Most Canadians understand that the rupture of their country would be a crime against the history of mankind.
—Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau
It is more and more sure that a new country will appear, democratically, on the map.
—Quebec Premier René Lévesque
A political time-bomb is ticking away north of the U.S. border. What it threatens is the unity and perhaps even the survival of Canada. The bomb comes in the form of a threat by the separatist government of Quebec to seek independence for the country's largest province. Next week, at an extraordinary three-day meeting, Canada's national and provincial leaders will gather in Ottawa to discuss means of righting the country's grave economic problems, which include a galloping 8.5% unemployment and 9.5% inflation. But underlying the talks will be a nervous awareness that Canada's 111-year-old confederation is in danger and that, as Montreal Novelist Hugh MacLennan puts it: "This country we have taken for granted might be lost to us."
It was on Nov. 15, 1976, that Canadians suddenly discovered part of their country might soon be missing. That day Quebec's predominantly French-speaking voters gave 41% of their ballots, enough to form a majority government in the province, to the left-of-center Parti Québécois, which only ten years ago was a splinter group on the fringe of provincial politics. Independence for Quebec is the party's main goal—indeed, its raison d'être. Some time next year the government is expected to hold a province-wide referendum. How the issue will be worded is uncertain, but in essence the voters of Quebec will be asked in a plebiscite whether or not their province should take the first steps toward becoming a new, independent North American nation. If Quebec does eventually secede, Canada's already impoverished Atlantic Provinces (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island) will be perilously isolated from the rest of the country. Separatist pressures, moreover, could very well increase in the western provinces, which have long chafed against the central government's lack of concern for their interests. Canada, in short, could be torn apart.
The resolution of these alarming possibilities rests in large part in the hands of two French-speaking Quebecois: Canada's aloof, intellectual Prime Minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 58, and passionate, populist Quebec Premier René Lévesque (pronounced Leh-vek), 55.
The two antagonists have much in common, including an acquaintanceship that goes back more than 20 years. Both are outspoken believers in the democratic process, men who are convinced that the coming confrontation between province and nation will be resolved without bloodshed or violence. Both, paradoxically, are held in more or less equal esteem by the 4.8 million French-speaking Quebecois, who constitute around 80% of the province's population. And both men, as sons of Quebec, seek the goal that is at the heart of Canada's crisis. That is the preservation of the French language and culture within a country of 23 million people, nearly three-fourths of whom have English as their first or only language—a country, moreover, that shares