19
The Referendum Syndrome
GOVERNMENT-ORGANIZED REFERENDA offer the citizenry the eternally obvious answer to an eternally obvious choice. The choice is so obvious that it has often escaped our notice until it is put before us, clear and neat, a perfect package to solve our problems.
Government-organized referenda are inevitably constructed upon the naïveté of the people. Since the people are not naïve, the mechanism of a referendum is designed to create an all-embracing internal logic which, by banishing the complexities of reality, to say nothing of the outside world, imposes naïveté as if it were normal.
By running roughshod over the complexities of society, the referendum removes language as the working mechanism of democracy. The complexities of argument which have evolved to deal with the complexities of our reality are among the most important characteristics of the democratic process. Public language is intended to play a double role: to reflect reality and thus action; and to prevent the withering eye of ideological clarity from sweeping away the careful, even contradictory relationships upon which a healthy society is built.
Representative democracy in particular has evolved from a desire not to put society on a goal-oriented track. The very idea of representation tells us that our civilization is the product of larger populations living together, and inevitably they live together in the midst of contradictions and compromises. The representative system is not designed to prevent action, but to minimize the chances of those with power cutting a damaging swath of clarifying action through the non-rational patterns which citizens have arranged themselves in.
This is why the history of the referendum over the last two centuries has almost always fallen into two streams. The first has used the mechanism to destroy representative democracy, usually replacing it with Heroic false populism. The second has used the referendum as a way to structure the citizenry into doing what they would never do in the more careful, balanced context of representative democracy. There is increasingly a relationship between these two streams. For example, contemporary leaders often now try to treat general elections as if they were referenda. The Harris government in Ontario is a perfect example of this. Their approach could be summarized as, ‘if you give us power, you give us the legitimacy to do whatever we want for four years.’
In a referendum society, language and argument as the central tools of democracy are swept away. They are replaced by a goal-oriented process which reduces the citizen’s real participation to passive acquiescence or refusal; a participation which is expressed through one of two single-syllable words.
When a society is caught up in a referendum syndrome, the very suggestion that complexity is the basis of civilization is a disloyal act. And yet, if we play along with the illusion of the obvious answer to the obvious question, the result will require more illusion, whatever the vote.
For example, had Quebec voted Yes in October 1995, the result would not have been independence or separation or sovereignty. It would have been years of bickering and argument over how to take the country apart. By voting to leave, Quebec would have destroyed the credibility of the anglophone moderates across the country. The effect would probably have been to catapult hard-liners to the fore. Those who listened closely to what Mr. Manning was saying during the last general election will have some idea of the sort of unpleasant, brittle attitude which would have dominated. Many reasonable francophones would respond, ‘But surely the rest of Canada would respect our decision.’ That is the difficulty with referenda. They encourage all of us to consider our situation in isolation, seeing things only from the point of view of our own logic. The moderate anglophone voices have identified themselves since the 1840s with the anglophone–francophone pact. Moderation for anglophones means working closely together with francophones in the construction of a federal, decentralized, bicultural state. For most of the last 150 years, these moderates have held power. Some have been extraordinary, some average, some awful. But they have been moderates. A vote in Quebec which rejects that pact, whatever the reasons given, would amount to the loss of legitimacy for that long tradition of moderation. The opinions of the moderates would suddenly be worth very little. What would this actually mean? I have no idea, since I would be among the moderates who had been wrong and would therefore, for what it’s worth, have been discredited. But my guess is that the endless and unpleasant negotiations would have been a struggle between two forms of extremism with no lack of opportunities for the raising of prejudice on both sides.
On the other hand, by voting No, Quebec has not given itself stability or prosperity. So long as the option of breaking up the country remains a real possibility in the identifiable future—that is, so long as it remains the policy of one of the two leading parties—the social tension will remain, as will the mesmerizing distraction from more vital and creative matters, to say nothing of the bleeding away of segments of the population both anglophone and francophone. In addition to this, the economy will continue to decline, as it has since 1976. In other words, in spite of a raft of remarkable social and redistribution policies put in place by Liberal and PQ governments over the last two decades, in spite of a strong cultural community, an innovative business sector and a population capable of dealing with new economic challenges, the basis of the economy continues to stagnate, even shrink. And it will continue to do so. The lingering presence of the ‘eternally obvious choice’ remains as a threat of division, bitterness and bickering whichever way the question goes in the future.
