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I can't remember whether somebody else answered Jack's query about secession or not--this thread is getting so lively I can't remember what I've read. But it boils down to this: 1. No, there is not provision in the constitution for secession. The referendum has no legal status. 2. But if Quebec unilaterally declared itself sovereign, we could refuse to let them use our currency, our economic treaties, our health system etc etc, but if they figured that their own country was more important than all of that, there's precious little we could do about it. We haven't forgotten what happened when the US gov't prevented secession by force. Thenm we would have to decide whether to pretend that a chunk of real estate comprising over a quarter of our land mass and blocking access from one side of the country to the other didn't exist or whether we would negotiate. The latter is what the separatists arecounting on, of course, but cutting off one's nose to spite one's face looks less attractive when the body mass affected is so much larger than a nose. Don't feel badly about being puzzzled. Were're all puzzled as hell here too. When you boil it all down, and Anthony has said, Quebec hasn't been treated all that badly lately. It's just that people who consider themselves a People rather than part of another population tend to want more authoity over their own affairs than a federalist system is designed to give. That's why rearranging the deck chairs on the Federalist boat has not convinced Quebec that the ship is seaworthy. cf Maurice CHarland, "Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Quebecois," Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (March 1987): 133-150.