Chantel Hebert

It's actually not even the outcome of whatever happens.

But that's another.

We'll get to that.

I'm not going to give you my answer, I'm going to give you Lucien Bouchard's answer.

The person who brought Quebec the closest to a yes vote in 1995, so some decades ago, who has been going around over the past two years warning his former party, the Parti Québécois, about the perils to Quebec of having a third lost referendum.

Because what Mr. Bouchard believes is that every time you do this and you lose,

you are losing something.

He points to the patriation of the Constitution without Quebec on side after the first referendum in 1980.

And he points to the Clarity Act and what followed the second referendum.

So his advice to Quebecers is do not go there unless you think that you are going to follow through and vote yes to sovereignty.

Now, I should say,

that the reason why Lucien Bouchard, René Lévesque, Jacques Parizeau led referendums on sovereignty in Quebec, and the reason why the current Parti Québécois leader wants to do that, is not to negotiate anything inside the Federation.

It is because they totally believe that Quebec would be better off

as a separate country than within the Canadian Federation.

You can quarrel with that belief.

A lot of Quebecers do, obviously, given the results.

But this is what it is based on.

I should also add, because I realized that

There's a lot of constitutional history that gets lost along the way over the years that the Quebec-Canada debate has taken place.

Most of the things that set Quebec apart from other provinces, a separate pension plan, a separate income tax, all of these things happened and were negotiated before the Parti Québécois even came in existence.