For the first time in eleven years, English-speaking Canadians have a prime minister from their own ranks. Hopeful observers feel this will ease the tension between the rest of the country and Quebec; but they may underestimate the strength of the separatist movement. The unity of Canada is threatened as much by indifference as by resentment. On the morning after last May’s elections, when Joe Clark, an unsophisticated and awkward young man from the west, defeated Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the intellectual from Montreal, to become the sixteenth prime minister of Canada, a Toronto taxi driver, overjoyed with the results, boasted, “Trudeau sure got thumped.” Yet Trudeau, I pointed out, had led in the national popular vote. “Oh, yeah,” the taxi driver replied, “but that’s only if you count the French.” Counting the French is not always easy for the people of Toronto and the rest of English-speaking Canada. For many of them, the French-speakers are an annoying and boring segment of national life who, when you bother to think about them, prevent Canada from becoming what everyone knows it ought to be — like Britain or Australia or the United States. In this case, according to the prevailing view, English-speaking Canada, the real Canada, thumped Trudeau, and it was pointless to muddy the issue with French votes. As a result of attitudes like this, which reflect the enormous gulf between the French-speaking and the English-speaking peoples, Canada is more sharply divided along communal lines than it has been in a half-century...

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