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Meantime, Trudeau and Lévesque are playing a political cat-and-mouse game. Lévesque has refused to name a specific date for the referendum vote. He is waiting for Trudeau to call a national election; that is considered likely this spring or in the fall. The P.Q. would presumably argue that anything less than overwhelming support for the Prime Minister was proof that the rest of Canada had no concern for Quebec. The P.Q.'s hopes for a Trudeau setback are not entirely farfetched, since the Trudeau government's popularity zoomed after the Péquiste victory but has now dropped back to 42%, v. 34% for the opposition Conservatives, led by youthful Western Canadian Joseph Clark, 38.
Lévesque's separatist ambitions leave some serious questions without satisfactory answers. One is the potential fate of the 1 million French-speaking Canadians who live outside Quebec. Should Quebec secede, protection for their cultural identity, which is already meager, would almost certainly disappear. The Péquiste solution is that non-Quebecois French Canadians would have the choice of emigrating to the new Quebec—a kind of diaspora in reverse. Considering the province's 11 % unemployment rate, that is not an inviting prospect for many. Moreover, the Acadians of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and the French-speaking descendants of Manitoba's fur trappers have traditions of their own. By and large, French-speaking Canadians outside Quebec seem to want more equality, not an uprooting of their lives. Says Raymond Poirier, executive director of Winnipeg's Franco-Manitoban Society: "If they continue to pass laws that do not permit the Francophone community to grow, they will have to build a fence around us and turn it into a zoo."
As the polls on separatism indicate, there is a serious doubt as to how much in tune with its electorate the Parti Québécois government really is on its fundamental goal. Sociologist Guy Rocher of the University of Montreal argues that while Quebec's cultural elite is nationalistic, statist, European in outlook, and intellectual in expression, the new mass culture of the average Quebecois is less wedded to government, more pragmatic, and oriented toward the U.S. As a pro-American populist, Lévesque is something of an exception in his 26-member Cabinet. With 17 graduate and postgraduate degrees among its membership, it certainly fits Sociologist Rocher's description as elite.
Another major question is whether separation would contribute to the regressive isolation of Quebec from North America. That is Trudeau's contention. Says he: "Our Holy Mother the Church is being replaced by holy nationalism. We're forbidding French-Canadian parents to send their children to English schools just as, 20 years ago, Catholic parents were forbidden to send their children to Protestant schools." The repressive nature of Bill 101 seems to back him up.
Will Lévesque's government stay in office long enough to win what it wants? Corporate investors are discouraged by the