All that this tells us is that referenda are not designed to deal with reality. They are designed to serve power. They are not, as Mr. Parizeau said in the legislature, “the most fundamental expression of democracy.”1 Referenda, and referenda-style government of the sort we are now seeing in Ontario, have very little to do with democracy. After all, democracy is not primarily about voting. That is only an end-product of the system. What matters is full participation. Referenda, by replacing the complexity of reality with naïve, crystal clear either-or scenarios, eliminate the possibility of active participation. The voter is converted into a victim, whichever side she chooses.
In the aftermath of the 1995 referendum there was a great deal of satisfaction over the high turn-out. This was said to be a sign of the democratic commitment of the people, of their democratic nature. Of course most Quebecers are devoted to democracy, as are most other Canadians. Of course they voted. What else would you expect them to do? But what is interesting is not the accountants’ view of democracy. Rather it is the skill with which the citizenry took hold of a process designed to enforce clarity and voted in such a way as to create confusion.
They managed to outsmart the referenda mechanism by reasserting their complexity. Ever since, the strategists and consultants—non-partisan and partisan on both sides—have been searching for tactical explanations of this referendum’s failure to produce a clear answer. But what is interesting in a representative democracy is how the careful placing of votes by individuals manages to deliver a very specific message from the whole. In that sense the pattern of the votes tells you what the society wants to say.
The narrow channelling process of a referendum is designed to prevent the citizens sending a specific message of their own expression. Instead they are to respond to the dictum sent to them by the authorities. In this context, the refusal to acquiesce is the most important sign of a healthy democracy.
A referendum is little more than a “rumour of choice.”2 The idea behind the mechanism, ever since its first modern manifestations two centuries ago under Napoleon, has been to replace democracy with the sensation of democracy. That is: to replace the slow, complex, eternally unclear continuity of democracy, and all the awkwardness of citizen participation, with something clear and fast which allows those in power to impose their agenda. Through an apparently simple question with a one-syllable answer, those who ask can get a blank cheque from the citizenry; that is, if they choose their moment well and come up with a winning question or “the winning formula,” as Mr. Bouchard put it.
But the democratic system, when it is working, involves a group of citizens—usually a political party—coming up with a policy and/or policies, which are then presented to the other citizens—the public. In order to present them, they need an accurate description of what they are. They hope that this language will be attractive, but since they believe in the policies, they are convinced that the most attractive formula will be the one which most clearly expresses their beliefs.
In a referendum society the process is the exact opposite. A group of citizens—usually a political party—works out its policy, but does not believe that the citizenry can be counted on to understand or embrace it. As I have said, the referendum is a product of the Napoleonic–corporatist tradition. What is required, therefore, is not language which accurately describes the policy, but language which is attractive to the public. If the public gives an affirmative vote to this formula, those in power will interpret the result as a blank cheque to do what they have always intended to do, but never clearly explained. What we are dealing with, therefore, is not language. Language is a means of communication and the referenda process is intended to prevent communication. “A winning formula” is the opposite of language. You could call it rhetoric or propaganda.
Mr. Harris found his winning formula with “the Common Sense Revolution,” and once in power acted in a manner unrelated to common sense. That is, he applied an integrated ideological strategy, as if the citizens’ acceptance of his vague formula provided him with the sort of blank cheque which is not supposed to exist in a representative democracy.
Preston Manning and the Reform party have demonstrated another aspect of this nullification of language through their use of the term ‘reform.’ This is a word which carries with it all the baggage of the humanist reforming tradition, from LaFontaine and Baldwin on. It is a term which describes the left of centre in Canadian history. It refers to a quest for increased social justice. The Reform party have engaged in what I called, in Voltaire’s Bastards, the dictatorship of vocabulary. They have kidnapped a term, unrelated to their own policies, but which evokes a heavy and positive history running through the subconscious and the consciousness of every citizen. Not only have they tried to appropriate that positive force but, by doing it for an unrelated cause, they have made nonsense of language.
Mr. Bouchard had no trouble using the word “separatism” when in Washington in 1995. Yet no one may use it in Canada without being attacked by the PQ as being anti-Quebec. The point is that this political movement is in constant search of a winning vocabulary. The party insists that separation/independence/sovereignty is a natural inevitability. All that is lacking, apparently, is an appropriate vocabulary. Not one which describes anything clearly, but rather one which is least likely to frighten people. As each new formula is launched, the preceding one is treated as if it were banned from respectable discourse. To use it is to be discredited as a reasonable person. This use of language is thus not language, because it is related not to communicating an intent, but to rhetorical manipulation. To put it another way, the move from separatist to indépendantist to sovereigntist is the ultimate in political correctness.
