It is not certain that Pauline Marois and the Parti Québécois will win a majority government in Quebec next month. The polls could be wrong; the Liberals might recover; Quebecers might decide they have no stomach for another self-indulgent conversation on their future.
But if the PQ is re-elected with a majority, no one should be under any delusion. Whatever the denials, the assurances and elegant evasions, there will be another referendum on sovereignty within the next four years. Count on it.
And when there is — in fact, long before — Canada will find itself in another psychodrama. It will be enervating, searing, costly and wasteful. No good will come of it — other than, at best, the survival of one of the oldest, richest, most heterogeneous democracies in the world.
A referendum divides people.
It unsettles the economy, inhibiting consumers, homebuyers and investors. It reopens old wounds and refights old battles. We know. We have been here before, twice. But this is what will happen if the Parti Québécois returns to power on April 7.
There will be a referendum because — fundamentally, viscerally, staggeringly — there has to be.
Forget about awaiting “winning conditions,” the phrase the Péquistes have invoked in the past when deciding when to hold a referendum. If it is true that demography is against independence — that support is highest among Quebecers over 55 — when will there be a better time?
But the real reason is Pauline Marois, who has made independence her raison d’être. She isn’t in politics to balance the budget. It is to be the mother of the Republic of Quebec.
Do not underestimate this instinct in her. Or her colleagues, like Jean-Francois Lisée, minister of International Relations (and much-vaunted “liaison” to the English community, which shows his sense of humour). This is why they are in politics.
They are shrewd and cynical. They created the charter to invent a solution to an invented problem.
So expect, from the day they win a majority, that they will use all levers of power to create psychological distance from Canada. This could mean boycotting federal-provincial meetings, producing studies to show the injustice of Confederation, using the notwithstanding clause of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
At the same time, expect more talk of “humiliation.” Here the Charter of Secular Values will help. The hope is to provoke revulsion in English Canada, which will in turn provoke a defensive counter-reaction among Quebecers.
This is what secessionists do. Social media will make misunderstanding easier to generate than it was a generation ago. It will not take a bigot in Brockville stomping on the fleur-de-lis to create an incident; a smart, perverse campaign on Facebook or Twitter could effectively do the same.
The biggest help this time around, though, is the perception of indifference in English Canada to Quebec. Listening to the CBC, you would think this insouciance were a convention crystallizing into law.
The evidence remains largely anecdotal, which isn’t to say the impression is unfounded.
After two referendums in 1980 and 1995 — two of the pitched battles of the Constitutional Wars that raged from the 1960s to the 1990s — English Canada is said to be impatient and disengaged. If this is real, expect to hear more of the “let them go” argument from Calgary, Vancouver and other places.
The waning concern for Quebec — if real — comes from a more diverse Canada, 20 years removed from the last political cataclysm, unaware of the struggles that have kept this unlikely enterprise together.
Of course, the indifference of English Canada comes in the absence of an adult discussion of the costs of losing Quebec, which represents 23 per cent of the population, 15 per cent of the land and incalculable cultural identity. Or a discussion of whether Canada itself would survive. As the esteemed Irvin Studin argues, if Quebec goes, Canada will splinter.
It is something to consider as Quebec — and Canada — sleepwalk to the abyss, once again.
Andrew Cohen is a professor of journalism and international affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa.
