The sleepwalker awakes
Quebec separatism brought Canada within inches of break-up in 1995. The issue has not gone away—and it has burst into the current election campaign
REGULARLY over the past five years, a former Conservative prime minister, Joe Clark, has been warning Canadians that their country was “sleepwalking” its way to a break-up. In tiptoeing round the issue of Quebec nationalism, Jean Chrétien's Liberal government, he argued, had drawn the wrong lessons from the failure of two earlier attempts at a solution, the Meech Lake agreement of 1990 and the Charlottetown accord of 1992, both derailed by public opposition of various sorts. It was just the message Mr Chrétien did not want the voters to hear. They have.
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