THE QUEBEC referendum was good therapy and excel- lent theatre, And I leamed something that I didn’t particularly want to learn. Uf the Pequistes blew anything, it was their cover. Up until the night of the vote, except for minor slips. like Bouchard's complaint that enough white French babies weren't being born, the PQ had managed to keep its inherent racism basically under control. Then Parizeau blurted out, in his bitterness at losing, that it was all the fault of “money and the ethnics.” That guy's dangerous, | remem- ber thinking. With that comment, combined with his and Bouchard’s sneering, hate-filled jibes about the, non- -Quebecers who travelled to Montreal! to join the big Non rally, the premier of Quebec showed his true colors, which were worthy of a white apartheid-era South African politician, That's it, Jacques. Blame big money and the wogs. Although, I guess, les Anglaise are considered ethnics too, in the PQ code fanguage for non-pureblood Quebecers. ‘It’s by the behavior we aren't aware of that we give ourselves away. It’s by our Freudian slips we reveal our secret beliefs, Jacques Parizeau let the idiot monster within show, and that was ~ personal tism as a sign of low intelligence. ‘T'm_a believer in the actual genet- ic brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity. My loyalty, I like to think, is to my planet. So an exercise in defining your- self along racial, linguistic or territo- rial lines pains me deeply. This has been my problem with the whole separatist movement in Quebec, It’s atavistic. Yet, amazingly, between them, Bouchard and Parizeau have man- aged to turn even me into a gibber- ing nationalist. A Canadian national- ist, of course. I'm sure it'll! wear off, but, for a moment there, when it looked like I, personally, was about to lose “my” country, somthing flared up inside “me, and | suddenly realized how the defining moment of the whole..." much this “great, schizophrenic hunk referendum exercise for rie. imagine many of us will look back on the hours before the Yes forces finally, agonizingly, reached - the 50% mark, as among the most dramatic in our lives. We will remember where we were, and who we were with. Accustomed to living in a coun- try that hasn't been invaded since the | Americans tried in 1812, I felt“ strangely threatened, as though there was an army gathering somewhere just over the horizon. “ ~ And the moming afterwards, there was numbness. Because, after all, how often in history has the fate of a whole country hung by such a thread, and rot snapped? One doubts that it could ever again be as tight as that. And I teamed something, as | say. It came as a surprise. I'm a guy “who normally looks down on patrio- “For aver 50 vears, we've been creating individual solutions through a range of products, including GICs, RSPs and our family of Ethical Mutual Fumdis. _ Plus, fora limited time, there's iXtern96. But time is running out, Of a nation-state meant to me. Up until that point, f had been hanging in the ropes, as instructed, and keeping my mouth shut as much as possible, not wanting to mess » with the brilliant game plan being / tun out of a basement on Parliament Hill. And also, gruth to tell, on bad days J wanted then) just to screw off, gel out of my face, and take the whole lot of francophone politicians and bureaucrats in Ottawa with them. The thought of Jean Chretien’s seat disappearing from underneath him, and no more chance of a Mulroney or Trudeau taking over the country again, well, it was hard not to think, at least, as T say, on bad davs, that things might just be a lot better without Quebec and her med- dlesome sons and daughters running the show in Ottawa. Parizeau and Bouchard did some hard pushing and shoving for the last couple of months in their drive for > power. Anywhere else in the world (say Punjab or Bosnia or Palestine or East Timor) they would have been pushed and shoved back-at pretty quickly. In the the U.S., can you imagine how long a serious state secessionist “movement would last before they rolled out the guns again? But this is Canada, eh? And the Canadian response, instead of shov- ing back or shooting, was to say, “Tm sorry." It worked, miraculously. In fact, it should be hailed as a mode) of non-violence. Go ahead, weep abit. it was beautiful. Yet, in the process, | suspect a lot of low-key, non-flag-waving, fairly worldly, unprejudiced, take-it-for- granted, so-called “English” Canadians found themselves experi- encing little rushes of actual primi- tive patriotism. Maybe we need Quebec to throw a screaming fit every ance.in a while just so the rest of us have something to bond over. Were Canadian flag sales up? ! rest my case. O Canada. THANK YOU! ... to the residents of the North Shore for your whojehearted support in the donations for wreaths and poppies in our recent campaign. The Royal Canadian Legion Narth Van (Branch 118) Lynn Velley (Branch 114) West Van (Branch 60) Unit 45, Army, Navy & Air Force Veterans 0) 0 call today 986-4321. 1362 MARINE. DRIVE 980- 9115. Sunday, November 12, 1995 — North Shore News — 7 orr 10 MINUTE OIL CHANGE | : expires Nov. 30/95 « Se Sn ne ee CUSTOM DRAPERIES, TRACKS AND VALANCES Labour $8.50 per. panel unlined, $9.50 lined. CUSTOM BEDSPREADS & BLINDS At low, low prices. 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