I don't know whether or not I should be happy, sad, angered, frustrated, mad, concerned, worried or just confused as Hölle (hell in German). Sure, I may have been 7 or 8 back during the referendum, but damn, despite my crazy imagination (See: Ontario-Quebec border getting jack-hammered and TNT'd and drifting off and crashing into Europe) I remember being incredibly scared that night. The whole "Quebec is a Nation" "Quebec is not a nation" thing annoys me to no end. As one person in the Ottawa Citizen editorial put it (paraphrasing because I gave the free paper to my aunt to read) "Quebec cannot be a nation because it doesn't fall under the two criteria for it to be one (One being it was under violent 'contrainte' rule from an oppressor and the other that it was a nation in the first place)". One writer at the Ottawa Citizen suggested that we let the Etymologists take care of it and said that it's a wonder why Quebec hates the title of "Province" which apparently means something along the lines of a conquered territory (Apparently 'nation' is no better and that State would be the appropriate title here...).
Eleven years later, I know more about the referendum of '95, I know more of the "inside politics" behind the whole thing. And today, I wondered about a "What-if-there-was-another-referendum-and-the-Separatists-won?" situation. Same 50,58% vs 49,42% margin. How would I feel sitting on the couch, perhaps here in Ottawa in my 4th yr or something, watching in horror as I have witnessed overnight my no longer being a Quebec resident or maybe no longer a Canadian, or that I've suddenly become an "immigrant". It'd be weird. Actually, now that I think about it, I would actually no longer be a Canadian if Quebec separated. I'd be technically a Québécois. I was born there. I lived there. (Unless they would bring in some new thing to applying for Canadian citizenship that says something along the lines of "If you were born in Quebec and have lived in Canada for X-years you can automatically qualify for citizenship sans all that immigration jibber-jabber")
Imagine that, loosing my 'citizenship', my right to call myself a Canadian overnight. Imagine that.
Imagine how strange and scary it would be like to suddenly wake up one day to only find out that, the province you were born in was no longer a part of the country you've called home for the last 20 years and that you're no longer a Canadian.
Imagine what it would be like to suddenly find yourself holding a Passeport reading: "Place of Birth: Notre-Dame-de-Grâce-Côte-St-Luc, Province de Montréal, Québec" as opposed to "Montréal, Province of Québec, Canada" branded with a gold-inked coat of arms reading maybe not the "Je me souviens" but "La belle pays" or something.
Of course, this would all be extremely difficult for you all to imagine. All that anxiety, the fear, the anger, the tension, people fighting and insulting each other over which side they picked, friendships destroyed, families torn maybe, the signs, the posters branded with either the red-white-blue with big letters reading "NON" and the colourful (albeit creative...) OUI posters and signs all around you wherever you looked outside the métro, the dépanneurs, shops, lamposts dotted with them, roads, cars, the constant non-stop coverage of the process, the interviews. Seriously.
Also, I never understood (or really remembered) Parizeau's comment on why the OUI side lost until now saying they lost because of "money and the ethnic vote". Gee, how mad were my parents at him, I wonder.
To finish, and make sense of this all
And of course, no one asks the First Nations up in Northern Quebec what they think about this new thing now do they?
And now a recommendation: Try and hunt down, buy, (rent) Breaking Point. A CBC/SRC documentary made last year on the '95 referendum.
*jumps off of soap box*
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