








Canada! . .. Canada!  And yet, despite their passion, not one of the federalists was able to say anything coherent about the country they were trying to save.
There were, by that point, two referenda being contested simultaneously in Quebec. Prime Minister Chretien warned of the dire consequences of separation. unemployment, uncertainty, economic chaos. Separatists spoke of ancestry and identity, questions of the heart.
It was not that Oui voters did not believe Chretien s threats. It was that they had heard them too often. The separatist supporters 1 talked with before the referendum accepted that independence would bring economic sacrifices and had in fact come to see those sacrifices as noble, a sacred duty. A generation or two would suffer, they said, but that suffering would be heroic, part of the long Quebecois narrative of victimization and survival. Chretien s realpolitik had nothing in common with Bouchard s appeal to the id. They were, quite
simply, not sp. same language.
A he result of the vot< ber 30 was 50.6 percent b percent Oui, a margin votes out of almost 5 m cording to polls, 60 perce cophones voted for inch and 95 percent of Anglop Allophones in the doul race and language in Quel phone,  from the Greek los,  the Other, is the eupl those whose mother ton; ther French nor Englis against. October 30 was si be a night of finality. But i cession speech Lucien Boi dared the vote a moral 5 separatists and said that ai erendum would be held i mier Parizeau promised re said,  We are beaten, it s ti what? Money and the ethn
Later that night, at 3 Bernard Landry, the depui of Quebec, who was also th responsible for immigratioi his Montreal hotel to che walked up to the night woman named Anita Mart out his glasses, and stared at tag. Then he leaned a< counter and said, menacing was because of people like 1 grants, that the Oui side  Why is it that we open th this country so you can v Landry demanded. Martine and crying, retreated to a b When another clerk, a Frar asked if she could help Lane in,  he flew into a rage. / guard had to be called. As L er explained to the Montra  In Quebec, we insist on correct [French] expressic time,  enregistrer.   As for Landry denied he d blamed 1 norities for the loss. The < tion, he said,  was done i tone and I never raised my v
A few days later, in a me provincial government sp said was completely unrelat referendum, Quebec cut th< of immigrants the province cept in the future. Later sti members of the 1960s natioi rorist group Front de Lib& Quebec (FLQ) redubbed th
theMouvement de liberation nationale du Quebec and demanded a moratorium on immigration until the province becomes an  independent republic.  It was reported in the English press that scrutineers appointed by the provincial government had rejected thousands of ballots in some predominantly English suburbs of Montreal because, it was said, the X s were too thick, too skinny, not at the right angle. And a few days after the rote, the government announced that four hospitals in Montreal, which provided service mostly for
Anglophones and AlloU T phones, were to be closed.
A feel like they're waiting for me to leave, Sylvia Wilson said to me that Monday night in a Spanish restaurant on St-Laurent.  It s not in ray day-to-day life. It s more abstract. You don t mean anything, we won t pay attention to you, you re not part 0 the vision.  It s like attrition or ear y retirement: we re not going to ire you, but could you please leave the company? 
hl ^T*a  a tedhead with freckles, big ac oots, and a tom gray sweater,  t or a film production company
P ejCitY' As we talked, a Montreal th^TX^LS1 h ckeV game played on behind the bar. Another of ceaseless reminders of Montreal s cronV1! st0PPed by our table, a nark eTLt00t^e^ wa'f *n a stained us ' .j money she collected from g0 to buy homeless kids f  d  andi sbe said with mg honesty, cigarettes.
want 1 cTH1 they re supposed to work in F Vr !a d   I m bilingual, I also th Jng lsh and French.  She is in.rt 6 aagbter of a pure lame (dyed-an An Quebecoise mother and calk   g  Ph ne father, a marriage she lack '^^bly brave  because of the from P ti?PP rt ^er parents received been J comrnunity. Her life has gUa?p a lned, by the politics of lan-ing S a cbild she remembers hav-kinj r' Us ^an uage confusion. In Ptenckr^ajten  1 was thinking in 1 didn t3^ English at the same time. 'ng-1	I was coming or go-
1980 c?11 an t communicate.  In the favOr of erendum> her mother was in The SeParation; her father, against. Sylvia Md  she said- was  tense. 
 tew up on the west side of the
city in the 1970s, when the separatist government of Rene Levesque made French the only official language of Quebec. She witnessed the mass flight of Anglos from Montreal more than 150,000 between 1976 and 1981, many of them members of the city s English elite.
When I asked her if she was going to leave Montreal, at first she said,  Those who are going to leave have left. The rest of us will stay.  Ten minutes later, as she talked about the mess that is Montreal s economy, she said,  This is the first time I ve considered moving for reasons that have nothing to do with my career. I like being a Canadian.  Ten minutes after that, she sighed and said,  To leave Montreal for purely political reasons isn t what I m like. I don t know. I am thinking about it. 
