Lying awake in bed in Montreal, born too late to have served in the Second World War, I hoped that one day I would be capable of making just such a sacrifice or perhaps something more modest in the name of a noble cause. Instead, well into my sixties, I found myself embroiled in, let's face it, Canada's longest running opera bouffe. A far from life and death struggle, over the size English lettering and outdoor commercial signs in Montreal. I manned the barricades, so to speak, for the legal right to munch unilingually labelled kosher matzah's in Quebec for more than sixty days a year. I also protested the right of a pet shop parrot to be unilingually English. As a consequence, nice people still stop me on the street and thank me for taking a stand. It's embarrassing, for my stand, such as it is, hardly qualifies me as a latter day Spartacus or Tom Paine or Rosa Luxemburg.

On the other hand, neither do Jacques Parizeau, a rich man's son, nor the impeccably dressed Lucien Bouchard, qualify as sans-culottes. Bitter tribal strife is tearing the former Yugoslavia apart. There seems to be no solution to the Irish troubles. The descendants of Isaac and Ishmael have been stoning each other for five thousand years, and on the evidence are not about to quit. But in Quebec, whichever side you're on, we are involved in disputes more appropriate to a kindergarten. We're living through a farce.

An acquaintance of mine, born in Vancouver, went to renew her passport in Montreal a few years ago. The clerk, a meticulous fellow, went over her application form line-by-line, until he finally found what struck him as a blatant lie. "You wrote that you were born in Canada," he said. "But I was," she protested. "It says here that you were born in la Columbie Britanique."

Explaining the dire situation, of Francophone Quebeckers to Parisians, our ineffable Deputy Prime Minister, Bernard Landry in 1994, said in an interview with the weekly L'Express: "Basically we have for centuries been a bit like the firemen in the heart of Chernobyl, at the center of a cataclysm, but still standing." I don't also want to be guilty of such outrageous overstatement, making too much of Anglophone suffering in Montreal. We haven't lost our heads, only our apostrophes. It isn't Belfast. Life goes on. Montreal, however diminished, is still to my mind the most agreeable city in Canada. And this is because the two cultures not only confront but also continue to enrich each other.

Looking beyond to-day’s quarrels, it remains a life-enhancing mix. But Montreal is paying a price for political uncertainty. The city is dying a slow economic death. The educated Anglophone young, no sooner pick up their degrees than they hit the 401 bound for Toronto or Vancouver. There are too many empty or boarded-up shops. And the mood is often gloomy as we continue to endure our national wasting disease.

On my winter stays in London or on trips to New York, old friends say, "I can't understand why there is such trouble in Canada." Well now, the truth is, the interest of the British Press in Canada usually doesn't extend far beyond the fate of baby seals. And I'm willing to forgive Americans their ignorance of Canadian affairs. I can remember once grabbing a taxi on Fifth Avenue and making the driver take me to La Guardia. "Where are you from he asked?" And I said, "Montreal." And he said, "that's my favourite city in the United States."

What I can't forgive is how little some ostensibly knowledgeable Torontonians understand about Quebec. Going into the last referendum I was commissioned to write a piece for a national newspaper based in Toronto. In it I had some less than kind words to say about the Abbe Lionel Groulx, who in 1954 wrote to a friend and I'm quoting now, "The Jew never puts down roots anywhere, refuses to assimilate and is indifferent to the political and social order around him. He is ready to make money from anything. Jews can be found in all shady enterprises. All the pornography operations." An alert editor on the desk of the national newspaper, who had just gone over my copy, phoned me. "About the Abbe Groulx," he said. "Yes," I said. "We are concerned that he might sue us for libel." "I don't think that's likely," I said.

Going back even further, in the late sixties, when I was still rooted in London, I was startled, on a short trip to Canada, to pick up a copy of The Globe and Mail and learn that its editors had already accepted the fact of separation. I read in the Arts pages, and I'm quoting again, that "films from Canada and Quebec would be shown at a festival." So far as I knew Quebec was, and remains to this day, if only just, a Canadian province not a separate country. But the Globe's self-defeating blunder, begun in the sixties, has long since become common usage. Possibly we are our own worst enemies.

