Recently, I was in France as a member of the Quebec delegation to the Paris Book Fair, where the province was guest of honour. We were sixty in all, mainly francophones but some anglophones too, with "ethnics" both visible and invisible. During one of the many receptions, a woman said to me in the nicest possible way, "Monsieur, you do not look like a Québécois." Her remark was amusing, for it made clear that she had learnt an unexpected lesson.

A glance at the massive media coverage given to the Quebec presence at the fair would have revealed the likes of Dany Laferrière (of Haitian origin), Ying Chen (of Chinese origin), Sergio Kokis (of Brazilian origin), David Homel (of Jewish-American origin), Trevor Ferguson (an anglophone Quebecker) and myself. All of these - to, one suspects, the chagrin of certain nationalist politicians - are what today's Québécois looks and sounds like: individuals of varying backgrounds, colour, religion and language - but individuals first and foremost, who have chosen their place of residence and refined their loyalties on the basis of their own perspectives.

Not long after my return from Paris, the Bloc Québécois, in search of a raison d'être, announced a debate on who is a Quebecker. Premier Lucien Bouchard, barely hiding his irritation, wrote the matter off by declaring, as had René Lévesque before him, that anyone who lives in Quebec is a Quebecker. (This is at best a flawed if well-meaning fiction, for it implies the Quebecker who moves out of province is no longer a Quebecker; surely anathema to anyone, such as the premier, who sees the existence of a Québécois people as justification for independence.) But Premier Bouchard was signalling his insistence - and, with reservations, I believe him to be sincere - on not playing the perilous politics of division.

This idea of inclusion was, however, the one explicitly rejected on referendum night by Jacques Parizeau when he blamed the narrow defeat on money and the ethnic vote. His outburst, evoked by Naomi Klein last week, was an expression of classic ethnic nationalism. But it was also a vision of a society multiculturally divided, the mosaic turned suddenly vicious. Mr. Parizeau's virulence revealed the expediency of paeans to ethnic diversity. Ethnicity is praiseworthy only so long as it is politically profitable - l'éthnicité rentable, in other words. The mosaic, then, is clearly a tool for manipulation by every manner of politician.

Mr. Parizeau was immediately forced to resign as premier and leader of the Parti Québécois. Even though maimed, he still has admirers, and continues buzzing around like an annoying wasp, flying from his nest within the moribund Bloc Québécois to make occasional sorties against Premier Bouchard. His intemperate remarks have, however, made clear the fault-lines that threaten the cohesion of the PQ.

It would be a mistake to cast Mr. Parizeau as a paradigm for Quebec or its nationalism. The fault lines have not closed and may yet lead to irreparable fracture. The reason is simple: The old ethnic vision of Quebec is on the run, chased by a civic nationalism that searches out the similarities between people rather than stressing the differences between them. Ironically, this new nationalism - less ideological, more social in character, shared by many federalists - is a result of the very success of nationalist endeavours such as Bill 101, the language law.

The new Quebec, born of the Quiet Revolution and its astonishing changes, has created a generation of people confident in themselves and their place in the world. Apart from political activists, few of them are driven by ideology or resentment. They feel no obligation to praise the songs of Gilles Vigneault or the plays of Michel Tremblay. They are as likely to read the New York Times as le Devoir. And the music they enjoy is more likely to be in English than French, with a healthy dose of World Music sounds thrown in. While France is important to them, they do not seek validation from Paris. Many of them even speak enthusiastically of Toronto (!).

They are a generation of people who know who they are - Francophone North-Americans. They take their identity for granted, and get on with their lives.

This new Quebec has put legislation and structures in place to ensure just treatment of its diverse population. Premier Bouchard, spiritually of the new generation, recently announced that 25% of a thousand new civil-service posts will be reserved for anglophones and other minorities. No matter how one may feel about such discriminatory hiring practices (I believe in old-fashioned merit evaluated on a level playing field where race, colour, ethnicity, etc. play no part), it is a sign of Quebec's inclusive civic nationalism flexing its muscles.

Few, I suspect, take the Bloc debate seriously. There is nothing to be gained from it. Undeniable, though, is that Jacques Parizeau's ethnic vision of Quebec coincides neatly with the multicultural vision prevalent in the rest of the country: a public sphere ethnically divided, easy prey to praise or vilification, as events dictate. In his bluster, Mr. Parizeau divided the society into non-ethnic and ethnic, those who fully belong and those who do not - precisely as multiculturalism has always done. He shares, then, the view of the mosaic - and a mosaic, remember, is composed of different tiles separated by a band of adhesive, which is precisely what Toronto immigration expert Tim Rees described in a recent issue of Time magazine when he said, "We're living side by side, but not together."

As human being and novelist, I believe that while identity emerges from various sources, it nevertheless belongs exclusively to the individual. Out of the self realized as fully as possible - by recognizing, for instance, that the acquisition of market-place skills is merely one rudiment of a real education - will come a citizenry accepting, and not merely tolerant, of each other. Only then will people begin to live together, sharing a common purpose, seeing each other not as exotics contained within separate mosaic tiles, but rather as fellow Canadians to whom they owe, and from whom they must expect, the respect that is their due as human beings.

"The function of liberal society," Michael Ignatieff writes, "is not merely to teach the noble fiction of human universality, but to create individuals, sufficiently robust in their own identity, to live by that fiction."

Moreover, in a world made perilous by unrelenting, multi-faceted arrogance, the ideals and institutions bequeathed to us by Western liberal traditions - the essential freedoms they affirm - remain the best guarantors of the alchemy indispensable to the development of individual identity. No other tradition so favours individuals in all their complexity.

Individuals, then, must transcend their ethnicity, as a society must de-emphasize it. The mosaic dream is flawed. Canada, a country that defines itself through its ethnic communities, must come to grips with the imperatives of this noble fiction.