Beginning of Essay
At the end of October in 1995 Canada came close to finally breaking up. Quebeckers took a vote on the 30th on whether or not their province should declare itself an independent nation. Most people and the media believe that the separatists would loose. The peo ....

Middle of Essay
.... handed over leadership of the separatists cause to Lucian Bouchard. Bouchard was head of the Bloc Quebecois (BQ), a distinct, federal level party which swept[t the polls in Quebec in the 1993 federal elections, and whose 53 members in the Ottawa parliament are second in number only to the ruling liberals of Jean Chretien. Already in June, Parizeau had retreated from his outright separatist stance by agreeing with Bouchard, and with Mario Dumont, leader of a small nationalist party, to couple a declaration of sovereignty with an offer to negotiate with residual Canada a form of political and economic partnership, similarly modeled ....