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The old rule of thumb was that the Quebec vote was divided into five approximately equal blocs

Most Canadians, no matter what happens, will not sit on the edges of their chairs again and worry about what Quebec wants or does, and that province’s importance to Canada has certainly diminished since the rise of the explicit separatist movement in the mid-1970s. At that time, Quebec had almost 30 per cent of Canada’s population (22 per cent now), and the whole idea of that province seeking sovereignty with continued association was a radical challenge to the serene and noiseless tenor of Canadian political continuity. It was widely assumed to be an attempt by the Quebec nationalists to eat their cake and still retain it — to continue to receive transfer payments, or at least the benefit of a common currency and trading area with Canada, while exchanging embassies with the world and joining the United Nations. Even the Quebec Liberal premier of the time, Robert Bourassa, said in Paris in 1975 that he was seeking and achieving “A uniquely sovereign, entirely French Quebec in a Canadian common market.” This was less than a ringing endorsement of the Canada most Canadians could recognize.

Photo by The Canadian Press

The separatist PQ won anyway with Lévesque in 1976 and the long-promised referendum of 1980 asked Quebecers to authorize the Quebec government to negotiate the independence of Quebec from Ottawa with continuing freedom of trade and movement with Canada. Pierre Trudeau led the federalists with Jean Chrétien and the-then Quebec Liberal leader Claude Ryan, former publisher of Le Devoir, as his chief collaborators. The federalists won 59.6-40.4 per cent in a turnout of 86 per cent of the voters. The French-speaking vote was split about evenly. Trudeau had promised a charter of rights and a constitution of Canada to be amended in Canada, and he delivered that, with considerable difficulty and without the agreement of Quebec (which took great umbrage but had not, in fact, been bargaining in good faith), in 1981. Brian Mulroney came to office in 1984, and Lévesque opted for the “beau risque” of trying to renegotiate within Confederation with the Mulroney government. Lévesque was purged by the party he founded, Bourassa made one of Canada’s more noteworthy political comebacks, the Meech Lake constitutional settlement of a partial decentralization was agreed, but blew up after Bourassa invoked the Notwithstanding Clause to revoke a Supreme Court decision defending bilingualism in Quebec, and the Trudeau-Chrétien forces attacked the arrangement as making too many concessions to the provincial governments.