CANADA: Montreal poet Irving Layton, who died this week at 93, was a mentor to generations of Canadian poets, including Leonard Cohen and Al Purdy.
He was also a witty scourge of the "simple-minded Canucks" who made Canada such a stuffy, careful, unimaginative society for much of his life.
The poet's death is all the sadder because the Alzheimer's that clouded his mind since the mid-1990s robbed him of the chance to celebrate the transformation of his country into a place of excitement, innovation and dynamism and the 21st century's first truly multicultural state.
Toronto, which Layton described as "a godforsaken place where people know only material success and nothing of love", is no longer the British, Protestant city he knew and is now home to more than 90 ethnic groups and a lively cultural scene he could never have foreseen.
Even conservative Alberta is changing, as the world's second biggest proven oil reserves create boom towns that compete for immigrants to work in the bars, restaurants and shops that have sprung up.
Perhaps the greatest transformation has been seen in Layton's home province of Quebec, once deeply conservative and Catholic and now Canada's most liberal region. Layton was almost run out of Montreal in 1945, when his poem De Bullion Street, about the city's red light district, compared a mission and church to "haemorrhoids on the city's anus".
Today the leader of the Parti Québécois, André Boisclair, is openly gay - a distinction Canadian political analysts agree is an electoral advantage - and Montreal is about to host an international gay sports festival.
The battle over bilingualism has been fought and won, leaving French clearly in the ascendant in Quebec, where businesses can be fined if their internal computer software is not in French. Anglophones have stopped complaining about the language laws and most young people are fully bilingual, including those who have moved from other parts of Canada.
Since 1978, Quebec has been allowed to decide which immigrants to accept and has favoured those from Francophone countries, ensuring that immigration does not upset the language balance.
Conservative leader Stephen Harper has promised that if he becomes prime minister after the January 23rd election, he will give Quebec a greater role in international affairs.
One way would be by allowing the province to represent itself at the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) as it already does at the francophonie summit of French-speaking nations.
Separatists are confident that Quebec will vote itself out of Canada by the end of this decade if, as seems likely, the Parti Québécois regains power in the province within the next two years.
A vote for the PQ is not necessarily a vote for independence, however, and many Quebeckers vote for the party because it is the only real alternative in the province to the governing Liberals. Opinion polls show Quebec to be evenly divided about the prospect of a sovereignty which includes an economic and political partnership with Canada. However, if sovereignty is defined as becoming an independent nation without such a partnership, support drops to 35 per cent.
The impulse to separate could weaken further as the rest of Canada becomes more like Quebec. Already, half of all Canadians would like to replace their constitutional monarchy with a republic and most new immigrants have few ties to Britain or the Commonwealth. Canada was created out of a compromise between two national groups, the French and the English, and that tradition of compromise and accommodation has formed the basis of the country's success in accepting successive waves of immigrants, not least from Ireland.
The Quebec separatist movement of the 1960s was born out of a proper sense of grievance after years of injustice towards French-speakers and the degree of autonomy it has achieved has been hard won.
However, now that Canada is finally getting it right, it would be a shame if Quebec were to pull apart one of the greatest democratic and social achievements of our time.
