18. The Question of Separatism by Jane Jacobs

My sister brought me this book (a beautiful first edition hardcover) as she thought I would find it interesting. I approached it very defensively, I have to admit.  I am like every right-thinking person a huge fan of Jacobs work on cities.  I was concerned, though, that as a Toronto-ite who had as far as I knew had little experience with Montreal or Quebec, she would just be one more pundit weighing in on Quebec who had never actually lived in French Quebec.  Happily and to my surprise she sidesteps this issue entirely.  This book is basically an economic analysis of all the risks and opportunities to Canada and Quebec if Quebec were to separate. Her conclusion is that while there would be some potentially difficult areas, a true separation would benefit both countries.

The initial chapter is basically a call for rationality and to remove emotion from the discussion.  She calls out both sides, though is sympathetic and understanding, for making completely unrealistic arguments and statements.  She then makes a really interesting historical argument, demonstrating that Toronto had actually started outgrowing Montreal as the major economic hub of Canada decades before the Quiet Revolution.  This was a real revelation to me as the conventional wisdom is that the french took control, started imposing language laws and all the big companies fled, thus flipping Montreal and Toronto's status. Jacobs demonstrates how mining growth in Ontario and its investment in Toronto pushed the TSX past the Montreal exchange and started to move money from the big banks in Montreal to those in Toronto. 

She then goes into the history of Norway and its peaceful separation from Sweden in the 19th century.  This chapter was really interesting as well.  I didn't know any of it, particularly that Norway had neither its own true language nor a self-identified Norwegian culture until this period.  The next chapter she argues convincingly that big or small are not definers of an economy's strength and quietly and gently rips into Canada for using it's population size as an argument for why it's economy is so fragile.  She calls it a "colonial economy", dependent on resource extraction with minimal effort in developing domestic manufacturing and small and medium-sized enterprises.  This situation has improved somewhat since 1980 when this book was written, but not much.  This is why Canada is still so keen on fossil fuels and a relatively large emitter of fossil fuels.  Also why Canada, despite some positive examples like the videogame industry (in Montreal), is still lacking in innovation.  It's really kind of depressing how we lag behind small countries like Norway when we have all the same advantages and more.  The one thing we have that they don't is a culture of small-minded penny-pinching fear of change and a powerful cabal that works to ensure they have all the money.

Anyhow, it was quite a surprise to read that Jacobs was a proponent of separation.  But when you get to the end, she makes a strong argument for diversity and then it makes sense that she would support a separate Quebec.  She argues that despite the inherent limitations of our colonial economy, a separate Quebec would create an economic diversity (layering on the existing diversity of culture and language) that would benefit both countries.  This aligns with her arguments about mixed spaces in cities.  I wonder if this book was ever translated into french and how it was received in Quebec.  According to my sister, it was not that well received in english and that in general Jacobs post-Cities works, as is typical, were poo-pooed by the Canadian literary establishment.