Killing Ground: The Canadian Civil War Review

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Killing Ground: The Canadian Civil War ReviewA civil war in Canada? Unthinkable today, perhaps; but thirty years ago, not only was it not unthinkable, it was a very real possibility. Killing Ground is the story of that civil war, a war that never happened- thank god, all the more so as Bruce Powe's very plausible narrative of the course of such a war describes how terrible a conflict it might have been.
Powe wrote this book in 1965, projecting forward to the year 1970, when a weak government in Ottawa crumbles in the face of armed separatism in Quebec. He follows the experiences of a member of the Canadian armed forces as the country collapses around him, and the war goes from bitter to worse. The story describes intial weakness and defeats for the national government, followed by reorganization and offensive action, much like the course of the American civil war, which may have been a model for the progress of the story.
Ultimately a near-stalemate leads to American intervention- resisted by both sides in the civil war. The scary part: all of this could easily have happened. The question is, why did it not happen? How did Canada escape civil war?
In my view, the reason is this: the political leaders in Quebec in the late 1960s turned out to have heroic respect for democratic principles, and instead of pursuing an abrupt, unilateral, violent succession, as some of their supporters urged, never wavered in their conviction that only the ballot box, in the form of a majority vote in a referendum, could be considered a basis for independence.
It could easily have been different. A separatist leader in plays the race card, and embarks on a propaganda campaign; a divided and weak central government fails to respond; the leader unilaterally declares independence; armed militias seize federal property, the armed forces divide along ethnic lines, there is a flood of refugees, and a bloody and bitter civil war commences.
What seemed so far-fetched in 1965 seems all too plausible now, since we've seen exactly this sequence of events play out in the course of the destruction of Yugoslavia.
Bruce Powe must have had enormous experience in the forces, as he writes more convincingly about military events that never happened than most writers can manage when writing about events they observed.
When it was published, Killing Ground was called "a dangerous book." Today, I think it should be regarded as a testament- not to a troubled time when the divide between English and French Canadians almost led to a civil war, but to the enormous good fortune of Quebec, and Canada as a whole, that Quebec produced leaders like Rene Levesque, Lucien Bouchard, and Jacques Parizeau, whose respect for democratic processes made sure that it didn't.Killing Ground: The Canadian Civil War Overview

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