Lucien Bouchard's four-state tour of the U.S. mainly serves to show that you can't make news touting business as usual

By ANDREW PURVIS /PHILADELPHIA

uebec Premier Lucien Bouchard likes to say that Americans are "maybe the greatest friends we have in the world." That might be an accurate assessment, compared with the reception that Parti Quebecois officials can expect in Ottawa. But Bouchard is also echoing a long-cherished separatist belief that if the rest of Canada is hostile to Quebec's secession, good relations with the U.S. will offer a comforting counterpoise in the event of a yes vote in a future referendum.

Proving that point was a major unspoken motivation as Bouchard, a gaggle of aides, 50 Quebec-based businessmen and community leaders plus sundry journalists swept off last week on a four-day, 5,000-km visit to Boston, Atlanta, Chicago and Philadelphia. The main purpose was to hawk Quebec's wares and promote her charms in four states chosen for their strong commercial ties with the province. But Bouchard also went out of his way to explain some of his government's more controversial laws, on signage and French-only schooling, to correct what Quebec City believes is a distorted picture in the U.S. media. The trip marked a new effort by the mostly pro-federalist business community in Quebec to set constitutional politics aside in the interests of commerce. "Quebec is a helluva place to do business, and we all need to get together to sell it," said Jacques Cote, president of the St. Lawrence & Hudson Railway, the eastern branch of the Canadian Pacific. "In some respects," he added ruefully, "we can be our own worst enemy."

Actually, as the band of pilgrims soon discovered, their worst enemy abroad was probably a form of vague benevolence. Just in advance of Memorial Day weekend, with politicians toppling in Indonesia and a $195 million lottery prize up for grabs in Des Moines, Iowa, a Quebec tour was never fated to get much attention in the local U.S. press. Newspapers buried the story; the Atlanta Journal-Constitution carried its first news of the visit in a wrap-up about a local trade show. Several state Governors pronounced on the importance of maintaining trade ties with Quebec, and those comments were seized on by P.Q. spin doctors and some members of the Canadian press as evidence of U.S. unconcern about Quebec's possible separation. But in the end the secessionist p.r. goals of the Bouchard mission foundered on the fact that one cannot make news about Quebec while contending that there is no news to tell, that it's business as usual, and U.S. investors needn't worry about a thing.

There was, of course, some unscripted farce. Keith Henderson of the splinter Anglo-rights group Equality Party shadowed the tour on two occasions with a placard-toting sidekick to denounce the "lies" and "human-rights abuses" of the Bouchard government. "I'm asking Americans to get involved," Henderson declaimed. They clearly felt no such need. In Philadelphia, where Bouchard was received in warm fashion at a business luncheon, several attendees noted Bouchard's tendency in his keynote address to imply that Quebec was another country. "You would have thought," said one, "that they had won the referendum."

But that was the extent of the political involvement. In Georgia, Lieutenant Governor Pierre Howard told TIME, "We consider Bouchard's politics an internal matter for Canada. They do not impinge on, or interfere with, our relations with Quebec." Howard added that he was impressed with the Quebec leader. "I liked his sense of humor; I really liked him a lot." The real message from the U.S. hosts seemed to be that Quebec, the United States' seventh largest trading partner, is not to be scorned. "If Massachusetts exports 30% of its goods to Quebec," noted a Canadian diplomat, "do you expect the Governor to get up and say, 'This guy Lucien Bouchard, I despise him'?"

Bouchard may have struck a blow for normality in Quebec-U.S. relations, but his hosts came away with heightened awareness of Canada's unique sensitivities. When Massachusetts Governor Paul Cellucci commented blandly that "the debate over sovereignty I don't believe is an obstacle" to friendly ties, he did not anticipate a Globe and Mail headline the next day that blared SOVEREIGNTY NO BAR TO TRADE, GOVERNOR SAYS. Cellucci hurriedly drafted a "clarification" for Canadian authorities. In that moment, he may have learned a fundamental lesson of diplomacy with the land to the north: no statement is deemed innocuous when it concerns the Parti Quebecois government.