The Quebec Secession Reference and the federal Clarity Act: the fascination with clarity and the value of ambiguity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the ongoing relevance of the Supreme Court of Canada’s Reference re Secession of Quebec (1998) in managing tensions arising from the coexistence of multiple political communities within a single constitutional order. It explores the lessons to be learned from this landmark case in light of recent debates such as the Scottish independence referendum and Catalonia’s “right to decide”. The article argues that, while the Reference provides a valuable framework for analysing multinational democracies and federal systems, caution should be exercised when employing the political and legal grammar associated with the federal Clarity Act. The latter, enacted by the Canadian federal Parliament after the Quebec Secession Reference, purported to clarify the Supreme Court’s advisory opinion, but actually aimed to exert control over Quebec’s potential secession. By examining the historical, political and legal context, the present article highlights the divergence between the federal Clarity Act and the spirit of the Quebec Secession Reference. It underscores the need to reassess the legacy of these events and their relevance in managing political and legal tensions within multinational democracies. It also invites scholars and political actors interested in these issues to appreciate the significance of ambiguity and avoid overestimating the advantages of clarity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".