The separatist swindle of the century: Canada Did What? podcast

We all know how close Quebec came to voting for independence in the 1995 referendum. What most people never knew is the extent of the trickery behind the separatists’ undisclosed plan for the day after they won. It would have taken a difference of just a few thousand votes to unleash utter chaos on the country that could very well have culminated in bloodshed and possibly civil war.

This is episode 2 of season 2 of Canada Did What?! For previous episodes and seasons please subscribe below.

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Canada Did What?! Episode 2 transcript

Tristin Hopper (host): I’m going to play you one of the greatest prank calls ever made. It seems almost impossible — because if you think about the three people on earth that would be hardest to get on the phone, it’s surely the U.S. president, the Pope and the British monarch.

And yet Quebec radio comedian Pierre Brassard managed to get a hold of two of those people: Pope John Paul II and Queen Elizabeth II. The call I am going to play you is his conversation with the queen. He called Buckingham Palace, got through, and then if you were listening to CKOI radio in October, 1995, you could have heard a live 17-minute prank call to the Queen of Canada, with Brossard pretending to be then Prime Minister Jean Chretien.

A couple things about this call. First off. British royals always claim to speak French. Turns out that may not be entirely true. Or at least, the Queen briefly speaks in some choppy French before politely giving up.

Pierre Brassard: “Je ne veux pas que le Quebec se separe. »
Queen Elizabeth II: “Non, certainement pas.”
Pierre Brassard: “Parce que si il se separe, la, on aura de la probleme avec le monnaie aussi.”
Queen Elizabeth II: “Non, mais avec le monnaie … the money and the business is difficult, isn’t it?”

Hopper: Secondly, she’s so nice. She’d be Queen for 40 years at this point, and this is right around the time all the Queen’s children are having messy divorces. She has to take an unsolicited phone call late at night that immediately veers into bizarre requests. The Queen didn’t know her comments were being broadcast, so she could have been as curt and condescending as she wanted … but she wasn’t. She was polite, friendly and patiently accommodating of a caller who was obviously a bit unhinged.

Jean Chretien — the real one — would later ask the Queen how she’d fallen for this. That’s because in his opinion, Brassard’s harsh, backwoods French-Canadian accent was apparently totally different than Chretien’s own harsh, backwoods French-Canadian accent.

The Queen, who presumably got a lot of drunk calls from political leaders, told him she figured he was drunk.

But how on earth did Pierre Brassard get through to one of the most protected women on earth? If he’d just called Buckingham Palace for a chat any other point in history, this probably wouldn’t have worked. But he was capitalizing on a moment of national crisis, and the Queen was sort of expecting someone from Canada to call.

At the time, the country was only a few days away from a Quebec independence referendum that it looked like separatists were going to win. So Brassard was pretending to be a panicked prime minister desperately calling London to try and get his boss to bail him out of an existential fix at the last minute.

Pierre Brassard: “Your majesty, I’m really stressed out these days.”
Queen Elizabeth II: “I’m sure you are.”

Thing is, even without the pranks, this was a crazy moment for Canada. This was the 1990s; the world had just witnessed the sudden and precipitous breakup of a massive cold confederation, the Soviet Union. And now, four years later, it looked like it was going to happen again, to Canada.

I’m Tristin Hopper and this is Canada Did What?! And today we’re looking at the moment when Canada came closest to not existing anymore. The history of any country is going to have a few dodged bullets: Giant, ruinous trainwrecks that came really close to happening, but didn’t. And this, bar none, is Canada’s biggest.

To demonstrate, let me take you back to the night of Oct. 30, 1995. To the hours right after that likely fatal bullet was dodged. We’re awaiting the reaction from the Quebec premier at the time, Jacques Parizeau, who was championing separatism and had just narrowly lost the vote he had had held to try and get it. Did I say narrowly? It was a razor-thin loss. 49.42 per cent of voters said yes to Quebec independence. 50.58 per cent said no. The difference was just above half a percent. Less than 55,000 votes out of nearly 5 million.

