“If It Stays like This, They’re Going to Win!”: The 1995 Referendum That Nearly Ended Canada

“Why isn’t the Yes vote collapsing?” my editor asked.

It was Wednesday, October 4, 1995. I was twenty-nine and had been at the Montreal Gazette for six years. Jacques Parizeau was Quebec’s premier. He had called a referendum on Quebec sovereignty for October 30, and while everyone had known for years the vote might come, the formal referendum campaign, with its rules and restrictions, was in only its first week.

My boss, the Gazette’s national editor, was Brian Kappler, strawberry blond and in his forties, viewed with suspicion among my fellow Serious Young Reporters because he was unfashionably conservative (he liked Rush Limbaugh’s radio show) and sometimes not serious (he earned good side-gig money moonlighting as the paper’s celebrity gossip columnist, using the pen name Doug Camilli). But I liked Kappler fine. He was from Windsor, Ontario, near my hometown of Sarnia. So, unlike some Gazette lifers—including the previous national editor, a proper Montrealer if Westmount counted—he didn’t hold my outsider status against me. He had assigned me to the Ottawa bureau a year earlier, with instructions to expect I’d be stranded in the boring capital for two years or so. This turned out to be a low guess.

I think what put the question about the stubborn pro-sovereignty vote into Kappler’s head was the release of the third Léger poll in a month that showed supporters of the Yes and No sides within a point of each other. Léger was viewed, more then than now, as a Parti Québécois–friendly firm, at least in the Gazette’s mostly PQ-unfriendly newsroom. But at most, such “house effects” might account for only a point or two between pollsters. My editor’s point was that the race shouldn’t even be close.

Parizeau, a fusty economist in three-piece tweed, had won the popular vote by only a hair in the 1994 election. Parizeau’s goal was to hold a vote on separating from Canada as soon as possible. It was not a popular policy. His own deputy premier, a flinty party operator named Bernard Landry, had told reporters, “I do not wish to be second in command of the Light Brigade.” Parizeau’s relations with Lucien Bouchard, the dashing leader of the Bloc Québécois in Ottawa, were strained at best. Bouchard had lost a leg to a bacterial infection at the end of 1994, less than a year ago. His return to active politics was widely viewed as almost a miracle. But he had no poker face, and anyone could see he didn’t like Parizeau’s recklessness.

With a major speech in the spring of 1995, Bouchard had pressured Parizeau into modifying the referendum plan. Voters would now be asked if Quebec should “become sovereign” after making “a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership.” This was claptrap. Parizeau’s writing after the referendum would show how little he believed this “partnership” could happen, and how thoroughly he had prepared for a sharper split with Canada.

To maintain maximum distance between Parizeau and Bouchard, and to neutralize the uncertain variable of then prime minister Jean Chrétien, the Yes camp decided Bouchard would spend much of his time in Ottawa, where he was, after all, the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Bouchard would prosecute the case against Canada every day in Question Period. But by the end of September, it was clear this plan was paying limited dividends. Question Period can suck the drama out of anything, and Chrétien knew how to navigate its currents better than most.

So, the separatists were led by an uninspiring premier in open dispute with his more popular partner/antagonist, who was in turn bogged down in the Ottawa swamp and wearying of the fight. To be fair, they were hardly the only faction in trouble. The federalist No campaign, led by the defeated former Liberal premier Daniel Johnson, had no heart or romance to it. But there wasn’t much heart or romance in the air either. The national mood, by whatever definition of “national” one might prefer, was cautious. Surely voters would give Parizeau’s jalopy a pass.

And yet, the polls weren’t budging. Kappler and I decided I should talk to some voters.

I don’t like “streeters,” the ancient journalistic practice of sticking a microphone under random noses on a sidewalk and hoovering up quotes from distracted citizens about complex issues. There’s no chance of getting a statistically valid sample. And I have always been painfully shy about asking strangers about sensitive topics. But maybe if I camped out somewhere for a while, talked to people at greater length, and quoted them more generously, we might obtain, and then convey to readers, a better sense of their thinking. The New York Times had been doing work like that under the rubric of “An American Place.”