It was the kind of confusion I found in every Anglophone and Allophone I met in Montreal. Defiance and uncertainty and displacement and free-floating anxiety. Madame Chu, the owner of a comer store in the east end, said that  sometimes French people get angry and yell at me when I serve a customer in English.  She said she doesn t know what to do. She wants to leave, but she has a lease. The man who runs the delicatessen where I bought my newspapers every morning told me he has a degree in medicine from Lebanon, but that he d never get a chance to practice in Montreal because he s not
a Quebecois. He would Dlike to leave as well.
r. Barbara Rubin Wainrib, a clinical psychologist and adjunct professor who teaches Crisis and Trauma Intervention at McGill University, explained to me that  nothing s been done physically in Montreal to nonFrancophones the houses are still intact but psychologically houses have been destroyed.  When I met with her in a cafeteria on the McGill campus, Dr. Wainrib, a New Yorker who has lived in Montreal since the 1950s, was wearing a red blazer and white blouse, the colors of the Canadian flag. She handed me her study, the results of a questionnaire completed by 292 people who were asked about their emotional state in the two weeks prior to the referendum. Half reported sleep disturbances and
43. No Canada?
nightmares, 72 percent said they d felt angry and irritable, 65 percent said they were concerned about having to move somewhere else what Dr. Wainrib called  the spontaneous flight response  83 percent said they had financial concerns for themselves or their family because of the vote. She pointed to what she said was the most important column: half of her sample ticked the box describing the elements of having suffered actual trauma.
One woman wrote on the back of her questionnaire,  I can t describe to you the fear, despair, anger, depression I experienced.... My family has been here for 200 years. I felt that, no matter what happens, we of the minority, no matter what our race or ethnic origin, will suffer. Those of the visible minorities will be in an even worse position than so-called Anglophones. If they separate and the economy suffers, we will be blamed. If they can t separate we are still blamed. When there is cheating at the ballot box, lies by Bouchard on the podium, racial slurs that the majority doesn t immediately renounce, we are not safe. 
I noticed that on the bottom of her survey Dr. Wainrib had asked,  Optional: Do you identify yourself as a Sovereigntist () or Federalist ()?  I asked her if any sovereigntists had replied and she said she didn t think so. I asked about the emotional responses to the referendum among Francophones and she said,  I don t know. I live and work on an Anglophone island.  She pulled out the forms of a couple of Francophones who had answered. A woman wrote,  I am a French-speaking Quebecoise and I was treated as a dog by my coworkers because I was not for the Yes. They made me feel that I did not belong in the French-
I speaking socety. 
watched the referendum results in an apartment in the Plateau District of Montreal at a kind of Super Bowl party for separatists: play-byplay analysis and computer graphics and catchy theme music beamed out of three televisions; beers were scattered on the coffee table beside a bowl with the stakes from a pick-the-winner pool. A dozen young Quebecois, all but one of whom voted Oui,
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8. ETHNIC FACTOR: INTERNATIONAL CHALLENGES
tilted forward in their seats as the early results came in. Marie-Claude Dore, a Oui, watched as Lac-St-Jean, her home region, a remote area in the northeast famous for its huge succulent blueberries and hell-or-high-wa-ter nationalism, reported 70 percent for independence. The excitement, early on, was palpable: Yes was ahead, 57 percent to 43 percent. But in the hyper-speed of electronic elections the lead quickly shrank: 56, 53, 51. When the tally reached a dead heat, Marie-Claude and her friends joined hands and said a silent prayer. The Yes percentage ticked up a few hundredths. They laughed.  It worked!  Then it ticked down again.
I kept a diplomatic silence as torpor settled in. Marie-Claude said what everyone was thinking:  It s Montreal.  Quebec s only cosmopolitan city and Canada s only truly bilingual city, more than two-thirds Francophone, a sixth Anglophone, and a sixth Allophone, voted 65.5 percent against independence.
Marie-Claude-is, in many ways, a perfectly unremarkable young urban professional. Her black Volkswagen Jetta was parked outside on Rue St-Joseph, she works out at the YMCA, and she goes with her girlfriends for overpriced pasta at loud bistros. She has a bob of blonde hair that she gets streaked and curled, and, as a dentist, she has a patient but firm manner. But she s also a Quebecoise from the small city of Chicoutimi, in Lac-St-Jean; her grandmother is a Bouchard. Quebec outside of Montreal is a vast wilderness dotted with homogeneously Quebecois small cities and villages like Chicoutimi; in those regions the vote was 59 percent in favor of separation.
During the weeks leading up to the referendum, Marie-Claude wavered between voting Oui and not voting at all. To vote Non wasn t an option it would be a vote against her people and her past. When I asked her why she finally voted Oui, she said,  I hear about the Night of the Long Knives and I m angry about Rene Levesque waking up that morning and being cheated this feeling that things are always planned behind Quebec s back. I see a continuous line from the conquest by the English in 1759. From the beginning the relationship wasn t equal. You
can still feel it. I think we still feel attacked maybe even when it s not true. History is always there for us. 
When she thought that the separatists were going to win she was elated.  I had so much energy to give to my country, to the new project.  But at 10:20 on October 30 the announcement was made: the Oui side had lost. The party broke up. Shrugs and two-cheek kisses were exchanged. Tomorrow everything would be back to normal. What would have been a cataclysm for others had been a simple hope for Marie-Claude and her friends. I stole a glance at the sheet of paper with everyone s predictions in the pool and saw that more than half of them, including Marie-Claude, J had bet against themselves.
osh Freed, a Montreal humorist, was the co-editor and author, in 1984, of The Anglo Guide to Survival in Quebec, a satirical primer to the French east end of Montreal that had as its principal advice,  If you want 