This is because there is a particular state of suspended reality inside the referendum logic. There the debate is based not on language but on an illusion created by the careful choice of the right word or words. These are used as religious tokens. The situation resembles mediaeval scholastic squabbling over precisely which terms must be used in order for us to be in accordance with the wishes of our deities.
The very idea of searching for a winning question tells us everything about the purpose of a referendum. It is not designed to find out what the citizenry wants or even thinks, but to get them to approve a winning phrase so that those who propose it can do what they want.
Quebecers should not feel that they are alone in this situation. As the rational élites have strengthened over the last 150 years, so has false populism. These two elements were at the core of Napoleon’s alternative to democracy. By the second half of the nineteenth century, this marriage of technocracy and Heroic leadership—with its constant direct relationship between power and the citizenry—had become the face of modern corporatism. All along, the referendum was used like a lightning bolt in order to fuse the populace to the leader, thus providing him not with the legitimacy of representative democracy but with a blank cheque of power. The referendum became the modern instrument of that mystical, anti-democratic legitimacy, which was inherited from the days of absolute religions and monarchs.
With a growth in high levels of public education we might have expected this sort of false direct democracy to wither away. But new means of communication arrived in time to buttress the illusions of direct democracy. It was as if, in Harold Innis’s terms, time were being destroyed and so “it became increasingly difficult to achieve continuity or to work for a consideration of the future.”3 With the arrival of mass communications, the complex, slow process of democracy was weakened by the authoritarian populism of corporatist politics. Put another way, the referendum mechanism allows those in power to erase the factors of practical memory, including history. The lessons of experience and the sign-posts of the public interest are rendered irrelevant by the structured excitement of wiping the slate clean by choosing an all-inclusive solution.
As we have seen most recently in Ontario and Quebec, the resulting simplification of reality does not smooth the way, but instead divides the population, creating and leaving bitterness and unresolvable emotions. These emotions are all the more destructive because a referendum society encourages the citizen to chant for one side or the other but reduces him to a passive and, if possible, naïve role. In Anne Hébert’s words—
I hold my heart on my fist
Like a blind falcon.4
And if that state of unnatural naïveté can be enforced, well then, society will be reduced to opposing groups. Napoleon discovered that it was Heroic populism attached to the use of referenda that would permit him to capture the abandoned forces of religious morality. The referendum permitted the framing of public questions in the context of good and evil, right versus wrong, us against them. In this context the leader became the people. They were one and the same, fused together. To criticize the leader was to criticize the people. To attack him was to do violence to the people. Laurier already understood the dangers of these tendencies at the time of the Métis crisis. “Shall we ever succeed if the bond of union is to be revenge, if we are to rake up the old scores and launch them at the heads of one another?”5
In other words, to seek unnatural clarity was to ensure an unnatural division of society. That’s why Jacques Parizeau fell so easily, in Marc Angenot’s words, into “demonizing his loss” by blaming it on specific groups.6 That’s why, when Mike Harris sees people opposing him, he immediately eliminates the possibility that they could be responsible citizens. They are interest groups or racial groups, not citizens.
In this context language loses its purpose as a means of communication. With government by referendum we are in the domain of ideology and religion. Language is reduced to incantation. And phrases which should have a devastating effect seem to float by without effect. Mr. Parizeau’s comment, before a dozen ambassadors, that if Quebecers voted Yes they would be “lobsters in boiling water,” should have destroyed his career. When our perception of reality is functioning, nothing is more damaging to a politician than the demonstration that he holds the citizen in contempt. Pro forma denials were issued, which no one believed and no one was expected to believe. Journalists made ironic or sarcastic comments, depending on their politics, then turned to other matters. And the words floated by, weightless.
A referendum is a spectacle unrelated to democracy. If the show is good, democracy is reduced to the excitement of the Big Top, just as A.M. Klein described it in the 1930s:
Clients of Barnum, yours no even break!
The maestroes have you, have you on the hip!
They gloat, they hold you ready for the take:
And you, O rube, fall smacko for the gyp.7
Democracy has little to do with clarity and decisive answers. It has more to do with pursuing the complex road of the public interest. And that has more to do with the search for not ideal but honest and sensible choices. These are, of necessity, partial choices with little of the excitement of an all-inclusive resolution. Since referenda treat the populace as if they were a single indivisible body, much of the language used resembles that of individuals caught up in romantic dilemmas. The Yes versus No offers resolution; the drama, the emotion of final resolution. But even in our private lives we know there is rarely resolution, and when there is it rarely is satisfactory. Here is Alice Munro’s summary of this recurrent problem. I have replaced the name of her character with an X.
