Quebec chooses to go its own way, does one assess the relative merits of federalism and the unitary state for the English Canadian country that remains?

One commonly-alleged advantage of federal government is, in fact, illusory. It is often said that federalism is required for the protection of local, territorially-concentrated cultures. That is true for Canada as it is today, but it ceases to be true for an English Canadian country without Quebec. The reason is simple. With the possible exception of the Acadians of New Brunswick, there are within English Canada no territorially- concentrated cultures that the provinces might be expected to defend. There are minority cultures within English Canada, but none that constitutes a majority in any province and none that can expect to be better protected by a provincial govermnent than by the government of the country as a whole. Canadians differ about this proposition. There are some who profess to see a Newfoundland culture, a Nova Scotian culture, or an Albertan culture. I see such alleged cultures as creatures of provincial governments with no substance or staying power once the governments that created them are abolished or diminished in their authority. We are all too much alike. To be sure, the Chinese community in British Columbia is distinct to some extent, but, as a minority in its province and in the country as a whole, it has no greater affinity for one level of government than for another.

What might be called "the Ontario problem" is also illusory. A common argument against a unitary state, an argument raised by Gordon Gibson, is that a unitary state would, sooner or later, be swamped by Ontario. The fear is that, with half of the population of English Canada, Ontario would come to dominate the country completely to the detriment of people elsewhere. Actually, the force of this consideration is exactly the opposite of what it often supposed to be. Ontario may indeed come to dominate the Federal legislature in a federal country where the very existence of a government of Ontario, collecting taxes from and providing services for the residents of Ontario exclusively, creates common interests among the people of Ontario and an incentive for its Federal Members of Parliament to vote as a block. With English Canada organized as a federation, the Province of Ontario may indeed be intolerably large. The Province of Ontario may have to be broken into several smaller provinces if the country is to function at all.

The problem automatically vanishes in a unitary state because, almost by definition, there can be no Ontario interest once the Province of Ontario is no more. A common danger in all democratic countries is the exploitation of minority groups by a permanent majority coalition representing a particular interest or collection of interests. A government of the Province of Ontario may serve as the catalyst for such a coalition. But without such a government, there remains no particular reason why Members of Parliament from the territory that once was Ontario should be inclined to vote as a block. The timber interests of Ontario may make common cause with the timber interests of New Brunswick and British Columbia. The big cities of Vancouver, Winnipeg, and Toronto may have common interests to defend against the small towns and the countryside. There

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may be a common interest among farmers nationwide. Though once important, contiguity counts for very little today. As a basis for coalitions, mere contiguity is almost irrelevant in a unitary state.

There are two main reasons, one economic and the other political, why a unitary state would be preferable to federalism for a Canada without Quebec. The economic reason is that a country with only twenty million people -a country smaller than the states of California or New York - i s likely to be more efficient as a unitary state than as a federation. A unitary state can avoid duplication of government activities and can select the appropriate scale for the delivery of every public service. A unitary state is not obliged by the Constitution to respect the authority of local or regional governments, but neither is it forbidden to do so. In practice, it would recognize local and regional authority, just as provinces recognize local governments today. If police protection and road maintenance are best administered locally, they would be administered locally. If the army and the old age pension are best administered nationwide, they would be administered nationwide. If elementary education is best administered in districts larger than a city but smaller than the nation as a whole, it would be administered by regional governments. We would avoid anomalies like that in public medical care where nationwide provision is blocked because medical care is placed by the Canadian Constitution under the jurisdiction of the provinces. We would avoid the absurdity of nine departments of health duplicating administrative cost, quibbling about provision of care for people who work in one province and retire in another, and bickering with a Federal government that is at once forbidden under the Constitution to provide health care directly but allowed to finance all or part of the cost. We would also to avoid the bias against redistribution when it is financed and administered by lower levels of government. Redistribution is inhibited under provincial jurisdiction because especially generous provinces are punished by the in-migration of the poor and by the out-migration of the rich. Provincial governments would be inclined to show less generosity than their voters would favor in the absence of interprovincial migration or if redistribution were national in scope.

