Few of the 1 billion people watching the Olympic Games opening ceremony knew it, but when the Canadian team marched into the Athens stadium, a small but important socio-political drama unfolded. It was a piece of irony that should be close to every Canadian heart.
The man holding the Canadian flag and leading the athletes was a practitioner of judo named Nicolas Gill. In that instant, Gill was a poster boy of the national spirit. But in his heart Gill was (and probably still is) a Quebec separatist. Nine years ago, he voted in a referendum that supported the fracturing of Canada.
In fact, it was not really much of a secret. Gill acknowledged his old political leanings but insisted it should not disqualify him as the Canadian standard-bearer. For a day or two, some Canadians made a bit of a fuss. But mostly, they accepted it. After 35 years of quarrelling over Quebec's place in Canada, the ethnic battle between English and French speakers seems to have lost its bite.
It is one of the joys of living in Canada, which has room for all kinds of cultural anomalies and flamboyant contradictions, including Mounties in turbans and rejected refugees from Third World countries seeking (and getting) sanctuary in churches that nobody attends any longer.
But any Canadian over the age of 40 knows that the country was not always so complacent about 'the Quebec problem'. In the late 1960 and 1970s, a handful of extremists under the banner of a group called the FLQ placed bombs in mail boxes, kidnapped a British diplomat and even assassinated a Quebec cabinet minister - all in the name of freeing Quebec from the 'yoke' of Canada. But the terrorists were caught, jailed, freed and mostly forgiven. In 1976, Quebecers elected our history's most famous separatist, Rene Levesque, as premier of the province. He did all he could to pull Quebec out of Canada, but in the end, his struggle was absorbed and mostly neutralised. Two referendums on separatism have been held since, and both times Quebecers stepped back from the brink.
Other countries break apart in ethnic acrimony. Canada accommodates. We even subsidise separatists. A national political party, the Bloc Quebecois, which is dedicated to the break-up of Canada, polled 1.67 million votes in the last federal election. By law, each political party receives C$1.75 (HK$10.50) in government funding for every vote it collects. That is every year, until 2007.