Now, there’s a generally accepted protocol for what a politician is supposed to do when they lose a vote. You come out, concede defeat, congratulate the victor, kiss your spouse and thank your supporters.

But every once in a while, a politician comes out and says what they really think. They just let it all out in front of news cameras: The bitterness, the disappointment, the recriminations: A no-filter tirade about how the voters are idiots and vowing revenge.

That’s what happened on the night that Parizeau lost the referendum for Quebec independence.

Clip of Parizeau: “On va parler des Francophones du Quebec … on va parler de nous. A soixante pour cent on a voter pour!”

If you don’t speak French that’s Parizeau saying that although they lost the referendum, Quebec’s French-speakers voted 60 per cent for independence.

The implication being that if they simply ignored the non-French Quebecers, those who weren’t real Quebecers – that is, immigrants, Jews, Indigenous people, McGill University students – they would have won this referendum in a walk.

I’m not even exaggerating. Parizeau was pretty blatant about his bigotry. This speech became known as the “money and the ethnic vote” speech, because Parizeau just straight-up blames the loss on “money and the ethnic vote.”

Clip of Parizeau: “C’est vrai qu’on etait battu. Par quoi? Par l’argent et le vote ethnique.”

I should mention that his wife is with him on the stage during this speech. Not right next to him; she’s awkwardly standing on her own about two meters away. And she looks real uncomfortable.

Also, in case you missed it, Parizeau actually growls at the audience. After saying that 60 per cent of Francophones had voted for independence, he bookends it with an extended “arrrrrr.”

Clip of Parizeau: “A soixante pour cent on a voter pour! Arrrrrr!”

And unlike the fake Chretien in the opening of this podcast, Parizeau probably was actually drunk. Parizeau had a well-known drinking problem and, well, just listen to him. This is a textbook example of a drunken rant.

Bob Rae, who had until a few months earlier had been Ontario premier and so was a contemporary of Parizeau’s just said what everybody was thinking at the time. Rae called it “the most disgraceful speech I have ever heard from any premier of any province, and perhaps alcohol would be an explanation.”

Andre Pratte (guest): I mean it was clear in his tone when he began speaking how hurt he was and I think everyone respected that, that he was very much hurt and disappointed by what was happening. But the moment he said those words, he just lost a large majority of people who just forgot the reasons for his anger and frustration because what he meant really was that the votes of some Quebecers should not count. That’s what he was saying, in fact, right? He was saying, well, if those people, the ethnic vote, whoever he was thinking about, those people are not Quebecers because, you know, it’s because the way they vote, then we lost. Well, no, it’s because Quebecers voted the way they voted, right? There were voters for the no side, for the Canadian side.

Quebec City and in Chicoutimi and in Lecce and in Montreal and French Canadians, English Canadians and people speaking other languages as their mother tongue, all origins. I think that it’s too many Quebecers and I think a large majority of Quebecers, including many, many separatists, that was simply unacceptable.

Hopper: So why was Parizeau so angry, allegedly drunk and unhinged? It’s because his elaborate and somewhat sinister plan to calve off Quebec as a separate country had just been foiled.

Here’s what Parizeau had actually wanted to do the night of the referendum.

If you lived in the non-Quebec parts of Canada, as soon as the referendum results were declared for independence, your TV would have pretty quickly switched to this.

Clip of Jacques Parizeau: “My dear friends, Quebec is standing tall. In a majority vote today, the Quebec people has just affirmed to the world that it exists. It is a serene and democratic affirmation. One that no one can ever erase. A strong and simple decision was made today: Quebec will become sovereign.”

That is a pre-recorded address by a grinning Jacques Parizeau basically telling the rest of Canada that the jig is up. They lost, Quebec is leaving, and good luck finding a way to connect the Atlantic parts of Canada to all the other parts when there’s another country in the way.

