Interpreting Quebec’s Exile Within the Federation

Guy Laforest is Full Professor in the department of political science, Université Laval, Québec, Canada. His main areas of teaching and research are political theory, intellectual history in Canada and Québec, theories of federalism and of nationalism. He is vice-president of the International Association for Québec Studies and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

This book combines the approaches of political theory and of intellectual history to provide a lucid account of Québec's contemporary situation within the Canadian federation.
Guy Laforest considers that the province of Québec, and its inhabitants, are exiled within Canada. They are not fully integrated, politically and constitutionally, nor are they leaving the federation, for now and for the foreseeable future. They are in between these two predicaments. Laforest provides insights into the current workings of the Canadian federation, and some of its key figures of the past fifty years, such as Pierre Elliott Trudeau, René Lévesque, Stephen Harper and Claude Ryan.
The book also offers thought-provoking studies of thinkers and intellectuals such as James Tully, Michel Seymour and André Burelle. Laforest revisits some key historical documents and events, such as the Durham Report and the 1867 and 1982 constitutional documents. He offers political and constitutional proposals that could contribute to help Québec moving beyond the current predicament of internal exile.

This book proposes a critical interpretation of the current predicament of the province of Québec within the Canadian federation. It uses the approaches of political theory and intellectual history to suggest that Québec is presently exiled within Canada: it is not adequately integrated, and it seems extremely unlikely that it will be successful in any attempt to exit from the federation.

Contents: Introduction: Interpreting Québec's Exile within the Federation: Selected Political Essays - The Internal Exile of Québecers in the Canada of the Charter - The Contemporary Meaning and Utility of Federalism - Making Sense of Canada as a Federal System: The Relevance of Historical Legacies - The Historical and Legal Origins of Asymmetrical Federalism in Canada's Founding Debates: A Brief Interpretive Note - What Canadian Federalism Means in Québec - Lord Durham, French Canada, and Québec: Remembering the Past, Debating the Future - Some Reflections on the Bouchard-Taylor Commission - More Distress than Enchantment: The Constitutional Negotiations of November 1981 - The Canadian State and the Political Freedom of Québec: The Ideas of James Tully and Michel Seymour - Trust and Mistrust between Harper and Québec.