What would be our Québécois place? I picked the Mercier riding, mostly francophone, a safe PQ seat running north from the Avenue du Mont-Royal, or Mount Royal Avenue if you prefer, near downtown Montreal. I would head there after lunch on Wednesday and interview voters until it was time to file on Friday afternoon.

I told you I was shy. From noon until the end of my Wednesday shift, I don’t think I got one interview done. I wandered up and down Mount Royal Avenue, poked my head into coffee shops, stared down at my shoes, and then went “home” to the drab business hotel where I was renting a room by the week for the duration of the campaign. Three days to work, and I’d just blown the first. So, by Thursday morning, I was already behind the eight ball. I had no choice but to strike up some conversations.

Over the course of the next day and a half, what I heard began to convince me that I had badly misunderstood the dynamic of the campaign. Here are brief excerpts from the long story I filed. It ran in the paper on Sunday, October 8. It opened with a direct reply to my editor’s question.

The rest of the article contained excerpts from my “streeter” interviews. I talked to Guy Crevier, a carpenter. “The rest of Canada, in the West, they don’t like us,” he said. “It’s like a dysfunctional family. It doesn’t work. It never will.”

I spoke to Marie-Ève Bérubé, an engineering student. “It seems to me that the No campaign just wants to destroy the Yes,” she said. “They have nothing to offer. We need a change.” Rereading these interview excerpts now, I hardly remember the people at all, but I remember enjoying these conversations, as I almost always do once I force myself to start one. Most of the people I met seemed to have barely thought about the referendum. Yet they did not seem interested in any rebuttal.

I listed all the reasons Bérubé should, in theory, be a gettable vote for the No.

What struck me, in those and other interviews, was not that a bunch of people were planning to vote Yes in a PQ stronghold. It was that nothing anybody said for Canada made sense to them. More than that: the determinedly pragmatic cast of the No campaign—bankers, lawyers, and cabinet ministers who seemed to believe that if they said “Separation” enough times, it would break a spell—was making them more eager to get out of Canada.

“None of us who stayed in the newsroom all the time had deemed a Yes victory to be possible. It would be closer than the first referendum.”

I traded emails with Kappler last week, comparing his recollection of things against mine. He writes:

Between Friday, when I wrote my article, and Sunday, when it was published, Parizeau and Bouchard held a rally together. That was the day that Parizeau announced that, in the event of a Yes victory, Bouchard would become Quebec’s “chief negotiator” to seek the economic and political “partnership” with Canada. The functional utility of such a role was highly suspect, but it was a handy pretext for a shift in tactics. From that day forward, Bouchard showed no reluctance or hesitation. He campaigned as I’ve never seen anyone campaign. Crowds responded with a fervour nobody had predicted. The Yes side nearly won.

But I’ve always believed, based on what the good people of Mercier told me, that the pump was well primed before Parizeau and Bouchard pulled their switcheroo.

Whatever journalistic prominence I have attained since, I had barely any when the referendum campaign began. I had no formal training in journalism. When I applied for an internship at the Gazette in 1989, I knew nothing about Montreal and my French was shaky.

But the student paper at the University of Western Ontario, also called the Gazette, was good. We taught one another journalism as we were scrambling to push pages out. Our standards were high. We put a premium on clever writing.

When I got to Montreal, the Gazette was in a brief newspaper war against the Montreal Daily News, a cheeky tabloid that didn’t survive past the end of 1989, but whose competitive pressure made Gazette editors worry their product was stodgy. The market value of a kid from Sarnia who could turn a phrase was temporarily inflated. I landed my internship and kept a job after it ended.

By 1995, I was newly arrived in Ottawa and working at the Gazette’s Parliament Hill bureau, but that was mostly because so few Montrealers ever apply to work in Ottawa. Anyone’s list of the paper’s top politics writers would have put ten names over mine, including the columnists William Johnson and Don Macpherson, the feature writer Hubert Bauch, and a strong bench in Montreal.

Two things helped me make myself useful. One was structural. As a political bureau reporter, my direct supervisor was the national editor, whereas if Kappler wanted somebody else to write for him, he would have to swipe a reporter from some other editor’s sandbox. By the end of the campaign, the Gazette was throwing every warm body on staff at its referendum coverage, but by that point, Kappler had already been giving me big referendum stories for months, and a precedent was established.

