On: Separatist party projected to win Quebec election, adding new test to Canada's...

7 October 2026

The Parti Québécois has won, and the papers call it “a new test of Canada’s unity.” Notice what that phrase does. A test implies something being examined - a patient, a specimen. But the thing being tested here is a wish. Several million people in one corner of a continent keep saying they would rather govern themselves, and the rest of the country calls this a strain on the patient instead of an answer to a question.

I have no brief for nationalists. I have seen what nationalism does when it gets power - the flags, the language laws, the small men with lists of names. A Quebec that purges English from its shop signs is not my idea of freedom, and the same party that wants out of Canada would be quite capable of squeezing its own minorities once the door was shut.

But the honest question is not whether I like them. It is whether the people get to decide. And here the record is better than most. They held a referendum in 1980 and another in 1995, and the No side won the second by a whisker, and the country did not fall apart. Nobody was shot. That is more than can be said for most places that have faced this question. Compare it with Spain, which put men in prison for holding a ballot.

So the word “test” is wrong. A test is imposed from outside. This is a promise, made openly, by a party that told the voters what it meant to do. If the separatists win a referendum, the matter will then be argued, haggled over borders and debts, and probably settled badly - such things usually are. But the sin will not be in asking. The sin would be in refusing to let them ask, and then calling the refusal “unity.”

Unity that must be protected from a ballot box is not unity. It is a landlord’s word for the rent.