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Subject: Canada Votes No=
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 92 04:28:31 EST
Message-ID: <4.1992Oct28.042831@AmeriCast.com>

Canada Votes No=

 CANADA'S constitutional referendum turned into a triumph for
narrow regionalism and a sweeping repudiation of all the
country's national leadership. All three nationwide parties sup-
ported the compromise settlement, as did the premiers of all the
provinces. But the breadth of the public hostility to the settle-
ment is stunning. Not only Quebec but all the western provinces
voted heavily against it.

 The most prominent loser is inevitably Prime Minister Brian Mul-
roney, who has tried to make constitutional reconciliation the
defining cause of his eight years in office. National elections
will be held soon, probably in the spring, and equally probably
Mr.  Mulroney will be gone before then. But when he departs, the
constitutional issue will remain. It began as a collision between
the French-speaking Canadians of Quebec and the English-speaking
majority in the rest of the country. But now it has developed
into an enormously complex family of disputes over not only
language and culture but also western resentments of the indus-
trial East, the grievances of the aboriginal peoples and in gen-
eral the regional differences and discontents of a huge but thin-
ly populated country.

 Now the initiative lies with Quebec. Sometime next year, after
the national elections, the separatist movement there will begin
to press its demands again. In the past, the thought of the
economic costs of secession has always pulled the separatists
back from the brink. But this time the failure of the referendum
makes it hard to see a compromise. Quebecers voted against the
constitutional settlement on grounds that it gave them too lit-
tle; the West voted against it because it gave them too much. If
Quebec does not press its case quite to the point of secession,
another possibility is the transformation of Canada into a loose
confederation of nearly sovereign provinces under a significantly
weaker federal government.

 A lot of Canadians are going to discover that voting no in the
referendum will have an effect precisely the opposite of the one
they intended. Especially in the West, much of that avalanche of
negative voting was an expression of deep exasperation with the
politicians and their endless preoccupation with the structure of
government at a time when most voters' urgent priority is the
economy. But the failure of the referendum means that it will be
the constitutional issues of regional rights - not economic
growth, not social equity - that continue to drive Canadian poli-
tics and public life.

02:03 10-28C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
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