The other thing I had going for me was that my emerging strength was feature writing. I could structure an argument, weave in context and historical background, keep readers from turning the page. I’d studied politics at Western and during a quick ten-month sabbatical from my new job in Paris, which at least helped my French. I’d begun writing on the side for Saturday Night, a monthly current affairs magazine with a mischievous new editor, Kenneth Whyte. As the referendum went from being one story among many to being, for anglophones in Montreal, the story, I found more and more angles to write in my style.

At the end of September, I moved into the Tour Belvedere, a bleak extended-stay hotel in the western part of downtown Montreal that would not have looked out of place in Tashkent or Magnitogorsk. I was dating someone I knew from Western who by now was working as a public servant in Ottawa. I was still legal to vote in Quebec, so we arranged for her to fish my absentee ballot out of my Ottawa apartment mailbox and bring it to Montreal so I could mark it and mail it in. It seemed worth the trouble.

At first, this referendum seemed pretty much in the bag for the pro-Canada side. Parizeau’s narrow election victory and the obvious infighting in the Yes camp suggested the sovereigntists would have a hard time of it. What I paid less attention to was how motley the No camp was. Johnson mistrusted emotion, believed Quebecers reasonably had no real affection for Canada, and led a No committee that leaned heavily on arguments about optimizing trade and economic security. Chrétien, sidelined, planned to stay mostly in Ottawa. He lured a former Quebec provincial cabinet minister to Ottawa to lead pre-referendum planning for his government: Lucienne Robillard, whom most people would forget three minutes after meeting her. Jean Charest had some juice, but he was his party’s only member of Parliament west of Saint John, and what I remember keenly—that goes against the conventional-wisdom version of the campaign that developed later—is that he received very little print or TV coverage for much of the campaign.

Part of my job was to look out for odd or potentially surprising developments. Mordecai Richler, the great novelist, had written an extravagantly jaundiced article about Quebec’s language laws for The New Yorker in 1991 and expanded it into a book, Oh Canada, Oh Quebec, in 1992. If you didn’t live through it, you might not believe the uproar that unwelcome outside gaze had provoked among nationalist political leaders in Quebec. Might Richler be writing another article for The New Yorker about the referendum? There was no way to predict the effect that might have, but the very prospect made me nervous. Regardless, it’d be a hell of a story if he were.

I called The New Yorker and asked the receptionist for the only staff writer there I knew, purely by reputation, to be Canadian: Adam Gopnik. We’d never met, still haven’t. She put me through. He picked up his phone on the second ring. It was a different time.

“Hi, I’m Paul Wells, I write for the Gazette in Montreal, I’m wondering whether Mordecai Richler is writing about the referendum for you guys.”

“Not as far as I know,” Gopnik said. “Would you like to?”

Terrified of getting into trouble with somebody, I said no thanks, and that was the end of that. Colleagues will recognize this as a sliding-door moment in a career.

Later, in the campaign’s last days when the Yes side had all the momentum and it seemed there was no saving the country, I got another phone call, from my friend Leslie Swartman, who was working in communications in the Prime Minister’s Office.

“I’m not sure what you want to do with this,” she said, “but we got this call from Martin Short, the comedian, in Los Angeles.” Short was Canadian. He had starred in The Three Amigos with Steve Martin and Chevy Chase. “He’s worried. He wants to know how he can help. He wants to let people know.”

This time I didn’t chicken out, precisely, but I turned down the interview offer anyway. If Canada can be saved at this point, I said, it’s not Martin Short who’s gonna save it.

More from my email exchange with my old editor, Kappler: “A few days before the vote, Bernard Landry, then deputy premier, asked to meet the editorial board.”

This was a quaint tradition, still observed at the few surviving large newspapers, in which a public figure would sit down with the then large team of people who wrote the paper’s editorials, along with senior management and any opinion columnists who might be around, to bring some kind of message to the paper and its readers.

“My God! They think they’ve got it won!”

It wasn’t unheard of for Parti Québécois eminences to seek an audience with the Gazette, but since the paper and its readers were generally seen as the purest of lost causes for the sovereignty movement, it was hardly common. And yet here was Landry. “We agreed, with some confusion, and sat there as he tried to explain to us that a Yes result would not really be so bad, no need to panic, rule of law, federal benefits safe, minority rights, blah blah blah. After he left Joan [Fraser, the paper’s formidable editor-in-chief], sounding truly shocked, said ‘My God! They think they’ve got it won!’ which was precisely the thought all of us were having.”

