All things Canadian are now regional

The result is that French Canada itself no longer exists as a community; it has become regionalized and it is now increasingly difficult to find a commonality of interests within what was once labelled Canada's French-Canadian community. The political tensions between Quebecois and Acadiens are probably as pronounced today as they are between English-speaking Ontarians and Quebecois. When, for example, the New Brunswick Acadian community wanted to play host to the eighth International Francophone Summit, it soon discovered that it could not count on support from its Quebecois cousins. Its best ally, say, 40 years ago, now wished to downplay the French-speaking presence outside Quebec in order to further its own objectives. French Canada no longer speaks with one voice even on the language issue and there are now at least two regional French Canadas pursuing different objectives.

Another force fuelling Canadian regionalism is the variation in the degree of industrialization and economic prosperity. Trudeau once observed that regional economic disparities, if allowed to persist, would almost as surely destroy the unity of the country as would French-English confrontation.

Canada and the United States have many things in common, starting with the 6,000 kilometre-long-shared frontier. Both were once British, and in certain regions and different periods, once French colonies. They both have federal constitutions and other institutions that are the same or similar. Both are large, resource-rich and highly regionalized countries. Given these similarities, one might assume that they would have dealt with regional economic development in the same fashion. This has clearly not been the case.

During the long period from the Civil War in the United States or Confederation in Canada to the Great Depression, differences in regional policies of the two countries reflected the differences in the nature of the frontier. Frontier development in Canada followed an almost straight line from east to west, reflecting the Confederation project to bind the country from coast to coast. The Mississippi runs north-south and the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence system runs east-west that contributed to this difference in the pattern of regional development. In the United States, the whole vast subcontinent was eventually settled, industrialized, urbanized and modernized outwards from several great cities, Chicago, Kansas City, Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, Atlanta, Denver and Los Angeles, for which Canada has no equivalent. Each of them served as a development or growth pole, long before the term was invented by the French economist Francois Perroux.

The difference in the two constitutions also accounts for an important difference in regional policy. Each state, whatever its population, has two elected senators; thus state or regional interests were and are equally defended in the United States Senate, whether or not there is a federal agency with specific responsibilities for regional development. As well, Americans, by and large, have a greater faith in laissez-faire economics and hold a deeper suspicion of economic dirigisme, this explains why federal regional development programmes appear in the United States only when the political pendulum swings a long way to the left, as during the Roosevelt and Kennedy-Johnson regimes.