Who doesn’t like a good constitutional crisis once in a while?

From that video of Jacques Parizeau telling the “Intellectuals for sovereignty”—yes, that’s a real organization—that sovereignists may have to “manufacture a crisis” in order to win a referendum.

Some key quotes:

“Sectoral referenda can be very useful to… One of my former assistants used to say, ‘to achieve sovereignty, you need a crisis.’ And it’s really frustrating because there are crises that come up once in a while, but the time isn’t always right for us. In fact, we should seek to provoke the crisis. And it’s obvious that a referendum on a specific topic can create a crisis.”

“Right now, we have a unity problem among sovereigntists […] There is a social democratic view of the Parti Québécois that has a tendency to chase away everything that’s not on the left.”

“After the terrible condemnation this survey represents for people like us, we must absolutely rediscover our inclination for clear objectives, for simple but generous ideas—an inclination to answer back to people. When they ask, as Yvon Deschamps does, ‘La souveraineté, cosse ça donne?‘ (‘What’s so good about sovereingty?’), we have to be able to answer them in simple terms. We have to rediscover that inclination—we had it for so long but have lost it somewhat since losing power—to feel like a fish in water inside Québécois society.”