Thanks to all of you who have passed along on- and off-line concerns about the referendum over the past couple of weeks. In addition to e-mail messages, I have received quite a few telephone calls (at full rates!) from friends across Canada. Some people are cynical about what they see as this eleventh-hour "support" from Canada, but I have been touched by the solidarity. The mood here today is glum, to say the least, and a close victory, which the pollsters are predicting, will hardly (or should hardly) fill either side with much joy. Imagine trying to create a new country when 49% or so of the population doesn't share your vision. And the opposite result would be a less-than-resounding vote of confidence in Canada. In the same way that divided opinion on the O.J. verdict delineated racial contrasts in American realities, this referendum has defined sharp contrasts in Quebec and Canada. Lucien Bouchard as charismatic "leader," as the saviour of a national dream? Apparently he is for many, but the guy makes my flesh crawl. This is no Rene Levesque, believe me, and Parizeau's PQ vision bears little resemblance to the heady social democratic philosophy of the early PQ. The Quebec that Bouchard and Parizeau describe as the current victim of Canadian anglo oppression sounds suspiciously like the Quebec I grew up in, and not much like the Quebec my children are growing up in. (Perhaps that explains the flower and peace sign that have been central images in the separatist campaign.) Certainly, the Quebec of my childhood was in need of radical change. The suburb I lived in was closer ethnically, linguistically, culturally, ideologically to Toronto than Montreal, although only 5 miles from St. Denis Street. But this morning in the polling station, there were at least 6 different ethnic groups in line, a wild mixture of languages, and obvious mutual respect. Anglophones and allophones were speaking accented French, and their French-speaking neighbours were responding in accented English. I know this sounds like Jean Chretien's rosy view of the Canadian possibility, but something similar has been my experience increasingly over the past decade in Montreal. I cannot remember when I last sensed linguistic tension here. It is a crazy Montreal commonplace to hear a French person and an English person having a conversation in broken versions of both official languages - each speaking the other's mother tongue. There is, no doubt, progress to be made, lots of it, but it does seem sad to me at this point in our history that separation seems to be the solution to so many. Whatever happens, tomorrow's a painful day. Anthony