Thinking The Unthinkable: What If Canada Breaks Up?

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

Canada, a decade after horrible mismanagement under the Trudeau Liberals, is in greater danger of internal dissolution than ever before, and U.S. President Donald Trump isn’t making things any better, either.

This fall, Alberta will be holding a “pre-referendum” on independence, and in Quebec, a forthcoming election again raises the possibility of a separatist Parti Québécois government in that province. These are no idle threats. Alberta’s grievances have simmered for decades. As for Quebec, it is already virtually a de facto nation.

So there’s no sense avoiding such hard questions. In the past century, we have seen states like Czechoslovakia, East Germany, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia disappear, creating almost 25 new countries. Somalia and Sudan have lost territories. East Timor wrested independence from Indonesia in 2002. Many other countries in the Global South deal with separatist movements and hang on for dear life. In Europe, Belgium has been virtually hollowed out as a unified state. Even the United Kingdom has robust sovereigntist movements in Scotland and Wales.

Canada is a large country of very disparate regions. It basically exists because it was the part of British North America that failed to join the United States, and managed to contain, for better or worse, French Canadian national desires within Quebec.

Look at a cartogram of the country. That’s a map where the shape of geographic areas are increased or decreased in proportion to their population. We see the area from Quebec City through to Windsor as a giant “island.” This narrow, densely populated strip accounts for roughly half of Canada’s entire population of about 41 million.

Pockets of population are scattered throughout the Maritimes, in the prairies, and British Columbia. The far north virtually disappears. In effect, Canada becomes an archipelago. The “empty” space between the populated areas of Ontario and Winnipeg effectively splits the country at that point.

Should Canada disintegrate, Quebec will obviously become independent. Everything in the province is called “national,” including the legislature. It refers to itself as “L’état du Québec.” On November 27, 2006, the House of Commons passed a motion officially recognizing that “the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada.” No need to elaborate.

But what about the other provinces and territories? Out west, Alberta and Saskatchewan (as one unit), and British Columbia, could stand on their own as two sovereign entities. Those two prairie provinces could be combined into a country called “Buffalo,” which was a widely discussed proposal for a massive new western province in the early 20th century, combining the southern halves of present-day Alberta and Saskatchewan. British Columbia could incorporate Yukon, and Buffalo include the Northwest Territories.

 As for the rest of the country, should Canada collapse, the other provinces will have to make their own decisions for their futures. Newfoundland has a distinctive sense of nationhood and would make a go of it, but it would need to keep Labrador from Quebec – which has historic claims to it – from seizing it. (It’s why it expanded its name to “Newfoundland and Labrador” in 2001. To name is to claim.) Might that yet involve a war?

The Maritimes could make compacts of free association with the United States, either individually or as a federated Maritime state, though New Brunswick might end up partitioned, with Quebec incorporating the Acadian areas, leaving a rump jurisdiction as a stand-alone or in union with Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Nunavut could merge with an independent Greenland to create a northern Inuit nation.

What’s left? Ontario would, probably along with Manitoba, remain in the country called “Canada,” as one of at least five successor states, and perhaps more.

But let’s face it: already Alberta and British Columbia are already at loggerheads over pipelines, and so are Newfoundland and Quebec regarding hydroelectric dams in Labrador. Interprovincial trade remains mostly an idea. Perhaps the old idea among Quebec advocates of independence, “sovereignty-association,” which meant sovereignty for Quebec within an economic association or union with the rest of Canada, could be broadened to turn the entire country into a version of the European Union.

What of indigenous peoples? The First Nations are, maybe unwittingly, now being used by the Laurentian elites as a cat’s paw against Alberta. The same ideology can be targeted against any provincial “nationalism,” which to the woke crowd is considered “white supremacy,” even if it gains favour with “racialized” people. It’s a way of dampening genuine provincial democracy, at least outside Quebec; there, it won’t work, since the French Canadians in effect see themselves as sort of “indigenous,” at least against the rest of Canada.

The indigenous groups might gain some kind of “national-cultural autonomy” but would probably not attain any kind of separate territorial status within these new polities. They are too small in numbers for that. All these new entities, except perhaps the Ontario-Manitoba “Canada,” would become republics, starting from scratch, like the 1776 Thirteen Colonies in the U.S. They would not be successor states and would inherit no ties or treaties going back to the “Crown,” so all former treaty rights with indigenous entities would probably cease.

None of this is very pleasant to think about, but refusing to face such dire possibilities does no good and leaves people more unprepared for what may come.

 

Book Review: A Touching Memoir of the Holocaust in Ukraine

 By Henry Srebrnik, Jewish Post, Winnipeg

Honor, by Nataliia Mariichyn, Leon Buchwald, and Susan McClelland (Astra Young Readers, New York, 240 pg., $19.99 USD, $25.99 CDN)

 This is an unusual memoir that moves forward and back between modern Ukraine’s troubles and those of that country’s tragic past during the Second World War. It recounts a tale of two individuals -- a Ukrainian teen in the early 2010s and a Jewish boy in hiding in Nazi-occupied Ukraine -- whose lives are entwined through a box of letters.

