The Referendum Obsessives

You don’t force a country on its future inhabitants.

(Texte français disponible ici.)

Mark Carney stirred up a hornet’s nest by saying that a 50% + 1 threshold is “absolutely not enough” to separate Quebec from Canada.

Pro-sovereignty politicians predictably got all worked up, because that’s what they do. Politicians from other parties followed suit, partly out of reflex. That’s what we’ve always said in Quebec, no matter which side of the national question you’re on.

I agree on the principle. If a line must be drawn, I too prefer it to be at 50% + 1 rather than at an arbitrary threshold that would be the subject of endless debate and would be practically impossible to set.

But that discussion misses the broader point.

For nearly 20 years, support for sovereignty has remained steady at around 35% to 40%. Recently, that figure has dropped. If a referendum were held today, the “Yes” camp would garner 32% of the vote, according to the polling aggregator Qc125.com.

To find such low support for Quebec sovereignty, one has to go back to the 1980s, during the Mulroney years and the promises of the “Beau Risque” period, before the Meech Lake Accord collapsed.

In fact, as far back as support for sovereignty has been measured, with the exception of periods of constitutional crises or scandals—which were short-lived—a clear majority of Quebecers has almost always preferred to remain within the Canadian federation, despite all its flaws.

Another way of seeing it is that, over the past 50 years, Quebecers would have voted “No” for 45 years, as shown in the chart below. I discuss this in detail here.

There never was enduring support for Quebec’s sovereignty. The most plausible scenario for a Yes victory would be a referendum held during a standoff with the federal government or with the rest of the country, leading to a temporary surge strong enough to briefly push the Yes vote above 50%.

In short, a passing whim.

That is why pro-sovereignty politicians are so attached to the 50% +1 threshold. Because, even in the best-case scenario, it wouldn’t be much more than that.

The burden of proof for breaking a country and creating a new one should be higher.

Legally, Mark Carney is wrong. But he isn’t wrong as far as legitimacy is concerned. Who really wants a country that the majority of its inhabitants will likely regret just a few months later?

The 2026 version of the Parti Québécois and its leader, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, are all about that.

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In his book Les orphelins politiques (The political orphans), PSPP from 2014 criticized the Parti Québécois’s “referendum obsession”: “To the sovereigntists, I say: your obsession with holding and winning a referendum harms progressivism and amounts to psychological harassment for the majority of the population.” He suggested that the PQ channel its energies elsewhere. There was so much to be done to improve the lot of us all.

2016 PSPP, which had then moved closer to the PQ, presented himself as an advocate of moderation, reason, and openness to Quebec cultural and ethnic minorities.

Consistently, 2016 PSPP, also a candidate for the PQ leadership, promised not to hold a referendum during a first term of a Parti Québécois government. In a second term, he would have opened a registry that would have led to the triggering of a referendum after signatures from 20% of all voters would have been collected, but only if a subsequent poll—presumably on a large scale—indicated 45% of Quebecers supported sovereignty.

It was a prudent approach. You don’t hold a referendum just to lose it or to create a country that people don’t want. It almost sounded like 2016 PSPP wanted to change the PQ.

2016 PSPP lost the leadership race.

And he had four years to reflect on his failure and his ambitions before finally becoming leader of the PQ in 2020.

In the 2022 election, the PQ came quite close to disappearing, garnering only 14% of the vote—a historic low—and electing just three members. It could have been worse. PSPP himself benefited from a stroke of luck after another candidate withdrew, having been filmed replacing a leaflet from her PQ opponent with her own.

The context and a certain political flair worked in favour of 2022 PSPP. His generally measured rhetoric initially appealed to voters’ intelligence before it evolved into a particularly bitter version of the sovereigntist argument.

Somewhere between 2020 and 2022, this version of PSPP had apparently realized that, in a shrinking party, those who remain are generally not the most moderate, but the most motivated.

In the fall of 2023, however, PSPP was still speaking of an independent Quebec as the “friendly neighbour” of a dismembered Canada. “Most Quebecers love Canada,” he acknowledged.

Then, the PQ took the lead in the polls following the collapse of the CAQ. That wasn’t enough to shift support for sovereignty, which continued to hover between 35 and 40%.

And the PQ went all in.