However, to return to the problem of my baffled friends in London and New York, more than once I've tried to explain to them about our incredibly rich, still nearly empty country. That in this country we are all injustice collectors. Myself included. We not only remember old insults but cherish them. I, for instance, can recall when there was a Jewish quota at McGill and we were persona non grata at a number of Anglophone Laurentian resorts and country clubs. To come clean, what troubled me most about these restricted country clubs was not that they didn't want me for a member but that those boors were presumptuous enough to think that I wanted to join them. And I can also remember when in the wartime forties a French Canadian mob marched down our working class neighbourhood chanting "Death to the Jews." Back in those days there were some anti-Semites, English or French speaking, who believed there was an international Jewish conspiracy. I've got news for you, they were right. There is an international Jewish conspiracy and I'm a member of it.

In the early fifties, when I was rooted in London and food rationing was still in place, I ventured into a butcher shop on Belsize Road. Ration book in hand. To collect my weekly thin baby lamb chop. The butcher looked me up and down. "You Jewish," he asked? "Damn right," I said, ready for a fight. "Come with me," he said. And he led me into the back of his shop, where he sliced four thick chops off a rack of lamb, and wrapped them up for me. "A Jewish boy," he said, "can't live on these rations."

Looking back, Québécois pur laine are also nourished by old insults. They can remember when that legendary sales person in Eaton’s refused to serve them in French, former Parti Québéçois house leader Claude Charon, a possible case in point. In 1982, Charon, who had shoplifted a tweed sports jacket in Eaton’s, was brought down after a three block chase, tackled in the snow. In response to Charon's being nabbed for pilfering, many separatist zealots ceremoniously tore up their Eaton’s credit cards. Eaton’s, they charged, was a notorious Anglophone institution, it's head office in Toronto. As a fulminating reader wrote in the Le Journal de Montreal the emporium has contributed to Quebec's dechristianization years ago by not closing on December 8th, Feast of the Immaculate Conception.

In the more thoughtful Le Devoir a sociologist, pondering the problem, declared that Eaton’s was actually a snare laid for unwary Québécois, tempting them to steal, if only because of the absence of sufficient staff to attend to sales. To be fair, the Québécois pur laine also had legitimate complaints. They can recall when they weren't welcome in the higher reaches of Quebec's leading law firms, brokerage houses or banks. In 1961 French Canadians, though they made up something like a third of Canada's then population of nineteen million, held somewhat less than fifteen percent of responsible federal jobs. A survey showed that while four fifths of the directors of 183 major companies in Canada, were Canadian born, less than 7% of these positions were held by French Canadians. Commenting on this situation in 1962, Donald Gordon, then President of CNR, said that he had never appointed any French Canadian Vice-Presidents because they lacked the necessary university training. French Canadian students responded by burning Gordon's effigy in Montreal's Place Ville Marie. Then an enterprising Toronto reporter discovered that of the thirty Vice-Presidents employed by Canada's two railway systems, only seven had actually been to university. The arrogant Donald Gordon was not among them.

The WASPS didn't so much suffer injustices as anticipate them. The coming of garlicky European hoards. Greeks and Italians who would do so much to transmogrify Toronto. That once closed fist of a Presbyterian city, where joy used to be an intolerable offence. The invasion of Chinese kids, who would win most of the school prizes. West Indians, contaminating once respectable Toronto neighbourhoods. Reaching back even further there was the case of MacKenzie King. When he built his country estate, Kingsmere, he was careful to buy the surrounding hundred acres lest there be, and I'm quoting from his diaries now "a sale to Jews who had a desire to get in at Kingsmere and ruin the whole place," possibly by opening a decent delicatessen.

Our provinces, each one shouting "Me, Me, Me" are also injustice collectors. Out there in the Maritimes, they are fulminating because Jean Chrétien, "Prime Minister of Ontario," would no longer support them all year round, even if they're willing to put their shoulder to the wheel for ten weeks of the year. Quebec, of course, is a special case. In "la belle province" life is no bowel of cherries for the pur laine. Even the climate conspires against them. One summer Bernard Landry memorably complained that Montreal's unacceptably high unemployment rate could not be blamed on continuing political uncertainty, but was due to poor weather conditions. Which all too typically, stopped at the Ontario border.

Alienated westerners have lumbered us with the Reform Party, with its Simple Simon solutions to our problems. Reformers promise to tackle the menace of crime on our city streets. What crime, I'd like to know? We are safer on the streets of any Canadian city than we'd be in New York, London or Paris. Mind you, those cities do have other attractions. Then there's British Columbia. Watching the CBC TV News on a Sunday night I saw a Vancouver reporter rebuke a discontented French Canadian. "We also suffer Ottawa's oblique," she said. "Under populated New Brunswick appoints ten Senators while we are allowed only six." The mind boggled. She should have been proud. A province the size of B.C. with only six super-annuated political hacks, sucking on the ultimate welfare teat.

