It’s 2016, the year of Brexit and Trump—but May, one month before the former and six before the latter. Barack Obama is addressing the G7 for the final time in a private session. I watch him describe the critical role that table played in managing the global events of his presidency. From the fallout of the great financial crisis to Russia’s illegal 2014 annexation of Crimea and to the Paris Climate Agreement negotiations, he paints a picture of an imperfect but irreplaceable multilateral institution that is to be appreciated and protected. It is peak Obama: intelligent, incisive, self-deprecating, wise, lengthy. He closes by apologizing for going over his allotted time but begs his colleagues’ indulgence, “since it is my last G7.”
British prime minister David Cameron speaks next. I remember him opening with a joke riffing on Obama’s close: “Who knows? We’ll see next month if this is my last G7.”
Cameron’s jaunty insouciance made me believe for the first time that the Brexiters were going to win their referendum. The PM had made a manifesto commitment to “give the British people a referendum with a very simple in or out choice.” It was a sop to Euroskeptic UK Independence Party voters, a cynical attempt to consolidate the British right under the Tory banner that even he, by most reports, thought was a far-fetched prospect. There’s no evidence Cameron believed Britain should leave the European Union, but he knew a political opportunity when he saw one. Britons had been battered by the financial crisis and were in the market for someone to blame.
The campaign necessitated by his promise was among the most toxic in history. The “Remain” side was swept aside, the British people gaslit. The “Leave” team was colourful, boisterous, and utterly untethered to facts—including a widely misleading claim that clawed-back EU money would fund the National Health Service after the Brexit vote. The campaign was also possibly aided and abetted by Russian agents beyond the UK’s borders. We’ll never grasp the extent because—after an alarming parliamentary probe—the Boris Johnson government opted to shut down the investigation and bury the controversy altogether.
Buyers’ remorse among Britons has been deepening ever since. As awareness of the permanent diminishment of their economic prospects burgeoned over the last near-decade, their anger grew until they finally handed the Tories their worst electoral defeat in a generation this past July.
I rehearse this sorry saga because I believe we are headed for a similar scenario here in Canada. We are utterly unprepared for its consequences, and our neighbours are not remotely attuned to its possibility. I’m talking about an increasingly likely Quebec secession referendum within the next three to five years. One that will be so dissimilar to its two antecedents that we should think of it as a Quebexit event rather than another Canadian identity crisis. Like many things these days, the past is unlikely to look like the future.
Its outcome could be a tragedy for Canada and a unique geopolitical problem for the United States.
There are three dynamics converging that make the near term an exciting time to be a Quebec sovereigntist and a dangerous one for Canada: excessive negativity about the country across our political class, vulnerability to foreign interference, and deep substantive division on climate change. Let’s look at each briefly.
Canada is one of the most successful countries in the history of the world. The evidence is too considerable to summarize, but from the UN Human Development Index, through the Global Peace Index’s measure of security, to Freedom House’s assessment of country-level liberty, and even the World Economic Forum Competitiveness Index, Canada ranks near the top of every comparative spreadsheet of good things humans could possibly hope to enjoy. We are, by most objective measures, one of the wealthiest, healthiest, safest, freest places on the planet.
But, man, you would never know it.
As was the case with Britain in the run-up to Brexit, Canada’s national mood is unrelentingly grim—not without some cause. Housing prices are skyrocketing, lack of competition for basic services has sent theirs into the stratosphere, and governments of all stripes are spending lavishly but finding few solutions. Inflation’s shadow will haunt family budgets long after our politicians and bankers tell us it has been exorcised, and we are suffering through a national epidemic of mental health problems exacerbated by the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic.
There seem to be more opinions about what’s ailing the current government than there are people in Canada—even adjusting for our recent population growth. My own view is that, somewhere along the way, the Liberals lost sight of the need to make a consistent positive case for the country and the concomitant responsibility to build support for the unique national attributes that set Canada apart. Canada is an imperfect country. Better is always possible, but there are only so many times you can apologize for the country before people begin to believe you’re not very proud of it.
And what of the opposition? How about the man who polls insist will be our next prime minister, Pierre Poilievre? If the government too often feels disappointed by Canada, the opposition is downright angry that we don’t all conform to its narrow vision of it. If you’re not waving your kids goodbye through the dusty window of your F-150 every morning as you drive off to work in an oil field, you’re not his kind of Canadian. Poilievre exhibits the illiberal impulse so common among contemporary right-wing leaders—the sense that if you’re not on their side of the culture war, you are a lesser citizen.
Poilievre has added a verb and changed the subject of Cameron’s “Broken Britain,” repeating ad nauseam that “Canada feels broken.” I don’t know what the “Oui” side’s slogan will be in the event of another referendum, but they could do a lot worse than “Le Canada est brisé.”
What’s more, the Liberal government’s current shaky political standing has created the real possibility that the next leader of the opposition could be Yves-François Blanchet, the leader of the Bloc Québécois. Poilievre is about as popular in Quebec as Trudeau is in Calgary. According to current polling, Quebeckers have recently realized that he will be prime minister within a year and have turned to the Bloc (and the Parti Québécois) for protection. English Canadians know little of Blanchet and where he stands on issues, but we can rest assured that he agrees with Poilievre that the country is broken.
