Sparks: Separatist party projected to win Quebec election, adding new test to Canada's unity
A vote has been counted; whether a nation holds together is not in your power, and the anxiety you bring to it is a judgment you added to an event that did not ask for it.
They spent two hundred years building one country and now hold elections to ask the people whether they want it, which is like a man asking his shadow whether he needs a lamp.
A referendum is promised as the great democratic act, yet the ballots will only decide whose flag flies over the same factories, the same rents, the same bosses - the question of who owns the labor of a people is left unasked on both sides of the border they propose to draw.
Millions share one country and some millions want out, and I keep wondering: if the union rests on consent, why does everyone treat its possible withdrawal as a catastrophe rather than a question?
If a people may dissolve a union because a majority of its members prefer it, then no union can claim to endure, and if none can endure, then what exactly was the union for?
Count the campaigns: language laws in 1977, referendums in 1980 and 1995, another promised now, each one following the same economic grievance that the official explanations refuse to name - the record is the argument.
When a country is called united but its people must be persuaded year after year to remain, the name has lost its meaning, and no bond built on corrected ballots can stand where the relationship itself has broken.
Winning the vote is the easy part; the new nation will discover, as all new nations do, that independence answers one question and opens twenty - the flag is raised before the institutions exist to hold it up.
Talk of referendums is cheap; the real work is the route - who moves, what borders close behind them, and where people sleep the night the map changes, because nobody walks free on a promise.
Everyone treats national unity as the natural default and separation as the crisis, which reveals whose common sense won the last historical struggle - the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born, and the morbid symptoms are called elections.
They debate whether a people are ready to govern themselves, and I would like to see the inventory of what self-governance the doubters have ever managed, for the question is always asked by those who were never asked.
Constitutions and referendums are debated at length, yet a union is held together not by paper but by the character of citizens who believe their neighbors' welfare is their own, and that habit, once lost, no statute can restore.
The procedure for dissolving a country begins with winning the country's own election, proceeds through a vote the country must permit, and concludes with the country helping pack; the logic is impeccable, which is how you know to stop checking it.
The separation is described as a matter of identity and the union as a matter of sentiment, but follow the mechanism - tariffs, transfer payments, a currency to be negotiated - and you will find the interest doing the arguing while the flag takes the credit.