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I’ll never forget how I felt on Oct. 30, 1995 while the votes in the second referendum on sovereignty were being counted. Things were looking bad for those of us who wished to see Canada prosper as one country with three nations, French, English and Indigenous.

At the time, I was editor in chief of Air Canada’s enRoute magazine, possibly the most fun I have had in a job. I could not help to wonder whether Air Canada would move out of Montreal in the event of a Yes vote.

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It was No, by a small margin, 50.58 per cent. Many places would have gone up in flames that night. That Quebec didn’t is testimony to the deep democratic roots of the sovereignist movement built by René Lévesque.

A Yes vote by the same margin would have been more complicated. Look at Brexit. The 2016 question was easy to understand, unlike our masterpiece of obfuscation, yet the result was as muddy as the Thames at low tide: 51.9 per cent in favour of leaving the European Union.