Quelle est une nation? Nous ne savons pas.

Many hard-core federalists have criticized the Liberals’ resounding support for the Bloc Québecois motion recognizing Québec as a “nation” (you may remember Ignatieff’s tag line: le Québec est ma nation, le Canada est mon pays). Myself, I view the motion as entirely procedural and reject Gilles Duceppe’s cries for parliamentarians to recognize it as something largely significant. Québec is already a federally-recognized “distinct society”.

The disturbing thing about the motion, however, is that no one really knew what it meant; even Conservative MPs gave contradictary statements about its meaning. The most important thing about this motion is to recognize the different facets of Québecois nationalism (regional, cultural, and ethnic) and consider what each of those mean within a federalist structure. While I embrace regional and cultural nationalism within a federalist Canada, I wholeheartedly reject a government’s official recognition of an ethnic nation within Canada. Canadians are proudly living in a multicultural society, but it is incorrect to include ethnicity in the equation. The idea of a pure laine (read: pure French blood) Québecois nation is not consistent with the Canadian multicultural “mosaic” and I do not believe it has any place in Canadian politics. As long as everyone understands that a “nation” is meaningless unless modified by scope, we’ll all be on the same page.