MONTREAL — If you are taken aback by the post-Brexit political chaos consider the following: Everything that has happened since the United Kingdom vote — and probably more — would have ensued in Canada in the wake of a Quebec vote for sovereignty in the 1995 referendum.

Indeed, since Thursday’s vote, I’ve had the impression that U.K. reality had caught up with the semifiction of The Morning After, the book about what the day after a Quebec Yes vote could have been like that I co-authored with the late Jean Lapierre.

If we learned anything over the course of the interviews we conducted with the political principals on both sides of the last Quebec referendum campaign, it was that events — post-Yes — would have quickly spiralled out of anyone’s control.

1. On the morning after his failure to convince a majority to stick with the European Union, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron resigned. Had he lost the 1995 referendum, it is not clear that Jean Chrétien would have left voluntarily. Two decades later, he still will not say. But others, inside and out of his government, would have wanted him to go. Had Chrétien not quit, he might have faced a caucus rebellion of the kind that is currently engulfing Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.

2. In the U.K., millions have signed a petition calling for another vote to appeal the Brexit verdict. In similar circumstances, there would also have been a fair amount of buyers’ remorse in Quebec. The sovereigntist leadership was determined to ignore it. In the months prior to the referendum, Quebec premier Jacques Parizeau had told the EU envoys to Canada that after a Yes vote Quebecers would be like lobsters in a trap — they would have no way to go but forward.

3. The Brexit result has increased the odds of a second independence referendum in pro-EU Scotland and rekindled talk of the breakup of the U.K. In this country, at least one premier, Roy Romanow of Saskatchewan, had tasked his officials with pre-emptively exploring the notion of the Prairies going it alone. The Crees in Quebec, among other First Nations, were determined to keep their territory in Canada. Some groups wanted Montreal to be carved out of a sovereign Quebec.

4. There is no consensus as to the pace of the U.K.’s exit from the European Union or the nature of the links it should or could maintain with its former partners. In Canada in 1995 some would have wanted to usher Quebec out of the federation promptly and limit future interactions between the two to a minimum.

Reform Party leader Preston Manning would have pushed hard for a snap federal election. He wanted a mandate to negotiate a divorce, not a custody agreement. On the other hand, some wanted to resist the Yes result, either by calling a federal referendum to test Quebecers’ resolve to leave or by opening up constitutional negotiations to convince the province to stay put.

There were equally deep differences among the three leaders of the Yes camp. Parizeau was set on secession regardless of the extent of the post-secession arrangements with Canada. ADQ leader Mario Dumont believed a narrow Yes vote would lead to reformed federalism. Lucien Bouchard’s bottom line was a different Quebec-Canada partnership.

Most of the front-line political players in the 1995 saga (with the notable exception of the late Jacques Parizeau) were convinced Canada dodged a big bullet on the night the Yes side lost by little more than a percentage point.

To a man and a woman, those associated with the federalist camp noted the absence at the time of specific rules of engagements. To varying degrees, they felt the post-referendum federal Clarity Act, which calls for a clear question and for a mutually agreed-upon threshold as preconditions for Canada to act on a referendum result, addressed a major vulnerability. If all else failed, they believed the new federal law would mitigate the uncertainty attendant to Quebec voting to sever its ties with the federation.

But in the Brexit referendum, the question was direct and all sides signed off on the simple majority rule. What we are witnessing in the U.K. is as orderly an adjustment to a game-changing referendum result as Canada and Quebec could ever hope for. Make of that what you wish!

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