Also, in this alternate reality where he gets to be prime minister or perhaps president of an independent Quebec, Parizeau has a very different opinion of the so-called ethnic vote. He’s their friend! Here’s a section where he very ironically tells them not to be bitter or recriminatory, but just to accept the result gracefully, because they’ll totally be fine in the new Quebec.

Clip of Jacques Parizeau: “In every neighbourhood and in every village, in every cultural and linguistic community, all of us no matter how we voted, no matter what we said in the course of this campaign, we are all Quebecers. Equal before the law.”

The video still has Parizeau using weasel words stopping short of declaring that Quebec is going to be an independent country now. He says “Quebec is sovereign,” not “Quebec is free” or “Quebec is independent.” You could still watch this statement and come to the conclusion that Quebec was just going to enter negotiations about increased autonomy. They’d start collecting their own taxes, get a seat at the UN, and this whole thing would blow over.

After all, the referendum hadn’t really been held over the issue of outright independence. No doubt that’s what some of the more extreme separatists wanted. But that’s not what they asked voters to vote on. Rather, the ballots had all said this: Ahem …

“Do you agree that Québec should become sovereign, after having formally offered Canada a new economic and political partnership under the bill respecting the future of Québec and the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?”

And that June 12 agreement, signed just a few months earlier, lays out a very restrained vision of what “sovereignty” means. Quebec and Canada would still share an economy, have the same monetary policy, and the same citizenship.

You’d basically be turning Quebec into what Scotland is now; a sovereign country in principle but not really.

Pratte: Well, one of the issues with referendum campaigns is that, you know, it’s never a perfectly clear what people are voting for or against. We saw that during the Brexit referendum, right, where people were expressing probably their frustration and anger towards all sorts of things, including the government in power at the time. And that’s one of the arguments I used for you know, discussing the issue with people who now want a third referendum in Quebec or people who want a referendum in Alberta, you know, trying to show them that whatever the polls indicate and whatever one’s intention at the start, at the beginning of a referendum campaign, you never know how it’s going to turn out because you don’t know exactly what people are voting.

I think both in 1980 and 1995, many Quebecers, I think, who voted yes, hoped that this result would provoke a negotiation with the rest of Canada and at the end, the end result would be some kind of new arrangement between Canada and Quebec. That was the hopes of many people. That is why the questions were designed as they were both in 1980 and 1995, know, highlighting the possible existence of a new association with the rest of Canada.

Hopper: But Parizeau had a whole secret plan here.

Step one. Hold a referendum promising some watered-down version of outright separation: Not a divorce, more like “friends with benefits.”

Step two. Once you win, you offer some monstrously unworkable deal to the rest of Canada. We get to be independent, except we can still use all your trade policy, send our kids for fruit-picking jobs in the Okanagan each summer, and use your military if we need it.

Step three. When Canada rejects the monstrously unworkable deal, you accuse them of being intransigent and then you go all the way and declare independence.

Six months before the referendum, Parizeau had spelled this out pretty explicitly to a closed-door meeting of European diplomats. He said that once Quebecers gave him a “yes” vote, they would be like “lobsters thrown into boiling water.”

It wasn’t necessarily a threat to scald everyone to death, but the gist was that once Quebecers said yes to independence, there was no going back. He would see to that.

Now it’s easy to assume that, even if the referendum had swung to the “yes” vote in favour of autonomy, that this might still have gone OK. It would have been a lot of paperwork and hurt feelings, but after a few years it’d be fine: Quebec would be off doing its own thing and we here in Canada would get a lot more done without them.

The gold standard for a peaceful secession is probably Norway. They seceded from Sweden in 1905 in an entirely peaceful process and they’re friends to this day. Although I will note that the Norwegian secession referendum wasn’t particularly close; it was 99.95 per cent in favour.

Or maybe Canada could have broken up like Czechoslovakia. In 1992, the country split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Notably, the citizens of both places didn’t really support the breakup and still don’t, but Czech leaders and Slovak leaders didn’t really like working with each other, so they engineered a non-violent divorce mostly out of political expediency.

