As Thomas Mulcair ingratiateshimself even further with the soft nationalist Quebec chattering classes, it’s
worth recalling that this is a very old NDP practice – as old as the NDP in
fact. The big 2011 breakthrough in Quebec came after fifty years of trying,
desperately trying.
Reading through the letters
between the great Canadian historian Donald Creighton and constitutional expert and letter to the editor bete-noir, Eugene Forsey, gives us a funny snippet on the
origins of this very un-Canadian courtship (and I say un-Canadian advisedly).
In 1973
Creighton was in the midst of writing an introduction for a collection of
essays by Forsey. He was trying to write a brief biography about Forsey and he
wondered wanted to get the story straight about why Forsey, one of the founders
of the CCF, had left the New Party. Here’s Forsey’s response:
‘I left the N.D.P. because it
deleted from its Constitution, 76 times, the word “national”, on the ground
that it “hurt and offended our French-Canadian fellow citizens” (I quote,
verbatim, from the speech of the chairman of the committee.) (In 38 of the 76
places, the party substituted “federal.”)
I argued against this two or three times, twice in French, I think, once
in English. I got “turned down like a
bedspread,” and left the hall.
Later in the letter, Forsey writes:
‘I have often said… that the N.D.P. Founding Convention was probably the only
case in history where some thousands of people gathered to found a new national
party and began by agreeing that there was no nation to found it in.’
Plus ça change…
Creighton photo: Canadian encyclopedia
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