WHY QUEBEC’S SECESSION IS WORSE THAN BREXIT

So let’s see. Massive uncertainty. Check. Currency crisis. Check. A bitterly divided society. Political parties in disarray. Leadership vacuum. Check. No plan for what to do next. No consensus even on the ultimate objective. Check. Parts of the seceding state refusing to leave. The state from which it would secede similarly fragmenting. And no sign of the reassuring new arrangement between them that was promised to replace the old. Check, check, and check.

In other words, the fallout from Brexit is turning out to be more or less exactly as the critics predicted — not only from Britain voting to leave the European Union, but in the event of a similar vote to secede in Quebec. If the latter remains the stuff of speculation — lent greater substance by Chantal Hébert and Jean Lapierre’s 2014 book, The Morning After, wherein it was revealed that none of the principal players had thought ahead even that far — the Brits are living through it. Only this isn’t the half of it.

Not only is the British situation likely to deteriorate further, as the economy weakens, as jobs and investment leave, as the negotiations with Europe, always prickly at the best of times, descend into the nastiness and brinkmanship that marks most divorce proceedings, but whatever mayhem ensues from Brexit, the consequences of a Quebec secession bid would be worse. Much, much worse.

It has been a marvel in this light to watch the sovereigntists attempting, with their usual brio, to cite Brexit for their purpose. If 50 per cent plus one of the vote was enough for Britain to detach itself from the European Union, they demand to know, why should it not be sufficient for Quebec?

To which the answer is, the two situations, whatever their surface similarities, differ in all sorts of critical ways. And the ways they differ are of a kind likely to make things vastly more difficult, more painful, and much more disordered in a Quexit than a Brexit.

Consider first the differences between Britain’s situation within Europe and Quebec’s within Canada. The U.K. is, and always has been, a sovereign state; it yielded some powers to the EU by treaty in 1973 (and subsequent codicils), but retained the rest. The modern province of Quebec was a creation of Confederation, with only such powers as were assigned to it by the British North America Act.

Quebec is in Canada, and Canada in Quebec, to a degree that the U.K. and Europe do not begin to approach. The historical, legal, cultural, economic and emotional ties that would have to be severed are of an entirely different order, leave aside such bits of housekeeping as the currency and the division of the debt. In sum, Britain’s exit is a challenge to Europe’s continuing unity, for the precedent it might set. But a Quexit’s threat to Canada would be existential, in itself.

There is, what is more, a legal process for the U.K. to leave the European Union, laid out in the Treaty of Lisbon. It is difficult enough, but there are clear rules and procedures. There is little doubt who would be authorized to represent each side in the negotiations, what matters they would have to resolve, and how the result would be ratified.

None of these apply in Canada. There is no provision in Canadian law for the secession of a province, beyond the vague provisions of the Clarity Act (a “clear majority” on a “clear question”) setting conditions on the federal government’s participation in the negotiations. But it’s far from clear the federal government would be eligible even then. There is no duly constituted representative of the “rest of Canada,” and no way of duly constituting one.

Suppose this obstacle were overcome. Absent a constitutional path to secession, one would have to be invented, by an amending process that has yet to be determined, with whatever further hurdles to ratification — referendums, most likely in all provinces — might be attached. But to have something to ratify assumes not only the existence of negotiations, but their successful conclusion.

The greater likelihood, as Jacques Parizeau himself was always clear, is that these would go nowhere: the issues are too irresolvable, the ratification process too uncertain. So secession, at least in his mind, was always envisaged as an abrupt, unilateral rupture, in defiance of both domestic and international law, in the hope that it might nonetheless be recognized as a fait accompli. In which case, take all of the chaos described in the first paragraph and multiply it by a hundred.

Indeed, the referendum itself would in all probability be bathed in conflict. Perhaps the question in some future Quebec referendum would be as clear as in past votes they have been opaque. That would still leave the issue of the majority. And here we return to the sovereigntists’ question.

The reason Canada recognizes 50 per cent plus one as decisive in the Brexit referendum is that everyone else does: Leavers, Remainers, the British government, the EU. There is no reason to think the same consensus would apply in Canada, or should.

Even the Brits, had they to do it over again, might set the bar considerably higher: 50 per cent plus one, they are discovering, is not nearly sufficient to decide such a momentous matter. And if it were appropriate for the U.K., that would not make it so for Canada. The situations are not remotely comparable.