But it doesn’t always go so smoothly. You can also have a secessionist movement that starts out peacefully, but very quickly flies off the rails. We shouldn’t assume that Canada couldn’t have gone down the latter path.

That’s kind of how the American Civil War started. The Southern States voted peacefully to leave, the federal government peacefully told them they weren’t allowed to leave. But then the rebellious states said that all the U.S. military stuff in their states belonged to them, Washington said “no, all that stuff is still ours” and … kablammo, you get the deadliest war in American history.

If you look at the conditions that helped ensure peaceful separation in both Norway and Czechoslovakia, you’ll notice that both things were lacking in Quebec.

First, as is obvious from the ridiculously close vote results I mentioned, the Quebec populace wasn’t anywhere close to unanimity on separation. If the “yes” side had somehow managed to win, it would have been by an equally razor-thin margin. So you’re starting a country in which half the population don’t even want your watered-down version of Quebec sovereignty, much less full independence.

Pratte: it was actually a concern of some separatists that the result would be so close for the yes side that it would eventually lead to chaos more than anything else. I’m not talking about necessarily violent chaos, but least disorganization for many months or not. Sorry, disorganization for maybe months or years. So I know because some of them confided in me that when during the evening when it came to be quite evident that the result would be very close. some sovereignists were quite happy to see that in the end they lost because had they won by 50,000 or 25,000 votes it would have been extremely difficult.

Second, the Quebec and Canadian governments did not agree that they’d both be better off as independent countries. Quebec wanted an independent Quebec. Canada did not.

For Prime Minister Jean Chretien in particular, this was personal. He’s from the extremely Francophone Quebec community of Shawinigan. He didn’t even speak English until adulthood. Chretien actually remains the only Canadian prime minister whose English was heavily accented: We’ve had plenty of Quebecers as prime minister, but they were either Anglophones or rich kids who were educated enough to speak the Queen’s English.

Chretien’s background, by contrast, is more Quebec redneck. The exact kind of person who was supposed to be all-in for an independent Quebec. But he was also born into a family of staunch Canadian nationalists. His father Wellie was a committed Canadian patriot who had specifically raised his son to enter politics and thrive within the federalist system.

So Chretien, understandably, does not want his father’s grave to suddenly end up in a foreign country – and he certainly not on his watch.

His memoirs are dripping in contempt for the separatist proposal, which he called “fanciful.” He refers to Parizeau as being full of “arrogant delusions.” The whole referendum, as he sees it, is an attempt to “hoodwink the people.”

Pratte: There’s an anecdote that Mr. Chrétien often told about why he was against the idea that a referendum could be won by the yes side by just one vote, right? 50 per cent plus one. That’s a theory that a referendum could be, that Quebec could separate even with a one vote majority.

And Mr. Chrétien always said in his speeches, you know what that means? It means that Joe Blow here, who forgot his glasses and comes to the polling booth and votes on the wrong side because he just forgot his glasses, he decides that Quebec will separate from the rest of Canada because he forgot his glasses. Well, this anecdote worked very well because people understood, you know, 50 per cent plus one, it’s very technical.

Mr. Chrétien told that anecdote. He scored some points because people understood exactly what he meant. that’s the type of politician, maybe old style, old school, but in many regions of the province it worked very well.

Hopper: So here’s where this could have gotten ugly.

For one, there’s a whole bunch of military stuff in Quebec. There’s a huge air base; CFB Bagotville. That’s where we keep a lot of our fighter jets. There’s also CFB Val Cartier: It’s a major army base where we’ve been training soldiers since the First World War.

This is all stuff we need to maintain our NATO and NORAD commitments, so Ottawa can’t just give it to Quebec. It’s federal property owned by the 23 million people who are still Canadians.