In the months before the campaign and in its early days, my byline on referendum stories was often one of three or four on group-written news pieces from reporters in Quebec City, Montreal, and Ottawa. Everyone would send a few hundred words. The desk would stitch it together. Here’s what happened, here’s how Chrétien responded, here’s what Bouchard said later at a rally. By Bauch, Wills, Authier, and Scott, with maybe files from Wells. In the last two weeks before the vote, my byline was on the front page more often than not. The older reporters were still doing dynamite reporting. I had cast myself as chief hand holder to an increasingly worried Gazette readership.

On October 22, I outlined a positive argument for Quebec’s place in the federation that, I decided, was too absent from the glowering lectures of the lawyers and bankers. “This view has had too few defenders,” that piece concluded. “It could use a boost. Today there are eight days left. Tomorrow there will be seven.”

Of course, one of the reporters in the newsroom took the piss: “So let me see if I’ve got this straight, Paul. On Tuesday there’ll be . . . six days left?”

A week later, my lede was: “So here we all are. Two days left.”

By now, I was a wreck. My girlfriend would dump me just after Christmas for the guy she ended up marrying. “I’m glad you focused all that dark energy on the referendum instead of on me,” she said. Fair point. After the big love-in rally at Place du Canada on October 27, a colleague came over to my desk in the newsroom to marvel about the size of the crowd and gossip about the speeches. I burst into tears, the only time I ever have at work, and had to hustle out of the newsroom.

The night before the vote, I went to a “Jazz for the No” performance at what would prove to be a short-lived jazz club on St. Catherine Street West. Short-lived jazz clubs are almost the only kind. This dreary jam session had no pretensions of being a rally or an attempt to get out the vote. Just some company. Ken Whyte was there, with Mordecai Richler’s son, Jake, who was writing about food for Saturday Night. A colleague from the Journal de Montréal popped by, briefly. The crowd was too down to match his mood. “Je viens de parler aux gens du Oui,” he told me before leaving. “Ils l’ont dans la poche, ils sont convaincus.” (“I just spoke to the Yes people. They’ve got it in the bag, they’re convinced.”)

Télé-Québec, the tiny public television network that was Quebec’s equivalent of Ontario’s TVO, had asked whether they could put a camera crew into the Gazette’s newsroom on St. Antoine Street to chronicle the way we covered the referendum night. Another crew would record how it went down at Le Devoir. Our editors declined.

Another thing I hate doing is bagging analysis in advance, but the referendum night would have too many moving parts. I spent the day of the referendum writing two analyses for Tuesday’s A1. “Quebecers just voted Yes, here’s what happens next” and “Quebecers just voted No, here’s what happens next.” With luck, we’d run the one that matched the news.

When the polls closed and the numbers started coming in, they came in bad. Not just close but with the Yes side over the top, even higher than in the last week’s polls. On the CBC, Jason Moscovitz kept patiently explaining to Peter Mansbridge that the votes that came in were the ones you’d expect to be for the Yes, and the No votes would roll in later. It was hard to be sure he was right. At 10:30, Kappler came over to my desk. “You’d better get started on ‘Maybe,’” he said.

The next morning, we ran No, with substantial late edits. There are still people arguing over that result, how it was obtained, what it would have meant if it had gone the other way. National unity would be a primary topic of my journalism for another half decade, then quite rarely since. I may yet get another chance. I hope not, but in this line of work, you swing at the pitches you’re thrown.

Six months after the referendum, as a gesture of thanks for services rendered, the Gazette volunteered me to cover the United States presidential campaign for the Southam News syndicate. A year later, another paper tried to poach me, so the Gazette gave me a column to keep me. A year after that, the National Post poached me. Everything that’s happened since began on Mount Royal Avenue, if it can be said to have begun anywhere in particular.

If I learned anything that bright autumn, it’s that people will often not think what I want them to think, but that I’d better listen to them anyway.

Adapted from “Get started on maybe” by Paul Wells (Substack). Reprinted with permission of the author.