My image of Quebec is of a rugged, clean, beautiful, lake filled, enormous country with a unique history in North America, full of people with joie-de-vivre and toleration, a mix largely of French speaking people but with a significant native and English origin population.

Quebec helps make Canada distinctive in an increasingly monocultural world. The threatened separation of Quebec runs counter to my notion of Canada as a multicultural and tolerant society which can be held as a model to the world of the possibility of the peaceful existence of multicultural societies within a nation. The actual separation will have tremendous and probably unforeseeable repercussions for Quebec and for the rest of the country, provoking significant confrontations with native Indian groups and significant conflict among francophones in Quebec.