Remember how I mentioned that the U.S. Civil War was triggered because of a dispute over federal bases located within the seceded states? The United States refused to evacuate Fort Sumter, a sea fort in South Carolina, so some southern hotheads blew it up, turning what was a delicate diplomatic situation into a full-blown shooting war.

So what happens if Quebecers don’t take kindly to Canada looking to keep all the military stuff for themselves?

Maybe some militant sovereigntists blockade the roads leading into Val Cartier? Or a Quebec nationalist saboteur who works at Bagotville starts cutting the fuel lines on our jets, or setting fire to some base structures?

What if elements of a Canadian army unit mutiny and steal a few armoured personnel carriers, declaring them property of the sovereign people of Quebec?

Another scenario that could have very quickly gotten ugly: If Canada tries to keep pieces of Quebec. After all, if Canada was suddenly divisible, why can’t Quebec be divisible too?

Quebec is a huge province stretching all the way up to the Arctic. The top third of it is known as Nunavik. It’s arctic tundra; no trees, polar bears, the whole thing. And it has large population of Inuit communities speaking Inuktitut as their first language.

I’m not going to pretend the Inuit were ever massive fans of being governed by Canada, but these places had a very clear preference for staying under the rule of Ottawa rather than trying their luck under the rule of a new French-speaking independent republic.

And it’s a similar deal with the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, a huge reserve just outside of Montreal. To this day, the Kahnawake mostly speak English and aren’t fond of Quebec’s rather onerous French-language laws. During the leadup to the referendum, they also made clear they didn’t want any part of an independent Quebec.

So the scenario is this: Ottawa says “alright, you can be independent, Quebec. But we’re keeping Nunavik and Kahnawake. And you know what? We’re also keeping the Eastern Townships. It’s a region of Quebec near the U.S. border that’s mostly Anglophone, they all voted against the referendum, so we’re just going to make them part of New Brunswick or something and you can have everything else.”

Okay, fine. Maybe the Parizeau government signs off on all of this. But what if certain Quebecers – the lobsters that Parizeau had just thrown into a pot of boiling water, took issue with the conditions?

Canada has been blessed by a peaceful history, and we’ve gotten used to the idea that we can do things non-violently that in most other countries would require bloodshed.

The United States needed a war to become independent, and then numerous wars to settle their territories. We did both of those things almost entirely with lawyers, not soldiers.

But let’s remember: What’s the one domestic political issue in Canada that has descended into overt and sustained violence?

It’s Quebec separatism.

Quebec nationalism was a decidedly non-violent political movement by 1995. But when the referendum happens, we’re only 25 years removed from the October Crisis, when radical French-Canadians nationalists had been willing to bomb, kidnap and kill for the cause of Quebec independence.

And where are the FLQ’s terrorists and murderers by the 1990s? They’re still around. The most notorious one, Paul Rose, is out of prison, completely unrepentant and active in Quebec nationalist politics.

Speaking of violence, just a few days after the failed referendum vote, a separatist tried to kill Jean Chretien. He got inside the prime minister’s residence with a knife aiming to “cut the throat” of the Canadian prime minister. Only a chance encounter with Chretien’s wife Aline prevented the murder from occurring.

As Chretien wrote in his memoirs, if the assassin had turned left instead of right after entering the home through a broken window “he would have arrived directly outside our bedroom, found the door unlocked, entered with his knife and discovered me immediately in front of him, sound asleep.”

It wasn’t just the separatists either — the federalist side has some violent leanings too.

In 1984, Quebec suffered the worst-ever violent attack on a Canadian parliament when a gunman stormed into the Quebec National Assembly, murdering three staffers before he was miraculously talked down by the sergeant-at-arms.

The gunman’s motive? He was a Canadian army veteran who objected to the sovereigntist policies of the ruling Parti Quebecois.

More recently, in 2012 the election victory speech of another Parti Quebecois premier, Pauline Marois, was stormed by an armed man in a bathrobe looking to kill separatists. He murdered a stagehand before his gun jammed.

