Taras Kuzio’s Blog

Viva La Quebec!

Being invited to speak at NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly is, in of itself, prestigious. The Assembly brings together parliamentarians from NATO member states and other countries with whom NATO cooperates through the Partnership for Peace programme and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council.
The only member of the Ukrainian delegation I recognized was Andriy Shkil. This was easy. In a room full of hundreds of delegates he was the only one wearing a Ukrainian embroidered shirt. Following a reception in the beautiful National Assembly building we talked politics throughout the evening over mussels and Chablis, a great combination.
NATO Parliamentary Assembly staff and Andriy Shkil were both surprised at the small size of the Ukrainian delegation and the small representation within it of pro-western forces from Our Ukraine. They also were surprised that President Viktor Yushchenko had not attended the May Paris meeting of the Parliamentary Assembly, unlike the Georgian and Azeri presidents.
Walking down the corridors of the meetings past different sections, I came across the meeting of the Socialist group of NATO parliamentarians. Besides themes, such as security or politics, each ideological group had its own meeting.
I wondered to myself when, or if ever, Ukraine’s Socialists would attend the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. This is unlikely as although Ukraine’s Socialists are members of the Socialist International they have little ideological affinity with Europe’s Socialists and Social Democrats. Ukraine’s socialists do not want to be part of a democratic club that NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly surely is. Spanish Socialist Xavier Solana was initially against NATO membership for Spain but then supported it and went on to become NATO General Secretary. During lunch I sat next to a British Labour parliamentarian who was a member of one of the committees. He happened to represent a city in my home region of Yorkshire.
Having this event held in one of North America’s most beautiful cities is an added bonus. Quebec city, the capitol of the French speaking province of Quebec, feels like Belgium’s Bruges or similar European cities. Of course there are other pleasant cities in Canada – Montreal, Halifax in Nova Scotia (which people mix up with the Halifax I am from in Yorkshire, England) and Vancouver.
Quebec is the heartland of French nationalism and there are many parallels with Ukraine. The separatist Parti Quebecois came to power thirty years ago and introduced French language laws a year later. A mass exodus began of big business to Toronto. Anglophones and Jews also moved in large numbers to Toronto (Jews had traditionally aligned with Anglophones in Montreal).
I have ran into Quebec issues on two occasions.
The first was with the well known Canadian-Jewish writer Mordecai Richler from whose daughter we purchased a home in Toronto when we moved to Canada in 2001. Richler, who grew up in Montreal’s once large Jewish community, never liked the Quebec separatists and the feeling was reciprocated when they boycotted his funeral.
The second was with the language issue when I applied for the new position of Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the bilingual University of Ottawa. Because the Political Science department is dominated by Francophones the short list of two candidates ended up being very short (there are few French-speaking experts on contemporary Ukraine). Knowledge of French seemed to be more important than merit. This is of course ironic as Canadians love to compare their ‘liberal’ multiculturalism to the ‘illiberal’ US melting pot.
Quebec has twice held referendums on its relationship with Canada but each time it failed to obtain majority support of separatism. In 1980, separatists obtained 40 percent and in 1995 only 49 per cent. This is a lot lower than Ukraine’s 92 percent in 1991 even with a lower threshold acceptance of the result as binding with only half of voters (compared to Ukraine’s constitutional two thirds).
But, Quebec also has its Trans-Dniestr (or Donbas). In 1995 the Cree and Inuit native peoples of northern Quebec voted 95 and 96 percent in favor of staying in Canada and against secession. A Quebec that tried to secede from Canada could well have its own separatist problem in a region that controls most of the provinces energy.
Canada’s relations with the US are similar to Ukraine’s with Russia’s. The smaller partner in each relationship knows more about the larger while the larger partner (Russia, USA) either knows very little or its knowledge is skewed and wrong. A well known Canadian comedian Rick Mercer had a popular television show “Talking to Americans” where he traveled around the US asking Americans daft questions about Canada to prove they knew very little about their northern neighbour.
NATO’s summit in Riga is fast approaching. It will be full of symbolism as the first NATO summit in a former Soviet republic. The last summit in 2002 was in Prague when NATO changed the language used to organize seating from English to French. This was to ensure that Leonid Kuchma did not sit next to Tony Blair or George Bush. One wonders whether the Riga summit produce more optimistic outcomes for Ukraine?