In making these claims, I am not denying that governments are aggrandizing. Nor am I dismissing the virtues of checks and balances among branches of government. Rather, I a m claiming that a multitude of governments, each with its own constitutionally- sanctioned sphere of authority but financed in part by the Federal government, is no more likely to get economic policy right than one government in a unitary state with full responsibility for the consequences of its actions. Regardless of whether I am right or wrong about health care, it is evident that the allocation of powers between the Federal government and the provinces which seemed appropriate in 1867 when the first Canadian constitution was established is unlikely to remain appropriate today, and that an allocation which seems appropriate today is unlikely to remain so tomorrow, A unitary state can place jurisdiction where it belongs. By contrast, the reallocation of jurisdiction in a federation requires a constitutional amendment which is at best slow and at worst impossible.

The political reason why a unitary state maybe preferable to federalism is to ensure that the "sharing community" is nationwide. Every democratic society has two domains, a domain of property where people are unequal because they possess different amounts of human and physical resources, and a domain of citizenship where people are equal because their rights are the same. People are equal under the law and in their right to

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vote. People are also equal in their entitlement to public services, in their right to education when education is provided publicly, in their right to medical care, to unemployment insurance, to the old age pension and to welfare (if necessary) to stave off destitution. Entitlement to equal public services constitutes a sharing community (a communist enclave in the bosom of a capitalist society) in which each person contributes according to his income and draws equally or according to his needs. In a federation, the sharing community is in part provincial. In a unitary state, the sharing community is nationwide. The latter is preferable in a country with strong ethnic divisions and where public policy is directed to the inculcation of common interests and loyalty among all citizens.

As a basis for a government of English Canada after the separation of Quebec, Plan B would strengthen the sharing communities of the provinces at the expense of the nation as a whole. Health care, unemployment insurance, education, the old age pension, and many other redistributive programs would be placed under provincial jurisdiction fostering provincially-based common interests that must inevitably place barriers between citizens in different parts of the country. With a province-wide sharing community, any Federal policy or program that is beneficial to anybody in one province is necessarily beneficial to everybody else in that province, for, on becoming more prosperous, the initial beneficiary must automatically bear a larger proportion of the cost of the province-wide sharing community or receive a smaller slice of the transfers conditional on being poor.

Consider the impact on a farmer in Ontario of a Federal subsidy to makers of auto parts (most of whom are located in Ontario). With an Ontario sharing community, the farmer might favor the subsidy because whatever benefits anybody in Ontario is to some extent beneficial to him as well. With a nationwide sharing community that would emerge automatically under a unitary state, he might oppose the subsidy because the implied redistribution from all Canadians to the makers of auto parts is of no benefit to him. The "Ontario problem" is a consequence of the provincial sharing community, and it vanishes when sharing is among all citizens in the nation as a whole.

With expanded jurisdiction and authority for the provinces as Gordon Gibson recommends, English Canada would soon become a very disputatious place. The Federal government would, in all probability, continue to collect more revenue in taxation than it spends directly and to reassign revenue to the provinces. Province would dispute with province over the distribution of transfers from the Federal government, for there is no universally-respected principle to determine how large a transfer each province deserves. Trade policy would also become more contentious. People in every region would persuade themselves that they are mistreated. They would identify with and look increasingly for support to their provincial governments rather than to the Federal government. Threats would escalate until, eventually, the natural aggrandizing tendencies of all governments and the want of real popular support for the Federal government would drive the provinces one by one to follow Quebec's lead to full independence. Extreme decentralization to the provinces is extremely destabilizing. By contrast, a unitary state is the best means for English Canada to hold itself together if Quebec chooses to go.

I add in closing that I am prepared to live with the Canadian compromise as long as Quebec remains a part of Canada and provided that the powers of the Federal government remain sufficient to hold the country together. But it would be foolish for English Canadians to abide by the terms of a compromise with Quebec- to preserve federal

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government-- once the object of the compromise, the Dominion from sea to sea, has been withdrawn.