So what I’m trying to tell you here is that unilateral declarations of independence have a way of awakening some unpleasant tensions that you may not have fully thought through. Particularly when you’ve got unstable people on both sides who are more than willing to start killing people for their cause.

And I cannot stress this enough: Quebec came really, really close to unilaterally declaring independence. The 1995 Quebec independence referendum was one of the closest elections in our history.

2,362,648 votes against separation, 2,308,360 for separation. If just 27,000 Quebecers had voted differently, the “Yes” side would have won.

That’s a close enough margin that almost anything could have yielded a different result. Bad weather on election day. A spike in gas prices. A federal minister saying something dumb into a hot mic.

Pratte: Even though in the end, the federal side won, the story of the 1995 referendum is that it was so close and it should not have been that close because I mean, if you look at polling before that and polling after that, the results are always the same and have been the same for years and years and years. You have about 35 per cent, 40 per cent of Quebecers in favour of independence and 60 per cent against. The exception throughout all this 60-year period is 1995. That’s the exception.

Hopper: The usual “what if?” scenario surrounds in particular the Unity Rally, a huge, last-minute pro-Canada demonstration held in Montreal just three days before the referendum vote that may have swung the vote just enough to push Canada back from the precipice of chaos.

It was the largest political rally in Canadian history, comprising about 100,000 people, and included plenty of non-Quebecers – including several premiers – who had travelled there to say how much they loved Quebec, how much Canada needed them and how, if they had a problem with the current relationship, well baby we can change.

This was a marked change from the way the rest of Canada usually treated Quebec. Much like today, the usual tack was to be annoyed at the province’s constant demands for special status. Which, I can’t stress this enough, had completely monopolized federal politics for years, including causing constitutional crisis after Ottawa tried, and failed, twice to get Quebec to officially sign onto the Canadian constitution.

But at the Unity Rally, you had a bunch of earnest Canadians holding up badly translated French signs reading “we loving you.”

In fact, in the last days before the referendum, everyone from Air Canada to Via Rail offered deep discounts just to encourage Canadians to go to Quebec and be extra nice to everyone there.

News clip: “I hope they stay. After they see all this support I hope they stay. But it’s their choice.”

Phone companies even made it free to call up a Quebecer from anywhere in the country, I guess to try and persuade them not to separate; these being the days when a long-distance phone call could cost you as much as 25 cents a minute.

It seems kind of naive in hindsight: We’ll hold a big love-in and that will convince Quebecers to vote “no.”

But was it? I mean, if you hadn’t had that Unity Rally – along with its widely circulated media images of Canadians and Quebecers holding hands in eternal brotherhood – then maybe it’s entirely possible you don’t get the 27,000 voters needed to crush Parizeau’s plan for unilateral independence.

Pratte: Well, I think the worst case scenario would have been a very short victory by the yes side, because then the result could have been challenged and who knows what could have happened at the time, you know, because people who on the yes side, just, let’s say they win by in 1995, they win by 32,000 votes. And so they’re convinced that they’ve done it, right? They’ve achieved their country and the Republic of Quebec is born. But that’s not the way the rest of Canada would have seen it and certainly not the way that many, many Quebecers who would have wanted to stay in Canada would not see it that way and would challenge a question and the results and whatever happened in some polling booths and so on. So I think that’s the worst case scenario.

You know, I’m against independence, but if there is a referendum, I just wish that the result is clear one way or the other so that everyone knows where they stand. as the Supreme Court said, you know, a clear question, a clear majority. And then, you know, if Quebecers choose to separate, we’ll see what happens with our relationship with the rest of Canada, but at least let’s make things clear because if things are not clear, then it could be challenged and it could be challenged in legal ways, but also by demonstrating in the streets, for instance, right? Quebecers who want to remain Canadians could very well demonstrate and they could use that large demonstrations and counter demonstration and then those.

Hopper: Here’s how popular culture remembered the Quebec separatism referendum.

Clip of Homer Simpson: “Ooh, look at that headline; Canada to hold referendum. Sorry Marge, can’t talk now.”

