Liberal Member #775281 implores Liberal MPs: SVP, vote NO to Nation motions

Liberal Member #775281
Laurier-Ste.Marie, Montréal

Dear Liberal MPs,
I ask you to respect Liberal doctrine, the will of the party members
and the will of the strong majority of the nation of Canada, which you
represent, and vote NO to the two nation motions coming before the
House.

To vote yes to either of these motions would be to accept a logic
completely contrary to the continued health and unity of the Canadian
nation. As Liberal MPs, I hope I do not have to remind you of the
principled and coherent positions taken by the Liberal Party and its
leaders on this matter in the past. Many of you will have previously
voted to defeat a similar motion when Mr. Chrétien was PM, on October
29, 2003.

At that time, when Bloc members demanded justifications for Liberal
members' vote, M. Dion, then Intergovernmental Affairs Minister, said:
« Si la question était celle qui a été soumise au premier ministre du
Québec hier, à savoir que le Québec est une nation au sein de la
nation canadienne, on voterait oui tout de suite. Est-ce que le député
voterait oui?
...
Monsieur le Président, j'ai posé une question au député. Est-ce qu'il
est prêt à admettre qu'il fait partie de la nation québécoise et de la
nation canadienne, et d'ailleurs aussi de la nation
canadienne-française?

Moi, je suis, avec tous les Québécois du côté de cette Chambre, un
fier Québécois, un fier Canadien français et un fier Canadien. Peut-il
en dire autant? »

(translation: "Mr. Speaker, if the question was along the lines of the
one put to the Premier of Quebec yesterday, as to whether Quebec is a
nation within the Canadian nation, we would vote yes right away. Would
the hon. member also vote yes?...Mr. Speaker, I asked the hon. member
a question. Is he prepared to recognize that he is a member of the
nation of Quebec and the Canadian nation, and the French-Canadian
nation as well?... I am, as are all Quebeckers on this side of the
House, a proud Quebecker, a proud French Canadian and a proud
Canadian. Can he say the same?")

In contrast, the Harper Conservative motion, "that this House
recognize that the Quebecois form a nation within a united Canada",
neither defines French Canadians as a nation, rather than Quebeckers,
nor says Quebec is a nation within the Canadian nation, only
pitifully, "within a united Canada", and Mr. Harper carefully avoided
any mention of the only unanimously recognised nation, Canada! The
intellectually coherent, politically wise and statesmanlike position
maintained by the Liberal Party in defense of Canadian unity until now
is that there is a French Canadian nation, based in Quebec, whence
Quebec's distinct nature.

Even Jacques Brossard, father of the separatists' weak legal
justification for independence with his study "L'Accession à la
souveraineté et le cas du Québec" and his mentoring of Daniel Turp and
others, admitted in his 1976 tome that by international standards
Quebec was not a nation and the justification for independence would
have to derive from the French Canadian nation, whether specific to
Quebec or simply based in Quebec.

I am a Montrealer, Quebecker and Canadian. I studied Political Economy
at l'Université de Montréal after having been educated in French
schools all my life. But, as bilingual and integrated into Quebec
society as I am, I am not part of a Quebec nation. My only nation is
Canada. Most French Canadian Quebeckers feel they belong to two
nations, Canada and the French Canadian nation, which, through a
combination of separatist strategies and general intellectual
laziness, many have come to call the Quebec nation. Pas grave. But
when the parliament of a country announces it holds within it another
nation whose name is the same as that of a legal political
geographical unit such as the federated state or province of Quebec,
without at least reaffirming that all Quebeckers are part of the
Canadian nation, and that Quebeckers form a nation in the sense of
French Canadians forming a nation, they are imposing an identity upon
me and hundreds of thousands of other Quebeckers with which we do not
identify, and playing into the hands of the long term strategy of
separatists, to psychologically divide Quebeckers from their fellow
Canadians as a means of achieving eventual political separation.
"L'étapisme" is far from dead.

For any federalist "digne du titre" to vote for the Bloc or Tory
motions is to vote for Quebec's gradual slip into independence. It is
to vote against Canada. Need I remind you, "better a bang than a
whimper"?

My uncle was twice a Liberal candidate in BC, my uncle ran repeatedly,
provincially and federally, in the dark years of Tory domination in
Ontario, my brother and I worked 40+ hours a week as volunteers in the
1995 referendum, only to be literally spat on in the street by rabid
separatists when they saw our NO buttons. I and my family and friends
have not given so much of ourselves to the Liberal Party, to Canada,
to watch the last bastion of principled federalism abandon everything
it ever stood for, from Laurier to King to St. Laurent to Pearson to
Trudeau to Turner to Chrétien to Martin, so that Liberal MPs, of all
people, perhaps overly worried about their Quebec appeal, perhaps
hoping to ease a favoured candidate's path to the leadership, would
vote for a motion undermining everything the party ever stood for, and
so lending unanimous consent to a measure which condemns Canada to a
very specific nationalist-separatist logic which can only result in
its dissolution.

Now is the time for all friends of Canada to come to the aid of the
Party! Liberal MPs, I implore you, do not vote for these motions. They
will destroy the Liberal Party ideologically and politically: if we
will not stand up for Canada, then we have no further raison d'être.
And many of us will have to reexamine our loyalties.

Sincerely,

Liberal Member #775281