It’s true that of the writing of Holocaust memoirs there is no end. But that’s not a critique, it’s as it should be. The Holocaust was the greatest Jewish tragedy since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem almost 2,000 years ago.

A collaborative project of Nataliia Mariichyn, the late Leon Buchwald, and author Susan McClelland, Honor, published this year and intended for younger readers, falls into the category of people who were saved by friends or neighbours. It is narrated by Nataliia, who is a Ukrainian teenager in Ivano-Frankivsk living in an independent Ukraine in 2013-2014, when she comes across a pile of letters from World War II that had been saved by her grandmother, Katherine.

Written by Leizer (Leon) between 1941 and 1945, the letters are interspersed with reactions by Nataliia, who would go on to tell this story. Certain scenes and dialogues have been recreated using Leizer’s letters, as well as personal recollections from both Leizer’s and Nataliia’s families, including her grandmother and great-aunts. It is now a Canadian story.

Eliezer Buchwald was born in Stanislawow (now Ivano-Frankivsk) in what was then Poland, in 1929. He was the youngest of three children. His sister Shloma, the eldest, was four years older, and brother Zelig, two years older. His father, a merchant, was well respected by the Christian farmers in the region around Tlumacz.

World War II began in September 1939, and Poland was divided between Hitler and Stalin; the part they lived in was annexed by the Soviet Union. In 1941, however, Hitler’s armies invaded the USSR. “Nazis were now marching toward Russia, and we were right in their path,” Leizer wrote. Some villagers in the area painted white crosses on their doors so Nazis would know when they arrived that they were not Jews. “People who had always said hello now looked down at their shoes, pretending we were not there.”

Leizer and Shloma escape into the forests as the Nazis arrive, but their mother Berta and Zelig are captured. She manages to escape, but Zelig is never seen again. Leizer, Shloma and their mother eventually find refuge in a cave: “We lived the winter of 1942 in darkness.” During these harrowing years, several Jewish families sought refuge in the extensive gypsum caves of Western Ukraine. One of the most notable shelters was Priest’s Grotto, a labyrinthine cave stretching over 124 kilometres.

Leizer leaves the cave at one point and is betrayed and captured by German soldiers but manages to escape. He saw only one viable solution. He had to go to their pre-war neighbor, a farmer. “There was nowhere else for me to turn.” He returns to his old home and the Ukrainian farmer who knows him allows him to stay and pretend to be his own son. Eventually Shloma and Berta join him.

“As he’d promised, Shloma and I worked the farm, tilling the soil for planting. We wore the farmer’s son’s old clothes. Shloma tucked her hair under a hat and from a distance, even I thought she was a boy. The farmer’s wife made us two meals a day. She often sat with Mameh while Shloma and I were in the fields. The farmer reiterated the Nazis were looking for me, even now offering a reward for anyone who turned me in.”

He and his wife “are angels who were put on our path,” Mameh said several times that winter. “Honor them like angels. Leizer, if we ever get out of here, if the war ends, and we have freedom again, remember the farmer and his wife.” When the war ended, the farmer smiled. “I will never forget you,” he said to Leizer, with a warm smile. “You are my second son.”

Nataliia’s grandmother Katherine’s own memories begin to return. “Leizer managed to outwit his captors, you know. My father said he was very hard to catch. Leizer became a man long before his childhood ended. Good people did bad things to him and his family during that time.”

It turns out that Nataliia’s great-grandfather Grigoriy Palivoda and his wife Mariya were the couple who saved them. “The Nazis were looking for Leizer,” Nataliia’s grandmother tells her. “I knew where he was hiding. I always did, but I told no one. He became my secret. For the longest time, I didn’t know that my father and mother even knew he was there.”

The book juxtaposes the stories of the war with Nataliia’s recollection of what was happening in Ukraine in 2013-2014 as pro-democracy Ukrainians struggled, in the Maidan protests, to free themselves of the pro-Russian kleptocrats running the country. It makes for an interesting contrast.

Following liberation, Leizer, Shloma, and Berta lived in the Tlumacz area for several months and then were able to move west to a Displaced Person’s camp in Germany. While there, Shloma met Yitzchak, whom she had known prior to the invasion, and they married. Leizer and his mother immigrated to Montreal in the fall of 1948, and Shloma and her husband arrived not long after. Shloma adopted the name Lucia upon arriving in Canada. Berta changed her name to Bryna, and Leizer changed his name to Leon Buchwald. A personal note: Miriam Buchwald Gordon, daughter of Leon and his wife Toba, whom he met after the war and who was also a Holocaust survivor, is a friend of mine.

Leon Buchwald died on May 30, 2018. He never returned to Ukraine. In the spring of 2022, Leon and Lucia’s descendants, including their children and grandchildren, sponsored Nataliia’s relocation to Canada to escape the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

Nataliia great-grandparents are now among the 2,673 Ukrainians who, as of 2023, have been recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations. Ukraine is among the countries with the highest number of individuals recognized for their courageous actions during this dark period in history. This story, like others, captures both the cruelty and humanity of ordinary people caught up in situations not of their making.