I wished that I could get my feelings about X to come together into a serviceable and dependable feeling. I have even tried writing two lists, one of things I liked about him, one of things I disliked . . . as if I hoped to prove something, to come to a conclusion one way or the other. But I gave it up when I saw that all it proved was what I already knew—that I had violent contradictions.8
For most of this century there has been an alternate school of referenda politics. It began around 1914 in the West, with the farmers’ reform movements and the suffragette movement. They felt politics was dominated by the banks and industry. They wanted citizen-initiated referenda in order to force their governments to listen to them. This was to be a form of direct democracy; democracy from the bottom up.
At that time provincial populations were small enough—particularly in the West—that you could almost imagine the application of practical, functioning, direct democracy in the Athenian mode.
That tradition is still with us, but the population sizes have changed. Suddenly the referendum initiated from outside government has come to resemble that of the inside. It is a brittle, absolute tool in anyone’s hands.
In California, where the greatest use has been made of it, anti-tax movements have managed more or less to bankrupt the state by putting severe limits on the government’s ability to raise money. Needless to say, those on the outside best able to mount and run an anti-tax campaign are those most liable to pay taxes in a normal state of affairs.
The effect of these votes has been to divide the society. The state is deeply in debt, food banks are running out of money, there are forty thousand homeless in Los Angeles alone. In other words, the clarity imposed by these referenda has served narrow interests rather than the public interest.
The most recent recuperation of the ‘populist’ referendum has come in Alberta, where Mr. Klein has called for a province-wide vote to cap income and corporate taxes. From then on taxes could only be raised by further referenda. If this happens, a neo-conservative agenda will have effectively captured the rhetoric of direct democracy for its own purposes. In reality, Mr. Klein is trying to concentrate the voters’ attention on taxes without them considering the effect on services. As in California, it is an attempt to ignore the public good in favour of self-interest, as if self-interest were a manifestation of populism.
This is why the strength of representative democracy is its ability to slow down those in power who wish to govern by blank cheque, but also those not in power who wish to yank the state about on the sole basis of their self-interest. This is why the issue-driven referendum coming from outside of power ends up resembling that of the power holders. They are both about acting, in Jacques Parizeau’s words, “by and for ourselves.”9 The idea of the public interest is that we can act for what lies beyond ourselves.
This brings me back to the central referendum conundrum: it is precisely the things referenda say they can do that they cannot do. They cannot translate into reality the clarity promised by the choice. Nor do they produce the solidarity among citizens which is the intended result. The choice usually proves to be an illusion and the results either way are divisive.
In part this is because referendum politics are usually imposed on top of the politics of representative democracy, which is centred on ideas of balance, equilibrium and progress through continuity. Imposing a referendum is dependent on the ability of those in power to claim that continuity has already been broken or progress blocked. Two centuries of false populism have been based on rhetoric which blames the need for a referendum on a theoretical schism with the past, a schism which has been caused by the other side. Since continuity has already been lost, the argument goes, only a clear choice which wipes the slate clean can re-establish normalcy.
The format of this argument is so standardized that you can trace it with ease through the speeches of the first two Napoleons and the dictators of the twentieth century to the new generation of false populists or corporatists, who can be found in power in several Canadian provinces and American states.
It is their concept of the urgent need for a new beginning which Mr. Harris used to justify his omnibus bill. In a few weeks, under the rules designed for single-issue legislation, he was able to redesign much of the underpinnings of a social contract put in place through decades of debate.
He simply ignored the unwritten but nevertheless clearly understood rules of representative democracy, according to which an election is only a general and preliminary indication of the citizens’ wishes.
After all, the thirty-day wide-ranging debate of an election campaign is not a decision-making process. It provides an indication of the direction to be taken, nothing more. People vote for different parties and candidates for many reasons. The result is a decantation of these factors.
For example, Mr. Harris was elected, in good part justifiably, by regions which felt ignored—the north and the outer suburbs of Toronto. Their vote seemed to indicate their desire to be included in the debate. The responsibility of the government after the election was therefore to advance their proposals one by one, so that a thorough debate could take place within the legislature and within society.
