Quebec’s Bill 1 Will Be Secession by Other Means

iStock / Unsplash, Marjan Blan / Emery Forbes

This story was originally published on thewalrus.ca

By Stephen Thompson

It was the thirtieth anniversary of the 1995 Quebec referendum this past October, and it brought to my mind that autumn thirty years ago, when I was far from home—in Sarajevo, with the United Nations. I was serving on the international team trying to hold together a fragile ceasefire that preceded the Dayton Accords, the agreement that ended the Bosnian war.

One night, I found myself in Pale, the wartime political centre of the Bosnian Serb leadership. I was ushered into the office of the Serb interior minister, who, having clocked that I was Canadian, immediately wanted my views on the Quebec referendum, a topic on which he was surprisingly well briefed. In retrospect, his curiosity made a certain sense: Was a respected federation like Canada on the verge of collapse?

But I was at a loss for words. I knew almost nothing about what was unfolding back home. Our telescreen was CNN, and its universe was Bosnia and O. J. Simpson, not Quebec. The only news I got from home came from the newspapers my mother used to cushion her butter tart care packages. When I got back from Pale that evening, I finally sat down and read them.

I tell that story because distraction matters. We are currently distracted by events south of the border. We tsk-tsk, shake our heads, and reassure ourselves that at least we aren’t like that. It’s a comfortable illusion of moral superiority. I’m not convinced it’s deserved. I’ve seen what happens when people look away. Yugoslavia taught me how fragile institutions become when leaders stop respecting limits, divide people from their neighbours, and subordinate individual rights to a mythical collective, and when citizens convince themselves “it can’t happen here.” Right now, Canadians seem to be missing something quite consequential happening in our own house.

The Canada–Quebec relationship has never been easy. At the core of the quarrel is a clash of national stories—one imagining Canada as a bilingual, multicultural federation, the other seeing Quebec as a French nation-state in an English-speaking continent—and nearly every fight over language, culture, immigration, and jurisdiction flows from that fundamental contradiction.

But beneath the noise, we functioned on the same basic operating system. It was that shared political DNA that ultimately kept the country together. It allowed us to say