That reminds me. During a downpour, seven or eight years ago, I flew into Vancouver from Victoria in one of those little commuter planes. On arrival, at the Airline’s desk I asked the young woman in attendance to call me a taxi. "Impossible," she said. "One it's raining, two, it's welfare day." "What's that got to do with it," I asked? "On welfare day," she said angrily, "hundreds of old ladies call taxis to take them to the bank, wait outside and then drive them to the Liquor Store, where they can load up and take a taxi home to party." She was outraged but I wasn't. The truth is, I'm proud to live in a country where once a month little old ladies, many of them widows, can get blasted at the taxpayers’ expense.

I would remind you that the great Samuel Johnson, penury his own lot, never passed a beggar lying in a doorway without tossing him a coin. It was his hope he once told Boswell, that these unfortunates would use the money to buy more gin, for oblivion was a blessing for those without hope. That same Vancouver reporter I saw on CBC TV also said that British Columbia would not tolerate Quebec being declared a distinct society. And neither was it likely to approve the latest euphemism being played at the time dubbing the province unique.

Of course we are distinct or unique, whichever. Where else can a government consider it a scandal that too many hospital doctors can speak English as well as French? Who but the separatist Ottawa point man, Gilles Duceppe, could suggest with a straight face, that if Quebec opts out in another referendum they can always vote for re-entry into Canada, in yet another referendum five years later? I once suggested, tongue-in-cheek, that we could be in for a best of seven series just like for the Stanley Cup. Possibly I was guilty of understatement.

In a moment of candour, following the first referendum, Jacques Parizeau once told The Globe and Mail's Graham Fraser, "We are elected by idiots. In Quebec, 40% are Separatists, and 40% are Federalists, and 20% don't know who is Prime Minister of Canada. And it's that 20% that makes and breaks governments." Parizeau was guilty of understatement. Don McPherson, the Montreal Gazette's astute commentator on Quebec affairs wrote on September 17th, 1996, "Quebec's fate could be decided by people who can't understand the instructions on the label of a bottle of Aspirin." McPherson went on to quote a Statistics Canada Survey that showed 28% of Quebeckers tested had trouble understanding the Aspirin instructions. Speaking for myself, it's not the instructions that give me trouble but the child-proof screw top. 31% couldn't pick the highest of 10 percentages on a graph, and 28% couldn't complete a three-line order form asking them to add $50 and $2 and fill in the total. So how were these functional illiterates expected to understand the Referendum-2 Question, which ran:

The same Statistics Canada Survey established that up to 30% of those who said they intended to vote yes, mistakenly believed that a sovereign Quebec would remain part of Canada. I don't mind Canada enshrining the obvious in anointing Quebec as a distinct or unique society. But I fear the proposal is a trap set for Federalists. If only one province shoots down the proposal saying no, count on Lucien Bouchard to brandish this as proof that the rest of Canada is out to stick it to Quebec. But if the rest of Canada holds its nose and pronounces Quebec distinctive, Bouchard will denounce this as condescending, too little and too late. Lucien Bouchard is an intelligent man, albeit according to Dr. Vivian Rakoff, he is rumoured to suffer, and I am quoting now, "from an aesthetic character disorder". Which I take it is not contagious. Certainly Dr. Rakoff’s psychiatric profile of Bouchard enlivened the dog-days of a summer past, featured on the covers of both MacLean's and Saturday Night, and igniting the ire of Bernard Landry and the Le Devoir publisher Lise Bissonnette. Admittedly, not so difficult a feat.

For openers, something should be said in defence of Dr. Rakoff’s trade, which so many intellectual revisionists now disparage, even accusing Father Freud of having embellished his case notes. There's no doubting the perspicacity of some of our later date Shaman's. Once, for instance, one of their number obliged Clifford Olsen, sex murderer of at least eleven children, to submit to the test of their x-ray vision and adjudged him a psychopath. While Dr. Rakoff’s character sketch did suggest that Bouchard could be emotionally unstable, like John Diefenbaker in his time, it is unfair to suggest that report was totally deprecating. True, if one of Bouchard's former aides is to be credited, he did seem to have a problem with biscuits as well as Meech Lake. Likely to explode if served anything but Arrowroots.