Politics over-indexes on negativity at the best of times. While our times might not be those, it is downright dangerous for politicians to run down their country while competing with each other to lead it. Corrosive negative rhetoric has its consequences.
Last year, we momentarily engaged in a public debate about foreign interference in our politics. The discussion was partly focused on China and was largely limited to an examination of the arcane procedures by which parties nominate candidates in federal elections. This will all seem quaint when our strategic adversaries see an opportunity to cause chaos on a nearly 10,000-kilometre border with the United States. Readers will doubtless have noticed that the 1990s was a little early to call the end of history, and geopolitics is back with a vengeance. We in the West think we won the Cold War, but Vladimir Putin doesn’t think it’s over. As has been widely documented in Germany, France, the UK, and the US, Russia will not hesitate to pursue its interests through election interference. It’s hard to imagine a bigger opportunity than the dissolution of the US’s largest trading partner and closest ally. We Canadians are not accustomed to seeing ourselves as a major strategic target of lethal foreign adversaries, but we should get used to it.
Our institutions are not built for the purpose of defending the country against this kind of attack. As Chantal Hébert and the late Jean Lapierre documented in their meticulous 2015 study of the 1995 referendum, The Morning After, there was no coherent plan to deal with a “Yes” vote then, when the geopolitical landscape was more favourable. President Bill Clinton was all but imploring Quebeckers to stay in Canada, and the Russians were still reeling from the Soviet Union’s demise. Our leaders promised that free trade and globalization were about to deliver economic dividends for the West that Quebeckers would exclude themselves from were they to vote to separate.
It’s not germane to the present purpose to debate how all that turned out. Suffice it to say that the strategic picture in 2024 is much different and more dangerous than it was in 1995. Nor is this to say that Quebeckers would be duped into voting “Yes” by shadowy foreign forces alone. Russian operations are more sophisticated than that, as we have seen in our sister democracies. Their modus operandi is to aggravate a country’s pre-existing conditions. All democracies feature divisive issues. Malign foreign actors are experts at using disinformation to inflame both sides—the ensuing intemperate bun fight does their dirty work. In the US, racial division is their preferred playground, while in the UK, anti-immigrant sentiment and nativism have proven fertile territory.
Which brings me to the final point. Will the next Quebec referendum become Canada’s final debate on climate change?
Like many fossil-fuel producing countries with good intentions, Canada has had a hard time getting its act together on climate change. We are one of the most decentralized federations in the world by constitutional design, so it’s not surprising that this debate breaks along regional lines. It’s a little reductive to say where a given politician stands on climate change depends on whether they represent a region that produces oil and gas—but only a little. The important point for the present purpose is that Quebec produces no fossil fuels and has clean-energy resources in abundance.
It’s easy to imagine the “Yes” side campaigning on a modern version of Quebec’s historical “mâitre chez nous” argument. It would go something like this: “We can be a clean-energy superpower, the Norway of North America. We’ll never get anything serious done on climate change while we’re tied to that oil and gas company the Anglos call a country.” Sovereigntists will argue that independence is Quebec’s path to prosperity in the new-energy economy, and that a “Yes” vote is the clearest possible statement of its determination to fight climate change.
The plural of anecdote is not data, but if the reaction I’ve received from many federalist friends in Quebec is any indication, it will be a persuasive argument.
It’s equally easy to imagine how premiers and politicians in fossil fuel–producing provinces would react to such provocation. Danielle Smith has already come close to accusing the government of treason for daring to rely on the Bloc Québécois to maintain the confidence of the House of Commons. Their many online agitators crossed that line long ago. In the emotional heat of a tightly contested sovereignty referendum, can we count on cooler heads prevailing?
My read of the national mood in the rest of Canada is that we will not see a repeat of the Unity Rally of 1995. If we’re lucky, the “let them go” sentiment will remain quiet and restrained. If we’re not, we’ll endure one angry tirade after another from keyboard warriors—and probably more than a few real, live demonstrations in the streets, where passion will overwhelm good judgment. One can easily imagine sovereigntist invective that Quebeckers won’t be ruled by the “blue-eyed sheiks” of Alberta being met with fleur-de-Lys burnings on the Prairies. The lesson of Brexit—and populism generally—is that such emotionally charged events can spiral out of control and end in disasters that their participants become powerless to prevent.
We have all the makings of a tragedy on our hands. Resurgent sovereigntist sentiment could find an accelerant in the “Canada is broken” narrative politicians are propagating. The populist forces that drove Brexit—economic discontent, social dislocation, skepticism of authority—are festering in the country and are ripe opportunities for our strategic adversaries to exploit.
Are Canadians steady enough on our pins to withstand such an onslaught? Can it be headed off at the pass by more responsible behaviour across our political class? I believe so, yes. Ultimately, a country’s ballast in difficult weather is the goodwill and kindness its regular citizens feel and exhibit toward one another. Despite the many strains of the past few years, Canadians retain both in abundance. National tragedies happen when too many people find common cause in losing their heads. Let’s hope enough of us keep ours.
