`We want a country and we shall have it'

To mark our 175th anniversary year, we feature a different front page each week from past Ottawa Citizens. Today: Oct. 31, 1995

To mark our 175th anniversary year, we feature a different front page each week from past editions of the Ottawa Citizen. Today: Oct. 31, 1995.

Twenty-five years ago, the nation avoided, or at least staved off, a crisis of Confederation when Quebecers on Oct. 30, 1995 narrowly rejected sovereignty. It was a referendum that saw a staggering 93.5 per cent of eligible voters turn out at the polls.

When the 4¾ million ballots were counted, the two sides were separated by just over 54,000 votes, with federalists claiming a thin victory: 50.6 per cent, to the sovereigntists' 49.4 per cent. West

Montreal, the Eastern Townships, Laval and West Quebec largely carried the “No” side.

In the Outaouais, in fact, the ridings of Gatineau, Hull and Pontiac overwhelmingly voted against separation, with more that 84,000 ballots cast against, and slightly under 28,000 in favour; the combined plurality of 56,786 “No” votes in those three ridings was greater than that of the entire province.

Meanwhile, in a moment as memorable as the result itself, an embittered Quebec Premier Jacques Parizeau took to the microphone once the results were clear and blamed the outcome on “money and the ethnic vote.”

“We want a country and we shall have it,” he added.

Former Ontario premier Bob Rae wondered aloud whether alcohol might be to blame for Parizeau's speech, while Quebec Liberal Sen. Lise Bacon suggested “the famous constitutional Pandora's box is being opened with a vengeance.”

And yet, “Canada has another chance,” wrote The Citizen's Quebec correspondent, Anne McIlroy. “The dream of national unity lives, but so, it seems, does the dream of Quebec separation. The threadbare Quebec referendum margin Monday reveals deep wounds that need healing in a country brought to the brink of fracture.”

Columnist Roy MacGregor, meanwhile, opined “There is nothing here to cheer.

“We are today, right back where we were in 1990, in 1980, in 1976 — perhaps even where we were in 1885 and 1837 and 1759.

“If Canada is ever going to be a completed project, it is time to start again from the beginning.”