Hopper: That’s from The Simpsons, which had a few prominent Canadian writers, and they’re commemorating the Quebec independence referendum as a boring Canadian procedural thing that went nowhere.

Funny thing is, that’s kind of how it was treated by a lot of people in Canada even before the vote. This is from an editorial in La Presse published in the lead-up to voting day: “Rarely have we so clearly seen the desire of citizens to get it over with.”

That’s a common sentiment in a conventional election, but this was not a conventional election.

Pratte: Mr. Chrétien represented at the time and represents today the typical Quebecer who is also attached, strongly attached to Canada. know, Quebecers who believe in Canada think that Quebecers, French Canadians have contributed in a major way to building this country with other Canadians, that their specificity, their specific culture and language are part of Canadian culture. So it is a very emotional issue for many of us. You mentioned earlier the episode in The Simpsons where they say that this was a very boring affair.

I can tell you in Quebec, 1980, 1995 were not boring at all. They were very emotional on all sides of the issue. we often hear the anecdotes of families who were split by referendum and people who, know, brothers and sisters who never talked to each other for years after the referendum because they were so angry at each other because of a, you know, emotions on both sides. So it’s nothing that is very, that is boring. It’s very emotional. And Mr. Chrétien represented the, you know, the large number of Quebecers who are attached emotionally to Canada and want to remain in Canada not only for rational economic equalization related reasons, but also for very emotional reasons. Because we think that, you know, Canada is our country and we don’t want to lose it, even with warts and all.

Hopper: If the Yes side had won, the best-case scenario is that Canada is permanently cut in half, its Atlantic provinces stranded from the rest, while losing one fifth of the nation’s population and nearly a quarter of its GDP. The worst-case scenario is dozens of Canadians being murdered in bombings on buses and in cafes in Toronto as part of a sort of intifada launched by the New FLQ.

So let’s go back to the night of the referendum. After losing, Jacques Parizeau promises that the separatists would just do this again, and again, and again … until they win.

Clip of Jacques Parizeau: “On doit attendre un peu. Pas longtemps. Pas longtemps.”

That was Parizeau telling his supporters that while they lost, they’ll just have to wait a little bit until next time. “Not long. Not long.”

And the response of the federal government was … “no.” You’re not pulling this crap ever again. Because they’d heard this before.

We haven’t mentioned it yet, but while 1995 was the closest Canada came to Quebec separation, it wasn’t the first brush with an independence reference. There had been one already in 1980 — that’s what kicked off all those constitutional negotiations that completely failed and made things even worse.

The 1980 vote also had a monstrously complicated ballot question that didn’t make any sense. The question failed by a pretty stunning ratio of six to four: more than 2 million voted “no” compared to less than 1.5 million who voted “yes.”

So, the premier at the time, René Levesque, gave a speech saying that he was surprised to discover how much his constituents liked being a part of Canada and maybe he’d shut up about separatism from now on.

Oh wait, no, sorry … his concession speech was the epitome of complete denial and went as follows: “If I understand you correctly, you’re trying to tell me: We’ll do it next time.”

Clip of René Levesque : “Si je vous ai bien compris, vous etes en train de dire ‘a la prochaine fois.’ “

And so 15 years later, his successors from the Parti Quebecois tried it all over again.

So, if you want to know what one of the most long-lasting consequences of the last Quebec independence referendum is — it’s that Ottawa vowed to bury separatists in so much red tape that another scheme to trick constituents into greenlighting secession with complicated ballot questions and unrealistic possibilities could never happen again.

In the year 2000, the House of Commons passed the Clarity Act.

It’s a unique piece of legislation in that Canada became one of the only countries on earth with an official road map to its own destruction. You want to break up the country? Sure, here are the rules.

The whole point of the Clarity Act is to lay out what secession referendums are going to look like from now on.

First, no B.S. questions. The ballot actually has to say what you intend to do.

