Deepening Crisis Looms In Canada -- Quebec Considering Secession

TORONTO - Canada's Maritime Provinces may have no choice but to join the United States if Quebec separates, the premier of Nova Scotia said this week.

In the latest warning over Canada's worsening constitutional crisis, Premier John Buchanan said the options facing his province and New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland are limited if Quebec's thinly veiled threats of secession are carried out.

``What are we going to do? Form our own country? That's absurd. Stay as a part of a fractured Canada? A good possibility, but that's all. Or be part of the United States? There's no choice,'' Buchanan told Canadian Press in Halifax Wednesday.

The Atlantic province premiers, who represent 2.3 million people in some of the poorer areas of Canada, privately discussed an association with the United States last month, but only as one of several possible results of Quebec separating.

If Quebec were to secede, the Atlantic provinces' geographic link to Canada would be severed and their economic future could be jeopardized.

Canada is mired in a stalemate over the Meech Lake Agreement, a series of proposed constitutional amendments that would make Quebec part of the 1982 constitution, which it didn't sign, grant the French province ``distinct society'' status and give all provinces additional governmental powers.

Unless all 10 provinces approve the accord by June 23, the proposal will die. Three have refused to endorse it, and current prospects of approval are dim. Quebec politicians have warned that rejection of Meech Lake could propel the province toward separation, and recent public-opinion polls support the warnings.

A U.S. union - which Newfoundland considered earlier this century - is not seen as desirable. But talk has begun of a fractured Canada and some eastern as well as western provinces joining the United States.