The Harper motion was made to preempt a Bloc Québécois motion that did not mention Canada. As such, it was necessary because a rejection by Canada's parliament of a nation recognizing the Québécois nation (in a sociological sense) would have fanned the fires of separatism within the province.
This motion is about nations, not nation-states (a distinction more common in French than in English). For example, the United Nations should be more properly called United Nation-States. Thus the motion recognizes the Québec
people, not the Québec province, as a nation within Canada. In fact, as a member of the French-Canadian diaspora within Canada, I would prefer it said
la nation canadienne-française (as one of the two founding peoples) for reasons I mention below but I can live with Québécois as a nation since even the anglos and other linguistic groups there belong to a loose but distinct Quebecois culture.
Here's a good read on what the term
nation means:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation
For example, the United Kingdom consists of four nations.
Couple of relevant quotes:
Apart from its meaning as a 'sovereign country,' the word 'nation' designates a people bound by history, language and territory. In this sense, the "nation" that is referred to is the French-Canadian nation, formed by the descendants of the French colonizers of 'Nouvelle France;" even though the vast majority is concentrated in Quebec, the actual territory of this nation is Canada at large. Provinces are not nations because they all are multicultural, including Quebec.
dixit Lysiane Gagnon, writing recently in the Globe and Mail.
It is not the concept of nation that is retrograde; it is the idea that the nation must necessarily be sovereign.
dixit Pierre Trudeau in 1962
Thirty years ago earlier this month, I voted for the Parti Québécois in my first provicial election. I was 19 years old and had been there for the founding of the Association nationale des Etudiants Du Québec, involved in the general CEGEP (pre-university college) strikes and totally disillusioned with the way the Bourassa government had handled education and the unions in general. I did not vote for separatists per se but I was not totally against the idea. I voted PQ as a reaction against what I perceived as incompetence and, mostly, corruption within the previous administration, kinda like some of our southern neighbours voted against Bush recently.
During the last 30 years, I have become better acquainted with the rest of Canada and increasingly angry at the parochialism expressed by some of Québec's intelligentsia. I'd say that the trigger for me was when the PQ government changed the Saint Jean-Baptiste (a holiday for all French-Canadians) into La Fête Nationale (a holiday that changes the target population to those strictly within Quebec's borders, whether francophone or not). To me that was a betrayal of Acadians and other nonQuébécois French-Canadians, including the million or so diaspora that had moved to other provinces and the US around the turn of the 20th century. Every June 24th, I saw the shows on Québec television that seemed to me like so much brainwashing of the younger generation to make them embrace a separatist agenda. An insidious, long-term plan worthy of Goebbels.
This move from the cultural to the more strictly political still irks me to this day. I have always and still consider myself a French-Canadian but I am no longer a Québécois even though I lived the first 23 years of my life in Québec City and my ancestors had arrived there in the first part of the 1600s. Being in Ottawa, Québec remains just a 1/2h walk away for me and I still spend about 6 weeks there each year when I visit my family.
Anyway, it's been 30 years, two referendums and several constitutional conferences but I still do not understand or actually feel deep within my heart and soul the need some have to separate from the rest of Canada and form another nation-state. No longer living in Quebec, I wonder what has changed during those 30 years. Are we closer together as Canadians now or still drifting apart? Are people more easily influenced by some form of propaganda from both sides of the question or are they able to exert more reasoned judgement.
Like my idol, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, I was taught and strongly influenced by the Jesuits and his saying "La raison avant la passion" reverberates deep within me. Which is becoming the predominant force within this discourse in Quebec today, reason or passion?
If you were there or elsewhere in Canada 30 years ago, I'd like to read how you felt then and since, what has changed and what hasn't both within you and within Quebec/Canada, particularly in view of Monday's resolution by the House Of Commons.
More reading:
http://www2.asanet.org/footnotes/mar06/indexthree.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_debate_in_Canada 
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