Do not adjust your constitution. We come in peace.

I've just attended today's plenary session (they're the big speakers, and no other panels run so that people from all the disciplines can attend). It was Benoît Pelletier, constitutional theorist and Quebecois politician, giving 'some thoughts on Canada's identity'.

To be honest, I thought it was a little too careful. Pelletier expresses himself extremely elegantly and persuasively, but he focussed the argument solely on constitutional mechanisms and accommodations: I didn't get a sense of how and why people in Canada define themselves as Canadian and/or Quebecois, Islanders, Brunswickers, Aboriginals and so on. Instead, Pelletier explained that Quebecers are all liberal progressivists keen to be Canadian while retaining their specific identity as a minority in the country and a majority in their province.

I can't help thinking that the same arguments are held elsewhere with much sharper elbows: Welsh-speakers in Wales could (should) argue for autonomy to preserve their cultural specificity. Should unionists in Northern Ireland, that remnant of expansionist Britain, be permitted to discriminate against Irish nationalists to avoid drowning in a sea of Catholicism? What about the Boers? What about, unfortunately, the BNP's hijacking of nationalist discourse?

These should be, first and foremost, cultural arguments. The constitutional niceties seem to be a way to evade the visceral, emotional, sometimes tribal ways in which we construct our identities. bell hooks (yes, that's how she writes it) says that we all have the ability to choose our histories and identities (not sure I agree, but still): the constitutional disposition argument I've just heard seems to be a 'once out of the hole' approach. It reminds me of Star Trek (no, come back): that show exists in a perfect, liberal society of peace and harmony, on earth and in the Federation of Planets. The gaping whole is how this is achieved. We get gleaming architecture, racial equality and the implicit assumption that these things happen because people eventually come to their senses.

If we've learned anything from the modern period (1600s-on), it's that people don't come to their senses. Give us trains and we'l load them with Jews. Give us accounting machines and they'll process said Jews and other groups into gas chambers. Give us radio and we broadcast Milles Collines. Canada's the United Federation of Planets: it's been pretty stable and the people seem level-headed, but that doesn't mean that constitutional conventions will replace local and cultural loyalties at the bang of a gavel. You can't legislate your way to the perfect society.