Second, you can’t separate just because 50 per cent plus one of the electorate said you could. It says right here in the Clarity Act: You need a “clear majority” to back a secession vote, otherwise we don’t have to listen to you. What’s a clear majority? The law doesn’t say, so you’d better have a convincing case for it.

Also, even if you do get that clear majority, you can’t secede without amending the Constitution of Canada, which requires the unanimous consent of all the other nine provinces.

So, be warned: if you are a modern-day separatist listening to his podcast, be you Quebecer or Albertan, you can’t just narrowly win a vaguely-worded referendum question and then start yanking down the maple leaf flag the next day.

Now, you actually have to tell voters that you intend to secede, the bulk of your population has to agree to it. And the rest of the country has to be so done with you that they let you go.

By the way, that hasn’t stopped the Parti Quebecois from promising that if it’s elected again it will hold yet another referendum. It just makes it a lot less likely that it will come anywhere close to the near destruction of the Canadian federation as we know it the way the 1995 referendum did.

Pratte: The issues change, but basically the main argument remains that for one reason or another, separatist leaders believe that it is impossible to safeguard Quebec’s culture and language and values within Canada and that if we remain within Canada, eventually those culture, language, values will disappear. And I mean, that goes way back. That argument goes way back well before 1995 and 1980.

In the 19th century it was an argument that if something did not change, Quebec would lose its language and its culture. But basically it’s always the same argument.

Hopper: The epilogue to this story is that Canada is still a unified country. Parizeau, the provincial leader who unleashed so much pandemonium with his referendum, resigned as Quebec premier just a few hours after giving that “money and the ethnic vote” speech. He woke up, probably with a hangover, and decided his political career was over.

A triumphant Jean Chretien ended up winning the Commonwealth’s prestigious order of merit, in large part for his fight for national unity. And he also choked a guy.

We’ll start with the Order of Merit. It’s basically the hardest-to-win award in the entire world. It can only be held by 24 living recipients at any one time, and the sovereign in England – the king or Queen – personally gets to decide who those 24 are.

If you’ve seen the Netflix series The Crown, there’s a whole scene about Queen Elizabeth II giving it to Margaret Thatcher.

And Jean Chretien has it. The Queen really liked him, but he’s also one of the last figures in Commonwealth history to score a good, old-fashioned territorial win for Her Majesty. A bunch of people didn’t want to be her subjects anymore and he got in their way. Hong Kong ditched the Queen from their currency during the 1990s, but not Quebec.

And now onto when he choked a guy.

Chretien remains the only prime minister we’ve ever had who’s been in multiple fistfights in his early life, and as noted, he really, really hated Quebec separatists.

But he’d had to spend most of the referendum campaign sitting on his hands, since he knew full well that if he had just appeared on prime time to tell the separatist movement to go screw itself, it could have backfired.

So the experience yielded a lot of pent-up stress, and probably especially after a knife-wielding separatist had tried to kill him in his own bedroom.

You couldn’t blame the guy if he’d wanted to clobber a separatist. And he got his chance.

It’s February 1996, just four months after the failed referendum vote and Chretien is going to a routine National Flag of Canada Day commemoration at a park just outside Ottawa.

The event is swarmed by angry separatists, who blow airhorns at Chretien as he’s trying to speak. And then when he’s trying to leave, they shove their way past his security detail and try to block his way back to his car.

So – and this was captured on film – when one of them tried to get in his face, Chretien grabbed the man by the back of the neck, used his other hand to grab the guy’s face and, using the protester’s skull as a football, he threw him to the ground.

When reporters asked the prime minister if he’d just choke-slammed a separatist, this was his response.

Clip of news reporter: “You didn’t lunge at him did you?”
Jean Chretien: “I don’t know. What happened?”
Reporter: “I don’t know.”
Chretien: “Well, see, if you don’t know the cameras were there some people came in my way … I had to go so, if you’re in my way I’m walking. So I don’t know what happened.”

National Post

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