Michael Ignatieff: Canada’s Cautionary Tale for Scottish Secessionists

Michael Ignatieff is the former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.

Now that Scotland has launched itself down a path towards a referendum on independence, London and Edinburgh are battling about who gets to make the rules for the vote. This matters: how the rules get made will determine who wins.

Canada has had to think hard about the rules that govern debates about our country’s existence. Scots could save themselves a fair amount of grief if they were to learn from our experience.

There is grief aplenty in store. In our 1980 referendum on Quebec, the result was a clear cut victory for Canada. But in 1995, the country survived by a hair. In both, the referendum divided English and French-speaking communities, and it also split families and cut right through individuals, forcing them to make choices about their personal identities. We learnt the strongest argument for leaving countries as they are turns out to be that most people don’t want to choose between different parts of their identity.

This must be true of the Scots too...