By the spring of 2024, Ottawa was fully regarded as a hostile power. The PQ leader seemed to care not a whit about relations with his potential future “neighbour.”

Speaking to his supporters gathered at a party convention, he portrayed the federal government as “openly and explicitly planning” Quebec’s “decline,” a regime that “knows only how to crush those who refuse to assimilate.” A referendum during a first PQ term, not later than 2030, was thus a last chance in the face of the risk of “disappearance.”

Ten years after denouncing it, PSPP had fully embraced “referendum obsession” and “psychological harassment.”

Speaking to his supporters at the same convention, PSPP also denounced the “deportations” and “executions,” referring to the Great Upheaval of the Acadians and the Patriots’ Rebellion. But in both cases, these events took place before the confederation, and even under British rule. They have nothing to do with modern Canada, which itself has changed significantly over the past 150 years. But why get bogged down in these details?

2024 PSPP spent the rest of the year blaming Ottawa and an unpopular federal Prime Minister (at the time, Justin Trudeau) for most of Quebec’s problems. The sovereignty needle still wasn’t moving.

And the PQ began shooting at anything that moved and wore a maple leaf.

In early 2025, PSPP effectively aligned himself with Donald Trump, agreeing with him that Canada had been a “bad neighbour” on the border issue—even though fentanyl and illegal immigrants are entering mostly through Mexico, and even though it is American guns in Canada that are the main problem, not the other way around. Journalists pointed out PSPP’s factual errors. It didn’t seem to bother him.

The criticism regarding “mass immigration” continued, even though Ottawa tightened its criteria for temporary immigration, notably at Quebec’s request.

Then, this year, at the party’s national convention held in January, the PQ leader launched into a long tirade about “British colonialism” in North America, South Africa, and India, the continuation of that legacy in Canada in 2026, and its “possession of the spirit” (?!??).

It was a vengeful, surreal speech, riddled with gross exaggerations and inaccuracies. The PQ leader spoke more about Gandhi and Mandela than about his own predecessors, and compared the Canadian federation to colonial India, apartheid-era South Africa, and the former USSR.

🤯

This week, when the Quebec City—Toronto high-speed rail project was discussed, 2026 PSPP promised to pull Quebec out of the “Canadian unity” train.

Huh?

In Europe, high-speed rail lines connect London and Paris, Paris and Berlin and other cities in Germany, Lyon or Marseille and Madrid and Barcelona. There are legitimate questions to ask about the high-speed rail project—about costs and profitability, and about the route as well—but since when has the simple act of making it easier for people to travel between major cities become a bad thing? In a sovereign Quebec, are we going to cut air routes?

The PQ leader could very well have said he had reservations due to the potential costs. We all do. But, caught up in his anti-federal persona, 2026 PSPP took everyone by surprise by turning a transportation and economic opportunity issue into a partisan one, relying on a hypothetical $200 billion cost pulled out of thin air, and inventing an even more hypothetical $40 billion windfall that Quebec could recoup by withdrawing from a project that won’t happen without us. Just about everyone, except his die-hard supporters, is still wondering what got into him.

This crudely ideological stance looked even more absurd when it was discovered that, as recently as February 2025, the PQ was “dreaming” of a Quebec City—Toronto high-speed rail line, even though the cost estimates were the same as they are today.

At the time, the PQ was suspicious of the announcement by a Justin Trudeau nearing the end of his term, and criticized the federal government for not having launched the project ten years earlier. Now that the high-speed rail is moving forward, that’s not good enough either.

Damn if you do…

From a media perspective, the positive arguments for sovereignty have all but disappeared from the PQ’s rhetoric. All that remains is resentment toward Ottawa, which the PQ leader works hard to stoke on a daily basis.

Fascinatingly, every time the PQ takes a slightly harder line against the federal government, support for sovereignty takes a hit.

In the spring of 2023, support for the Yes was around 42%. In 2024, it held steady at 40%. In 2025, it was 35–36%. And, even though 2026 isn’t over yet, support for the Yes has fallen around 31–33%.

The further the dream of sovereignty recedes, the more the PQ leader seems to seek opportunities to turn his guns on Ottawa, pursuing his scorched-earth strategy, trapped in his role as a referendum-obsessed figure.