I understand. If I order a medium fat smoked meat sandwich at Schwartz's fabled delicatessen, and a waiter brings me a lean one instead I also show my displeasure. I'm not alarmed, but touched by Bouchard's rage at having his father attacked as a "boozer." "I find it revolting," said Bouchard, "a lying attack, it's a scandal."

When the time comes I hope my children will prove equally loyal to my memory. The truth is Dr. Rachoff's analysis resonated with high praise. He said Bouchard doesn't so much tell what he thinks as articulate more nobly and passionately what they already think and feel. He's a kind of gifted national poet, who in speaking of his own particular desires, speaks of the yearnings of the general community. Elsewhere he's described as a considerable intellect, a hard worker, eloquent, with a powerful delight in language.

However the claim that he's a master of invective, the possessor of a truly Voltarian wit, strikes me as iffy, given examples cited by Lawrence Martin, the author of The Antagonist, a biography of Bouchard. He [Bouchard] has dubbed Chrétien English Canada's hatchet man, the assassin of Meech Lake and the raper of the political will of Quebec. And [Bouchard] has dismissed Trudeau as a traitor. On the other hand, labelling the other provincial premiers "morons, the not awfully enduring," does point to a problem. Especially in British Columbia.

So why were the usual suspects, say Landry and Lise Bissonnette seething? Writing in Le Devoir, Ms. Bissonnette denounced the Anglophone press for describing Quebec sovereignists as xenophobic, anti-Semitic, racist, fascist, you name it. Which is to say they get it right for the most part.

In 1950, at the age nineteen I dropped out of St. George William College in Montreal, as it then was, and sailed for England on the Franconia. Foolishly, no arrogantly, believing I could put Canada and its picayune problems behind me, never dreaming it would become the raw material of most of my fiction and non-fiction. Or that I would care so deeply about its surviving intact.

Several years after I had settled in London, The Spectator invited me to write a three-part article about Canadian Conundrums. In it I put the case for my Canadian generation this way: "Elsewhere…" that was the operative word, the built in insult, "Canadians of my generation sprung to adolescence during the Second World War, were conditioned to believe that the world happened elsewhere. You apprenticed for it in Canada, on a farm with a view. Then you packed your bags and lit out for the golden cities, New York, London or Paris. Home was a good neighbourhood but suburban even bush. And any candidate for excellence was bound to be suspect, unless he proved himself under alien skies. Most of us were, and remain, rooted close to the 49th parallel. Intimidated by the tundra on one side and American appetite on the other. The vastness of our country was deceptive and our dilemma put simply, was, could we survive as an honest corner grocery of a country next to a voracious supermarket land?"

But even then we were different from the other Americans. The American kid who wanted to grow up to be President, was enjoying a dream of glory. But the Canadian kid who wanted to be Prime Minister, wasn't thinking big. He was setting a limit to his ambitions rather early.

I remained abroad for something like twenty years. I met my wife there and our children were born there. During the latter years of our sojourn in London, visiting Canadian professors and even Ottawa Mandarins, their manner solemn, said to me: "Do you want to come home? We need you in Canada." It wasn't that flattering, I thought. Yet shortly after I returned with my family, the question I was confronted with again and again was: "Didn't things work out for you in England?" "Yes," I said, "certainly." "Oh come off it, if that's the case what are you doing here?"

One of our most attractive qualities I think is that we are a self-deprecating people. Had Babe Ruth, for instance, been born a Canadian rather than an American, he would not be celebrated as the Sultan of Swat, the man who hit 714 home runs. Instead he would be deprecated as that notorious flunk who struck out 1330 times.

I sympathise with the rest of Canada's impatience with Quebec's seemingly

insatiable demands. Its boarding-house-reach for more, more and more. Speaking as an Anglophone Quebecker, I am of course fed up with fatuous, petty-minded language legislation. But we should remember that it is not only Francophone Quebeckers who are in a defensive linguistic mood but also a much diminished France. In the 19th century French was the language of diplomacy. It was also the second language of cultivated people in Russia, England and America. But now, the language of diplomacy is English. The language of Brussels is English. The language of science is English. English is the obligatory second language taught in Russia, China and Japan. A hundred years from now who knows, the dominant international language could be Chinese. But right now it is unarguably English, and that understandably does not go down well in Paris or Quebec City.

