JUST THINK HOW BORING CANADA WOULD BE WITHOUT QUEBEC.

When I was a young man living in Edmonton I was a Separatist. Not one of those naive ideologues who imagined Alberta going it alone as a separate country, but a Quebec Separatist. I felt it was perfectly understandable, perhaps inevitable, that Quebec would eventually choose to become a sovereign nation. Canada had done it, why not Quebec? My few Quebecois friends were offended. No matter how much I protested that I was a genuine Sovereignist, they insisted on interpreting my stance as either a hostile rejection of Quebec, or "calling the bluff". My Quebecois friends were not Sovereignists, so they found my acceptance of Quebec sovereignty upsetting and confusing. They insisted I was just posturing because they wanted to believe I was. I wasn't.

I'm not Quebecois, and I have little appreciation of what it means to preserve an island of Quebecois culture in an Anglo sea. This is why we have sovereign countries; so peculiar people can develop peculiar solutions to their peculiar problems, without imposing their solutions on other equally peculiar people who have different and equally peculiar problems. In other words, I believe in Quebec, and I think we should trust the Quebecois to sort themselves out.

We don't have any language police where I live. And, when I hear of debates over whether you can sell "Pasta" in an Italian restaurant, or clerks being fined because they said "Hello" before they said "Bonjour", I'm glad we don't. Quebec looks silly when they do these things, but things often look silly to those who don't understand.

Now Quebec Premier, Pauline Marois, is promoting the idea of banning "religious" symbols in the Service de Publique. This seems silly to me, but what do I know? If the Quebecois want to establish a Government dress code, hairstyle or funny walk let them try. They're a democracy, and the people of Quebec are free to change the government, leave the civil service, withhold their taxes, practice civil disobedience, or move to more hospitable regions of the country as the Mayor of Calgary has been encouraging them to do. As long as they're part of Canada, of course, they'll have to deal with a Supreme Court that will ultimately decide if what they’re trying to do is constitutional. And if they’re told it isn’t Quebec can still leave. They are a peculiar people, with their own peculiar problems. And I’m still a Sovereignist.