Even support for the PQ seems to be suffering. After peaking at 35 to 37% in 2025, voting intentions for the PQ have dropped back down to around 30%. If you have moderate sovereigntists in your circle, many will tell you they’ve had enough of the Poilievre-like rhetoric. Testimonials are multiplying on social media. Even former PQ ministers no longer recognize their party.

But since five parties are vying for seats in the National Assembly, the PQ could still form a government with just 30% of the vote.

The Parti Québécois could even win a majority. In fact, with the current vote split, the PQ’s chances of forming a majority government are excellent as long as it reaches a threshold of 32 to 33% of the vote. And the party is counting on this to trigger a referendum that most Quebecers do not want any more than they want Quebec to secede.

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I voted Yes in 1995. I would vote No today.

The context has changed, which also changes the answer—and even the question. It has less to do with Donald Trump than with the evolution of Quebec and Canada. Many of Quebec’s legitimate constitutional objectives have been achieved from a political standpoint, even if they haven’t been formalized.

Nor is it because I think the federal government is wonderful, or out of any immoderate love for the Supreme Court, Toronto, or the Rocky Mountains. It’s because, like the majority of Quebecers, I believe that we are generally better off—or at least not as bad off—within Canada as outside of it.

I fundamentally believe there are many valid arguments for independence, just as there are for remaining in Canada. And, even though I’ve written extensively on this topic, and even though the nature of my work and my approach have led me to explore the subject far more from the perspective of better public policy than from that of my own preferences, I don’t want to talk about that today.

I want to talk about the fundamental reason for creating a new country: for the people who will live in it.

I remember October 30, 1995, perfectly. As a young entrepreneur, I saw sovereignty less as a rejection of Canada than as an opportunity for Quebecers to make decisions entirely for themselves, just as I did with my business.

The first results coming in on TV on that Halloween eve were promising. But as the evening wore on, it looked increasingly tight. Really, really tight. Then it became clear that if the Yes side won, it would be by the skin of its teeth.

From that moment on, I hoped the No camp would win.

Because the aftermath of a country won on a razor’s edge would have been unmanageable. Because I’ve never seen independence as an end in itself.

There would have been legal challenges, perhaps another referendum in the event of a change in government, to reverse course. Above all, there would have been divisions that would never have ended. It would have been a major mess. You don’t build a country within a margin of error.

Yet, it is precisely this hope that the referendum obsessives cling to. And that is what sets the referendum obsessives apart from other sovereigntists.

As Mario Dumont—a one-time sovereigntist leader who became federalist after the 1995 referendum—once said, the Yes camp was not 50,000 votes short in 1995. It was 500,000 votes short. The referendum obsessives don’t get that.

It doesn’t sink in any more than the fact that a majority of Quebecers don’t want Quebec to be a country. They are incapable of accepting one very simple thing: sometimes, people just don’t buy into it.

Not because they are misinformed, manipulated, colonized, or incapable of thinking for themselves, as PSPP seems to believe when he speaks of “possession of the mind.”

Once all the arguments have been made—and one can certainly argue that this is the case in Quebec, after nearly 60 years of debate on the issue and two referendums—sometimes people simply disagree.

And we have to accept that. Because that’s what democracy is all about, too. You don’t force a country on its future inhabitants.

But the referendum obsessives won’t accept that. They’re still dreaming of 50% + 1, even though for twenty years it’s been 60%, 65% on the other side.

And that is why the 2026 PQ is still banking on a parliamentary “majority” that it would secure 32% or 33% of the vote to force a referendum that most Quebecers don’t want, hoping to stoke just enough anger that we’ll change our minds for a few weeks. What would come next is an afterthought.

Because, ultimately, they believe they know what’s best for all of us better than we do ourselves, and that we’ll eventually come to understand it, whether we want it or not.

That’s having a pretty low opinion of their political project and of the people they want to lead.

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This text is 2,477 words long, which is about 10 pages of a book. For three days, the research and writing had me almost as obsessed with sovereignty as the PQ leader.

My name is Patrick Déry. I write for a living, and I’m trying something different here. If you enjoyed reading this text, you can support me by buying me a coffee. Comments, shares, and “likes” are always appreciated.

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