I should point out that my quarrel is not only with Francophone separatists, but also with the concept, obnoxious to me, of Canada's two founding races. And the notion that they are some how entitled to more privileges than the rest of us. Our Native peoples aside, we're all immigrants here. Whether they were fleeing penury in Normandy, the Highland clearances, the Irish potato famine, pogroms in Russia, Communist tyranny in Hungary or Poland or the lack of opportunity in China, the Ukraine or India, our ancestors came here in search of a better life, a fresh start. And together we have forged a fundamentally decent society. Yet Thomas Jefferson, not withstanding, ‘All men,’ and I'd better be careful here, ‘or women, are not created equal.’ Far from it. We are born unequal in intelligence, talent, beauty and economic privileges. So we should enjoy, in so far as it is possible, equal rights. That is to say whether our ancestors came here three hundred years ago or last week, once we are Canadian citizens there should be no self-serving nonsense about founding races.

Happily, there's no such thing as a Canadian aristocracy. Although we are now suffering from a pathetic copy-cat effort to fabricate one. Case in point, I was amazed that an issue of MacLean’s, featuring a cover story on the Eaton’s, described them as Canadian aristocrats. I have no quarrel with the Eaton boys. Fine fellows I'm sure. But the truth is they're the progeny of a shopkeeper.

Lucien Bouchard has promised another referendum. I'm not so sure about that. Bouchard is far too astute to call one unless he's damn sure of winning big. And as things stand, the result would probably be indecisive even something like the last one 49-51%, either way, leaving us with dangerous problems. Is 50% plus one sufficient to break up a country? The separatists argue not unreasonably, that if 52% was sufficient for Newfoundland to join Canada, why isn't 50 plus one enough for Quebec to quit. I don't think it's enough. Not really. But the federalists, no longer complacent, are trying to alter the rules rather late in the game. Trudeau's logic is impeccable. If Canada is divisible, so is Quebec. But I've been down the Shankhill Road in Belfast. Thank you very much. And I don't wish partition on Montreal. The Cree, however, do have a case to answer. And if they refuse to go along with a separate Quebec, does Ottawa send in troops to protect them? Do the Cree start blowing up northern power lines? Given a third referendum and another narrow federalist win, what about the hard core separatists? Say 35%, are Francophone Quebeckers. They have spent thirty years working for a dream. Surely they will be deeply depressed, may be seething with discontent. Would the young militants, blaming their defeat on les autres, the ethnics and the money, as Parizeau did last time out, take to planting bombs in mail boxes again? And if, against all odds, it were the narrowest of yes votes, would we not endure ten years or more of acrimonious negotiations?

We could be sleepwalking out of a kindergarten into a real world of postgraduate troubles. Meanwhile Ottawa strikes me as a vacuum. Chrétien vacillates between Plan A and Plan B but won't commit to either. And Sheila Copps’ solution is to offer free flags to the hoi polloi. At the root of our problem within Quebec there is our confessional education system. Catholics, Protestants and Jews, we're all educated in separate primary schools. Brought up suspicious of one another. Were I empowered to create a real revolution in the province I would oblige all Quebec children, gentile, Jewish or Muslim, to attend the same primary schools, studying half the day in English half in French, emerging bilingual.

This is a far more sophisticated country than the one I tried to put behind me in 1950. Canadians are the inheritors of two of the western world’s seminal cultures, the English and the French, and a good deal more besides. Canadian children, increasingly bilingual, could be the most cultivated on the continent. In spite of our increasingly tiresome family quarrel, ours is a country where the civilities are still observed for the most part. If we self-destruct we will only have ourselves to blame.

I have had many harsh things to say about Quebec separatists but the truth is Quebec is the hub of the Canadian wheel. And its loss, beyond the obvious economic costs to both sides, could be terminal. As a consequence, the rest of Canada could suffer the same fate as Humpty Dumpty. At times like this, tempers fraying, it is essential to remember, as Alain Dubuc wrote in Le Press that Bernard Landry's crusade against bilingual hospitals is out of touch with most Quebeckers’ views. Knowledge of English, Dubuc argued, is not an infectious disease from which Francophones must be protected. The indignation of the PQ militants and the government, he wrote, celebrates the cult of unilingualism, which is that of ignorance.

What this country is in such desperate need of today, is a healer. Young Jean Charest is a likely candidate but he is still untested and could lack sufficient substance. All the same, I believe we still have it in us to realise Northrop Frye's vision of this country as a fulfilment of his highest dream of the peaceable kingdom, wherein the wolf shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.