Mon dieu! Montreal!

TORONTO PATRICK Buchanan caused a great stir north of the border recently with two columns urging the U.S. Government to welcome any Canadian provinces that applied to join the American Union. This is hardly surprising. Canada, like certain obscure sea creatures, has evolved with vital organs outside of its skeletal structure, in this case south of the 49th parallel. Canadians really care what Americans think, particularly at this moment, when Ottawa is going through one of its increasingly frantic efforts to find a constitutional formula that can keep Quebec and English Canada in harness. (Domestic critics can be dealt with more readily. Buchanan kindly wrote that my book The Patriot Game: Canada and the Canadian Question Revisited, published in Canada in 1986, had "predicted what is now unfolding." Every Canadian paper that I've seen omitted this passage when reprinting him.)

Injecting new ideas into public debate is the supreme function of the newspaper columnist. Politicians and civil servants absolutely will not take the risk. Thus Washington's long series of noises in favor of a united Canada is merely a faithful rendition of official timidity. So reluctant is the State Department to contemplate any change north of the border that in 1980 it apparently refused even to draw up a contingency plan to cover the real possibility that the Parti Quebecois might win the referendum that year on negotiating a partial divorce-"sovereignty association"from Canada. (The referendum lost, but it got about half the French-speaking vote, and the issue is now hotter than ever.)

By the time you read this, a last-minute compromise could well have salvaged the latest constitutional formula, the "Meech Lake Accord." But don't be fooled: even this agreement is actually a tacit surrender to Quebec's autonomy drive. Eventually, attention will have to be paid. Here are my untimid ideas for Washington:

Get the message that Quebec is emerging as a French-speaking nation-state on the European model. The powerful Ottawa political elite and its New Class allies in Canada's media and academe have an intense vested interest in the fantasy that Canada is a single "bilingual, bicultural nation," whatever that might be. However, the U.S., and the majority of ordinary Canadians, do not. Quebec's parting from Canada is gradual, like that of Norway from Sweden or Ireland from Britain. But it's just a matter of time.

Look through the confederation carapace. Canada's national institutions are a Rube Goldberg combination of Victorian British Parliament and 1960s social engineering slapped on by former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. They seriously misrepresent the country's sectionalized political reality, even apart from Quebec. They have resulted in systematic plundering of the peripheral regions of the country by the metropolitan center through policies like protectionism-something Western Canada now has the population, and increasingly the political organization, to resist.

To use a lurid Third World analogy: There comes a point at which any sensible diplomatic corps worries less about cocktail parties in the dictator's palace and more about its contacts with the rebels in the hills. The Reform Party, a new conservative particularist group, is already winning elections in Western Canada. Eventually, this could be as big a problem for Ottawa as Quebec separatism.

Recognize that the U.S. is involved. Ottawa regularly cites alleged American attitudes to discourage its dissidents. For example, it claims that Washington might not extend the 1988 bilateral Free Trade Agreement to a separated Quebec (a contention even State Department officials deride). And Ottawa insists that Washington would never, never accept a province into the Union. (See below.) Realize that this crisis is not a problem but a solution. However, it may require U.S. help. There is no particular necessity for Canada to be a centralized polity with a cynosure chief executive who swans about to international conferences. Reasonable people could easily redesign Canada's Confederation into something like Switzerland's-quick: Who is the president of Switzerland?-or the pre-Jacques Delors European Community, a common market of several sovereign states loosely linked by some supranational consultative institutions. (But without Brussels's current drive for real political union-Canada and Europe could be like sister ships traveling the same route in opposite directions.) In fact, this is more or less what both Quebec's avowedly separatist Parti Quebecois opposition and its nominally federalist Liberal provincial government say they want.

For that matter, with no external threats and appropriate policies-above all, free trade-any Canadian province could quite practically aspire to independence. The difficulties are purely transitional. Ottawa's tariffs, resource mismanagement, and transfer payments have pushed some peripheral provinces toward subsidy addiction, although the Free Trade Agreement will eventually help wean them. The Canadian liberal elite, especially the English-speakers, might have an hysterical tantrum. Washington could help a lot with a good bedside manner.

Well-why not statehood? Opinion polls have consistently shown that a hardy minority of Canadians (including French-speakers) is in favor of joining the United States. Certainly all the English-speaking provinces would make excellent U.S. states. In the Canada remodeled by Pierre Trudeau, it is the English-speakers who are the colonized group, repressing their own identity in a continuous misguided effort to appease Quebec. For them, U.S. statehood would be an honorable alternative to the current hybrid, bicultural monstrosity," as Rene Levesque called it.

Some American conservatives fear, and liberals presumably hope, Canada's alleged statist heritage would incline its voters to the Democrats. Actually, this heritage has been exaggerated by Canada's nationalist" propagandists-and anyway American politics is more a matter of ethnicity than economics, which would put most Canadians squarely in Kevin Phillips's Emerging Republican Majority. Ottawa's apparently permanent center-left governing coalition has stayed in power through adroit manipulation of Quebec's nationalistic bloc vote.

There is another problem, of course: accepting statehood applications from Canadian provinces would require vision in the Bush White House.

All is not lost, however. The logic of history, if not Manifest Destiny, suggests that a Canadian Community is evolving north of the border, a constellation of sovereignties that may well naturally seek a "contractual link" to the United States. One component, probably the most formally independent, will be a solidly bourgeois French-speaking Quebec. The rest might be the nucleus of what Goldwin Smith, Canada's Tocqueville, called for a century ago in Canada and the Canadian Question: The moral federation of the whole English-speaking race throughout the world." Mr. Brimelow is a senior editor of Forbes magazine and author of The Patriot Game (Hoover Institution Press).