Quebec’s Bill 1 Will Be Secession by Other Means

It was the thirtieth anniversary of the 1995 Quebec referendum this past October, and it brought to my mind that autumn thirty years ago, when I was far from home—in Sarajevo, with the United Nations. I was serving on the international team trying to hold together a fragile ceasefire that preceded the Dayton Accords, the agreement that ended the Bosnian war.

One night, I found myself in Pale, the wartime political centre of the Bosnian Serb leadership. I was ushered into the office of the Serb interior minister, who, having clocked that I was Canadian, immediately wanted my views on the Quebec referendum, a topic on which he was surprisingly well briefed. In retrospect, his curiosity made a certain sense: Was a respected federation like Canada on the verge of collapse?

But I was at a loss for words. I knew almost nothing about what was unfolding back home. Our telescreen was CNN, and its universe was Bosnia and O. J. Simpson, not Quebec. The only news I got from home came from the newspapers my mother used to cushion her butter tart care packages. When I got back from Pale that evening, I finally sat down and read them.

I tell that story because distraction matters. We are currently distracted by events south of the border. We tsk-tsk, shake our heads, and reassure ourselves that at least we aren’t like that. It’s a comfortable illusion of moral superiority. I’m not convinced it’s deserved. I’ve seen what happens when people look away. Yugoslavia taught me how fragile institutions become when leaders stop respecting limits, divide people from their neighbours, and subordinate individual rights to a mythical collective, and when citizens convince themselves “it can’t happen here.” Right now, Canadians seem to be missing something quite consequential happening in our own house.

The Canada–Quebec relationship has never been easy. At the core of the quarrel is a clash of national stories—one imagining Canada as a bilingual, multicultural federation, the other seeing Quebec as a French nation-state in an English-speaking continent—and nearly every fight over language, culture, immigration, and jurisdiction flows from that fundamental contradiction.

But beneath the noise, we functioned on the same basic operating system. It was that shared political DNA that ultimately kept the country together. It allowed us to say “My Canada includes Quebec” in 1995, something I believed then and still want to believe now. But Bill 1, the Québec Constitution Act, 2025, is forcing me to confront the possibility that I may be wrong.

Bill 1 is a sweeping attempt to consolidate and rewrite the province’s constitutional architecture on its own terms. It bundles together elements of Quebec’s existing legal order—including language laws, the secularism framework, and the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms—and reasserts the National Assembly’s unfettered authority to act in the interest of the Quebec nation.

Critics of Bill 1 fall into two main camps. Many civil society groups and legal scholars argue that it sidesteps the Canadian Constitution and risks weakening protections for individual and minority rights. At the same time, the pro-sovereigntist Parti Québécois has denounced the bill as a “fantasy,” criticizing it for attempting to create a Quebec constitution without first achieving independence through a referendum. For supporters of the governing Coalition Avenir Québec, however, Bill 1 represents an effort to codify what they view as Quebec’s historic autonomy within Canada.

Although Premier François Legault has announced his intention to step down as leader of the CAQ, the immediate political risk to Bill 1 is limited. The bill is carried by the justice minister, Simon Jolin-Barrette, a leading contender to succeed Legault, and with no election expected before October, the legislation has a clear procedural path to adoption within the current National Assembly.

Canada’s constitutional order rests on a set of unwritten principles that give the text its depth and coherence. Federalism is one of them: Canada is not a unitary state but a partnership in which Parliament and the provinces each wield real, autonomous power. Democracy is another—understood not simply as holding elections but as maintaining institutions that enable accountability, deliberation, and participation, including space for dissenting and minority voices. These commitments are anchored by constitutionalism and the rule of law, which require governments to act only within legal limits and accept that the Constitution—not any elected official—is supreme.

Alongside these sits a long-standing duty to protect minorities, woven into the fabric of Confederation and reaffirmed in the Constitution Act, 1982, and its entrenched bill of rights, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, where linguistic and other vulnerable communities are given safeguards against majoritarian impulses. None of these principles means much without an independent judiciary to serve as arbiter when governments push against constitutional boundaries. Together, they ensure that power in Canada is shared, restrained, and ultimately answerable to the law—not absorbed by whichever government happens to hold a majority at a given moment.

These principles were embedded in the British North America Act (now the Constitution Act, 1867), and George-Étienne Cartier was indispensable to that achievement. Cartier was one of the central architects of modern Canada, the dominant French Canadian statesman of his era, and a nation builder whose partnership with Canada’s first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, made the new Dominion possible. Cartier secured French Canada’s participation, defended provincial autonomy, and protected civil law and denominational schools. Where Macdonald pushed for a more centralized state, Cartier held firm for a genuinely federal system that recognized Quebec’s distinct character and gave its legislature the authority to protect it. The solution to this tension was a design wherein the powers of the majority—whether exercised in Ottawa or Quebec City—would be restrained by minority rights and the rule of law.

