Fire and Ashes by Michael Ignatieff

in Quebec was crucial if we were to return to power. At every stop in Montreal, Quebec City, the little communities on the north shore of the St. Lawrence and the farmland on the south shore near the American border, I reminded delegates that Quebec was the place that took in my Russian family and gave them refuge. I talked about the graveyard overlooking the St. Francis Riverwhere they were all buried and how I wanted it always to be part of my country. It had always seemed to me that offering Quebec more powers within Canada was both divisive and beside the point. The real issue was to demonstrate a conviction that the country as a whole was unthinkable unless Quebec and Quebeckers were at the heart of it.
    In late June of 2006, when Quebeckers were getting ready to celebrate their holiday, the Fête de la Saint-Jean-Baptiste, a journalist asked whether, given what I had written about nationalism in my book
Blood and Belonging
in the 1990s, I thought Quebec was a nation. It was neither an innocent question nor an academic one. The separatists in Quebec had been insisting that they were a nation, and that as such, they deserved an independent state of their own. Two referenda had been fought on these issues, and the separatists had come within sixty thousand votes of winning the last one in 1995. In
Blood and Belonging
, thirteen years before, I had written: “Because we do not share the same nation, we cannot love the same state.” 2 But nations, I went on to say, can
share
the same state and I believed we always would. Of course Quebec was a nation.
    No sooner had I finished the interview than I experienced the extraordinary difference between words spoken by a writer and words spoken by a politician seeking national office. That single remark triggered a countrywide debate. Some columnists called me brave, others an idiot savant. All my competitors in the leadership race were forced to declare their own positions, some for, some vehemently against. For a time, Quebeckers, especially young ones, flocked to our banner because we had seemed to recognize them in a way our party had not done before.
    In politics calling a fact a fact can be the equivalent of pulling the pin out of a hand grenade. As far as I was concerned, it was a fact that francophone Quebeckers have a national identity: they’ve always identified both as Quebeckers and as Canadians. It doesn’t make theirloyalty to Canada less strong, but it makes it more complex. The genius of our politics lay in the fact that we had never imposed a single national identity on anyone. We were not a country founded on
e pluribus unum
—out of many, one—but instead a complex quilt of overlapping identities. We had created a country in which you could be Quebecker and Canadian in whatever order you chose. What I rejected about separatism was not the pride in nationhood but the insistence on a state, the belief that Quebeckers must make an existential choice between Quebec and Canada. This was a choice most Quebeckers had always refused to make, for the very good reason that they felt some loyalty to both. They wanted to be Quebeckers and Canadians in whatever order they believed right. It was a kind of moral tyranny on the part of separatists to force them to choose between parts of their own selves. After much travail, I said, we had understood that countries must be built on freedom of belonging. From this followed our system of federalism. We could not centralize power in this country, I said, because we could not centralize identity.
    No sooner had my words been uttered than English Canadians began asking whether I was putting the national unity of the country at risk, while nationalist Quebeckers wanted to know when I would recognize their nationhood in the Canadian constitution. I replied that I was against opening the Pandora’s box of our constitution. Our habit of turning every political question between Quebec and Canada into a constitutional negotiation was