But as always with referenda-style government, an atmosphere of crisis was purposely created, of now or never, of the government on the edge of bankruptcy. In other words, the actions they proposed were put forward in a manner reminiscent of wartime. The rhetoric used to sell them was that of a military crisis; a state of emergency which justifies sweeping away normal democratic guarantees. The second wave of the government’s changes so disturbed the citizenry that those in the Toronto area invented an awkward and imperfect form of plebiscite, simply to get the government’s attention. This was not a referendum and had none of the characteristics of a problem-solving mechanism. It was merely an angry shout at the government to slow down and listen to the complex messages the citizens were trying to send them.
The result of these two waves of referenda-style change has been a growing level of confusion and division in the population. The more the Chamber of Commerce announces that it is pleased, the more we sense that there is no longer a shared social contract. The government may find a way to exploit this by playing further on the atmosphere of crisis and so continue down their path. But that isn’t the point. Ontario has not been so divided in an apparently unresolvable manner since the disordered and tumultuous days of the 1930s.
The situation in Quebec bears all the same characteristics of referenda politics. Mr. Bouchard spoke before the 1995 vote of “. . . Quebec solidarity. And it isn’t just a word. It includes all the political parties. Because, with a wave of the magic wand of a Yes, all Quebecers will be in the same camp. There will no longer be two camps. There will be the camp of all Quebecers together.” But the result of such a vote has precisely the opposite effect. It leaves the scars of exclusion on the losers. One of the purposes of representational democracy is to avoid the false clarity which produces those scars.
In that same speech he spoke of voting Yes to get “a government which can take decisions. . . .”10 By this, he repeatedly said during the campaign, was meant decisions to go in a different, more egalitarian direction than that taken by the rest of Canada. But he was no sooner premier than he called a summit of interest groups—a perfectly corporatist view of society—in order to propose policies which would cause Quebec to conform with its neighbours. Suddenly he was insisting on the need to act in the same manner as the communities with which Quebec was integrated.11
In fact, he went further than most of them by agreeing to a law which would limit the government’s right to indebt itself. This law—which is sought everywhere by neo-conservatives—is the key to undermining the idea of the public interest. If enacted, it means that businesses and individuals may indebt themselves as they see fit, but governments, the only mechanism of power available to the citizenry, may not. To pass such a law is to shift the balance of power from the citizens to those who are able to take advantage of investment capital; that is, the large joint-stock corporations. In other words, while the referendum campaign was fought under the banner of increased democratic solidarity, the reality was a government devoted to a corporatist economic agenda.
In an atmosphere where words and reality are disassociated by the focus of the referendum mechanism, it isn’t surprising that the rhetoric bears little relationship to the reality of what will be done. Thus the Yes side’s strategy during the 1995 campaign was to suggest there would be gradual change, negotiations and partnerships. However, the actual legal texts empowering the government in the case of a Yes vote allowed for massive unnegotiable political change. And Mr. Parizeau was focused on the texts, not the rhetoric.
In fairness, he never hid his hand. “The lobsters in boiling water” was a clarification of intent from the very first days. And his speeches throughout the campaign were clear, and therefore in contradiction with those of his allies. Three days before the vote of October 30, 1995, he cut off all contact with Messrs. Bouchard and Dumont, cancelling all meetings, not returning calls.12 He was preparing to act in an Heroic manner with the blank cheque of a majority Yes vote. This was reported in detail a year later. In February 1996, the contents of the speech Mr. Parizeau had taped the day of the vote was revealed. It was to be broadcast after the victory. Seven leading journalists had been allowed to see it on October 30. And yet it wasn’t until May 1997 that the penny seemed to drop with the publication of Mr. Parizeau’s memoirs. You knew the penny had dropped because Mr. Bouchard expressed his “stupéfaction.”
I repeat this well-known sequence of events merely to illustrate the extent to which, when we are caught up in a referendum syndrome, reality is suspended. Language becomes illusion rather than a means of communication. And this state of illusion or delusion is so strong that it persists long after the searing event. We are still its prisoners. Are we to believe, for example, that only Mr. Parizeau knew how he would act the day after the vote? That Bernard Landry didn’t understand? Given the complexity of government decision-making and his central role, surely that isn’t possible. That Lucien Bouchard hadn’t grasped it? In any case, it doesn’t seem to matter, except at the unspoken level where the citizenry must digest these events. Meanwhile the pro forma denials are issued and the press focus on Mr. Parizeau without examining the role of those still in power. And the words float by, weightless.
Not only do referenda emasculate language as part of their anti-democratic process, they install an atmosphere of rigorous anti-intellectualism.