The Constitution Act, 1982, though never signed by Quebec, did not invent these foundations, nor did the subsequent, unsuccessful attempts to achieve constitutional reconciliation—most notably through the Meech Lake Accord (1987–90) and the Charlottetown Accord (1992). They affirmed and entrenched what Cartier and the other fathers of Confederation had already built into Canada’s constitutional architecture.

Bill 1 does not merely restate Quebec’s place within Canada’s constitutional framework. It asserts something far more ambitious. By declaring the Constitution of Quebec to be “the law of laws,” and by giving it precedence over any inconsistent rule of law, the statute claims constitutional primacy within Quebec itself—including over federal law as it applies in the province. This is an explicit assertion of supreme legal authority, exercised internally by Quebec.

Bill 1 advances the claim that Quebec possesses a complete and self-contained constitutional order, one whose authority does not derive from, nor depend upon, the Canadian Constitution. In constitutional terms, this is a claim of post-Confederation sovereignty. It marks a departure from the federalist vision associated with Cartier—where provincial autonomy was secured within a shared constitutional compact.

The larger point is simple: Quebec was not a marginal or reluctant participant in Confederation and its constitution but a driving force in its design. That history matters, because Bill 1 rests on an implicit claim that Quebec’s constitutional order stands apart from—or above—the federal compact it helped to build.

• Most Quebecers Oppose Sovereignty. Even More Reject Another Referendum
• “If It Stays like This, They’re Going to Win!”: The 1995 Referendum That Nearly Ended Canada
• Quebec Is a Lot More Canadian Than Sovereigntists Want to Admit

The proposed Constitution Act, 2025, discards the foundations of liberal constitutional democracy, and its inherent checks and balances, in Quebec and replaces them with a model of provincial, executive, and legislative supremacy—one in which the government defines the scope of its own powers and is constrained only by its own priorities. Bill 1 is not a declaration of secession per se but a systematic effort to hollow out the practical force of the Canadian Constitution—particularly where it constrains Quebec’s legislative autonomy—without formally leaving the federation.

At the heart of Bill 1 is a reimagining of political authority. The bill refashions Quebec as an “autonomous, national State” and grounds its constitutional life in the collective rights of an undefined “Québec nation.” There is little guidance on how this collective identity interacts with the rights of individuals, with the government implying it speaks “for the people.” In any democracy worthy of the name, the people define the state—not the other way around. The familiar architecture of responsible government—legislative scrutiny, independent review, legal constraint—becomes thinner and less reliable. What emerges instead is a political system that concentrates power at the top and places fewer brakes on its use.

No federation can function when one of its members begins operating from a fundamentally different constitutional logic. Intergovernmental agreements rely on shared understandings of legality, accountability, and the limits of unilateral action. When one government uses statutes that must withstand judicial review, and another uses constitutionalized executive discretion justified by an undefined national interest, co-operation becomes friction. Friction becomes conflict. Conflict eventually becomes rupture.

This is why 2025 is not 1995. The earlier debates about sovereignty (or some hybrid relationship with Canada) appreciated the constitutional value of consulting the public. Bill 1 is something else entirely: a form of constitutional separation without the honesty of a referendum. It redefines Quebec’s internal order in ways the rest of Canada cannot absorb without undermining its own constitutional foundations.

I have spent most of my life working in and around the institutions that tie our country together. I have fought for minority-language rights, collaborated with provincial and federal partners, and built policy bridges because I believed Quebec belonged, fully and confidently, within Canada. If Bill 1 becomes law, the conditions that make that belief meaningful will disappear. The federation cannot operate on parallel and incompatible constitutional tracks. The two systems would grind against each other until one gave way or the relationship simply ceased to function.

If Bill 1 passes, the Canada I believe in—the Canada built on shared democratic principles, shared constitutional norms, and shared limits on state power—will no longer be able to include Quebec in any meaningful constitutional sense. Not because Canadians reject Quebec but because Quebec’s government will have constitutionally detached itself from the framework that holds this country together.

Quebec has every right to pursue a constitutional document that reflects its aspirations. But legitimacy requires transparent public debate, meaningful participation, and a result that can coexist with the broader constitutional order of the country it inhabits. Bill 1 delivers none of this. It isolates Quebec, concentrates power, and undermines the rights and institutional safeguards that any modern democracy depends on.

If this bill becomes law, the borders may stay the same. But the constitutional country we have known—imperfect, contested, resilient—will not.