SOURCE: Cooper, Barry. Review of Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!: Requiem for a Divided Country, by Mordecai Richler. American Spectator 25, no. 12 (December 1992): 71-2.

In the following review, Cooper argues that Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! is a useful study of Quebec nationalism and recent Canadian politics, commenting that Richler's criticisms are the “only appropriate response of a concerned citizen in a democracy.”

Canadians are prey to many myths, but the most important of them is that what makes us truly, uniquely, profoundly etc. Canadian is Quebec. Two peoples, working in two languages, together, building on the northern half of the continent a more tolerant, more caring, more just nation than the U.S. Without Quebec, sing the full-throated chorus of Canadian intellectuals, we would simply be poor, cold, rust-belt Americans with a deep appreciation of hockey.

When the novelist Mordecai Richler attacked many of the underpinnings of that myth in...