How else are we to describe the eradication of serious public communication in Ontario and Quebec? This atmosphere of false populism is not unlike that of the late-nineteenth century when lower-middle-class Protestants and Catholics became the emotional shock troops of the élites, even though by doing so they undermined their own place in the public interest. Today’s situation is one which D’Alton McCarthy or, later, Maurice Duplessis would have had no trouble understanding.
The premier of Ontario in particular celebrates ignorance. When asked during Reading Week in 1997 what books he had read recently, he eventually dug up Mr. Silly, something read out loud to his small child. This is in the tradition of Duplessis standing up with pride in 1943 against universal education. False populism is built on the exploitation of self-loathing. But the active use of referenda make it doubly difficult to focus on this demeaning of the citizen’s self-pride.
For example, one of the principal causes being celebrated and defended during the 1995 referendum was supposed to be Quebec’s francophone culture. Yet it was mentioned only once in the official speeches, and then in passing as “les industries culturelles.”13 During the actual campaign, it disappeared from the arguments of the political leaders. Perhaps Mr. Bouchard had nothing to say. His memoirs contain dozens of enthusiastic references to European writers and culture. I could find only one specific reference to a Quebec writer, and that was brief and in passing.14 As for Daniel Johnson, he was so caught up in his utilitarian arguments that the reality of culture didn’t seem to occur to him, even to point out that the PQ in power had done little for creativity. The Quebec Arts Council had, in fact, been a recent Liberal creation of Lisa Frulla, perhaps the best cultural minister since Georges-Émile Lapalme. Jean Chrétien, who does, it seems, read Canadian literature, is always careful to hide the fact in public. And he didn’t seize the opportunity of a campaign theoretically centred on the defence of francophone culture to talk about the central arm’s-length federal role in supporting culture over the last half-century. He avoided the importance of the federal cultural institutions through which francophones have said what they were unable to say through equivalent provincial structures. This was because nationalist governments such as Duplessis’s made this impossible or because PQ governments did not create the necessary institutions or indeed did not sufficiently fund those which did exist.
What I am describing here is not simply the anti-intellectualism of false populists. There is also a close relationship between referenda and ideology. What frightens ideologues about culture is that it is uncontrollable. A politician may quite naturally think of culture as something which should be in the service of the public image; therefore as something that is controllable. A more intelligent politician will realize that this isn’t so. But an ideologue cannot imagine culture in any other way.
Referenda, false populism, ideology are all about control. Culture is about the exact opposite and so it frightens them. The person least likely to defend the independence and health of creativity is a rationalist who has fallen into ideology. And a referenda society is the least likely to believe that culture is a central part of our reality and must flourish beyond political control.
But then culture is tied to memory—practical, hard-edged memory which permits us to imagine the future. And referenda are dependent for their success on society losing hold of that practical memory.
One of the most curious lapses has been our inability to judge each referendum which comes upon us in the light of those which have come before. After all, the vote of 1942 over conscription divided society. It was one of the few occasions when Mackenzie King’s instincts led him onto dangerous ground rather than away from it. The two referenda in 1948 in Newfoundland over Confederation have left scars in society, still identifiable long after the result has been absorbed. The vote of 1980 created bitterness and division which has never gone away. That of Charlottetown in 1992 left more a sense of unease and discomfort. Perhaps distaste is the right word.
We don’t yet know how deep are the wounds of 1995—the wounds between different groups of Quebec francophones, between francophones and anglophones, Natives and francophones within the province, between those francophones and the million and a half who live outside the province, between francophone Quebecers and anglophones in the rest of the country. These wounds are not the product of the outcome. Had it gone the other way they would have still been there, probably even more so after the bruising experience which would have followed and would still be going on. The wounds are created by the referendum process, which, in a simulation of democracy, attempts to impose an absolute decision when the normal patterns of the society do not suggest that such blinding clarity is what the citizens are after. The structure of a referendum resembles not so much the complexities of a democratic exercise as the divisions of a set-piece military battle—two armies, a battlefield to be won, widespread psychic and physical damage on all sides which goes well beyond the victims and the formally identified losers.
He “felt dizzy,” Alice Munro wrote of a character, “and sick with the force of things coming back to life, the chaos and emotion. It was as painful as fiery blood pushing into frozen parts of your body . . . he had to keep himself from thinking, too suddenly, about what had just missed happening.”15
We may not even know what damage has been done to the citizens this last time before the next obvious choice with its eternally obvious answer is upon us, creating a whole new wave of division and bitterness in the name of solidarity and in aid, it goes without saying, of a sunny future.