Quebec Vote a Hoax

It is interesting that throughout the torturous months that gripped Canada in the run-up to the Quebec referendum, no serious challenge to the simplistic and unjustifiable definition of a separatist "victory"--a mere 50 percent of the vote--was posed.

Indeed, the separatists won on this point:. They effectively framed the question and its terms of success, setting the agenda for ensuing debate. Whenever major constitutional changes are made in any self-respecting nation, a supermajority is required: two-thirds, 75 percent, unanimity. In the United States, 75 percent of the states must ratify any constitutional amendment, no matter how inconsequential (like flag-burning or prohibition), for it to take effect. In Canada, a constitutional amendment requires seven of the 10 provinces' ratification.

Breaking up a peaceful and well-respected country certainly qualifies in my book for the supermajority condition, but this was never an issue in the Quebec referendum. It is hard to see how serious debate took place without questioning this central assumption, that it is somehow justified to remove a province from a federation on the decision of a mere half of its eligible voters. What of the other half? This case is interesting because it is not merely an academic argument: the uncanny behavior of Canadian voters produced a near 50-50 split, the vote being decided 50.6 percent "No" and 49.4 percent "Yes."

When the legality of a simple majority referendum was questioned, politicians from both sides called it, dismissively, a "legal" issue as opposed to a "political" one. The niceties of the law were now seen as trivial, in a country obsessed with questions of federal-provincial jurisdiction and constitutional wrangling.

It was somehow taken that whatever the legal consequences--or illegality--of a 50 percent threshold, this was subsidiary to the expressed "will of the people." This ignores, of course, the fact that in this case the law for good reason sought precisely to prevent a major constitutional change from happening with only marginal support.

Then there is the question itself. Quebeckers were asked the ponderous "Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign, after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership, within the scope of the bill respecting the future of Quebec and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?"

The documents referred to include a "Declaration of Sovereignty" and some anti-British diatribe over events that happened 200 years ago, hardly a basis for negotiations in good faith. How many people read this package of legislative bills before voting. I wonder?

And then there's Jacques Parizeau, the now on-his-way-out separatist Premier (although he refers to himself grandly as the "Prime Minister"), who tainted his loss by blaming it on "money and the ethnic vote." He told the Los Angeles Times last summer that Quebeckers would be trapped like "lobsters in a pot" once they voted "Yes" to his packed question, further throwing into doubt his sincerity in negotiating with the rest of Canada. I think he just wanted to mint his face on a new Quebec-franc coin. He'd have been the founder of a new nation, after all.

There should not have been any reason to fear that the Quebec referendum, with its misleading question and ridiculously low threshold of success, would have any serious moral legitimacy. And this is to say nothing of the secession requirements in international law that a minority be persecuted, that the parent country concur and that the secession receive broad international recognition.

Nevertheless, the vote did have a huge impact in its expression of widespread discontent with the status quo in Quebec. If anything, the referendum should be read as a credible opinion poll, and serve as an incentive for action in the years ahead. But by no means should it ever have been read as a serious challenge to Canadian sovereignty. But then, not all things make sense in the emotion-driven world of separatist politics.

Patrick S. Chung's column appears on alternate Saturdays.