A. All Quiet on the Constitutional Front?

• Author: Patrick J. Monahan - Byron Shaw
• Pages: 521-527

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In February 2012, a group of retired politicians and scholars gathered at the University of Toronto to debate the "Quebec question for the next generation." The conference was prompted by the remarkable fact that for more than a decade, the issue of Quebec’s place in Canada had largely disappeared from public view. The result was that an entire generation of political leaders and scholars outside Quebec had developed without any sustained immersion in issues relating to the "Quebec question." What was unclear was whether this silence on the constitutional front, which had persisted for more than a full decade, was permanent (a "new normal") or whether it was merely transitory and the country was destined to revert to a discussion of the same constitutional questions and debates that had dominated Canadian political discourse throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

Although there was no consensus on this issue amongst the participants at the February 2012 Toronto gathering, few believed that the constitutional question would re-emerge to take centre stage in Canadian politics anytime soon. The 2011 general federal election had featured the collapse of the Bloc Québécois, the rise of the NDP in Quebec, along with a Conservative majority government largely based in Ontario and the West, with minimal Quebec representation. While this political configuration poses obvious risks for the long-term

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political unity of the country, at least in the short term it would appear that economic and fiscal concerns, rather than the role of Quebec in Canada, are likely to dominate federal politics. Although support for sovereignty continues to hover in the range of 40 percent in Quebec, the Parti Québécois has avoided any commitment to holding a referendum on sovereignty if elected in the next provincial election, preferring to focus on economic and social policy concerns.

In retrospect, the constitutional policy pursued by Jean Chrétien in the late 1990s, in the aftermath of the 1995 sovereignty referendum, has proven to be remarkably successful. Chrétien’s success was all the more noteworthy given the disarray in the federalist ranks in the latter stages of the 1995 referendum campaign itself and the extremely close referendum result. It seemed, then, to be only a matter of time before a third sovereignty referendum would be held. Faced with this continued threat to the survival of the country, many federalists, particularly those in Quebec, advocated continued pursuit of "Plan A," focused on securing incremental changes and adjustments to the federation so as to respond to Quebecers’ apparent desire for greater constitutional autonomy. But Chrétien eschewed this advice and avoided all discussion of constitutional change. He pursued, instead, a "Plan B" aimed at clarifying the ground rules for any future referendum and stressing the costs and uncertainties associated with secession.

The Chrétien government opted decisively for the Plan B strategy in 1996 with the Secession Reference,¹followed by the enactment of the Clarity Act in June 2000.²These initiatives significantly reformulated the ground rules that would apply in any future sovereignty referendum, particularly in terms of the wording of the question and the majority necessary to effect secession.³Moreover, while these initiatives did provoke an immediate outcry among the sovereignist political leadership in Quebec (which claimed that Quebec alone would determine the ground rules for a referendum and possible secession), public support for sovereignty among ordinary Quebec residents eventually began to decline during the early 2000s. The election of a majority Liberal government headed by Jean Charest in 2003 eliminated the possibility of a third sovereignty referendum for the mandate of the government. By

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the fall of 2005, a group of respected Quebec public figures headed by former PQ premier Lucien Bouchard called for a new...