CHAOS ON THE HORIZON
Drivers of the 1995 Quebec referendum still haven’t thought the thing through
The revelation in The Morning After, Chantal Hebert’s important new book on what would have happened had the Yes side won the 1995 referendum — or rather, what the protagonists think would have happened — is not that they had, almost without exception, given very little thought to the matter in advance of the event. That much has long been apparent.
No, the news is that even today, nearly 20 years later, they still haven’t thought it through. For all the fascinating nuggets to emerge from Hebert’s interviews (conducted with the help of Jean Lapierre, the former Liberal and Bloc Québécois MP) — that Jean Chrétien asked Frank McKenna, then the premier of New Brunswick, if he would join a cabinet of national unity in the wake of a Yes vote; that Preston Manning would have led his caucus out of Parliament if Chrétien had refused to resign; and so on — the overall impression is of a paralyzing inability, if not refusal, to think more than one move ahead, or to consider any outcome other than the one each desired.
Still, it’s startling to hear them confess how blindly they were flying at the time. Never mind the morning after: They hadn’t even worked out what to do that night, though all the polls projected a win for the Yes. This is particularly evident on the Yes side. Not only did the three party leaders and signatories to the “agreement signed on June 12” obliquely referred to in the referendum question — Parti Québécois premier Jacques Parizeau, Lucien Bouchard of the Bloc Québécois, and Mario Dumont of the Action démocratique — have very different ideas of what such a vote would have meant, in at least the first two cases they were not even talking to one another.
Bouchard, brought in mid-campaign to lead the Yes side, with results as miraculous as his recovery from the flesh-eating disease that claimed his leg, nevertheless feared Parizeau would try to cut him out of the post-referendum negotiations — with good reason, as the latter freely admits. Nevertheless Bouchard is convinced that, having proved such an invaluable political asset, he would not be so easy so dislodge — after all, how would it look, in those fraught days and weeks after the vote, if he and Dumont were to publicly break with the PQ leader over how to interpret it — just as he remains convinced that Quebec would emerge from negotiations with the rest of Canada, if not with the promised sovereignty-association, than at least with “something better” than it has now.
Yes, of course. You can see what a powerful bargaining position he and his negotiating team would have been in: not only having won the referendum with the slimmest of margins, but warring among themselves. For his part, Parizeau put no faith whatever in the negotiations, to which he had been opposed from the start. Alone among the Yes side (it is difficult to call them the sovereigntists, since Bouchard was only conditionally so and Dumont, as he now acknowledges, not at all), he understood what a dead end they would inevitably prove to be — even if political leaders in the rest of Canada were inclined to negotiate, which for the most part they were not. (It is clear, reading between the lines, that Chrétien would have refused, except as a stalling tactic.)
Speculation over whether the rest of Canada would have reacted with uncharacteristic emotion, or whether squarer heads would have prevailed, is beside the point: With the best will in the world, there is simply no way to resolve the many zero-sum issues such negotiations would have entailed, especially given the lack of any recognized authority to represent “rest of Canada,” the many different groups that would insist on a seat at the table, the demands for referendums on all sides, at every stage, to ratify the results, and so on. Bouchard may believe he could have imposed his will on all this, but Parizeau is no such fool.
If there were ever any doubt, there is none now: The whole “offer” of negotiations was a feint, a massive bait-and-switch. Parizeau’s game was always to jump, as soon as possible, to a unilateral declaration of independence. Quebecers would be presented with a very different plan than the one they voted for — including, I have no doubt, the shared Canadian dollar, which would almost certainly be jettisoned soon after. Bouchard and Dumont are convinced they could have reined in Parizeau’s ambitions. But Parizeau is just as convinced he could have carried it off. Liberal MNAs we are told, would have crossed the floor (a few, perhaps, but not the party leadership). Scores of prominent federalists had supposedly agreed to back the government’s position (not so: they committed only to a “summit” of Quebec society to consider how to proceed). International recognition would surely follow — from countries dealing with their own separatist minorities. In its own way, it is every bit as fantastic as the serenely productive negotiations of Bouchard’s dreams.
What would have happened the morning after a Yes vote?
Not separation, it is now abundantly clear, but chaos.
Nobody had the slightest idea of what to do next, or how to enforce their vision on others if they did. Though the federalist side was as divided as the separatist, federalism had, and has, one decisive advantage: It is the status quo. The question was never how the federal government could prevent a unilateral secession bid, at least one with so little popular backing.
It was how the PQ could expel an unwilling federal authority from Quebec’s territory.
In such a many-sided power struggle, the odds favoured that master of the status quo, Jean Chrétien.
“What is politics?” he muses towards the book’s end. “It is to skate on thin ice without ever knowing if it is about to open up.”
In the tumultuous aftermath of a Yes vote, I have a strong hunch who the last man skating would have been.