Parti Québécois Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon vows to hold another referendum on Quebec independence if his party wins next fall’s provincial election.Jacques Boissinot/The Canadian Press

As 1993 drew to a close, Canada was on the edge.

Two failed attempts at getting Quebec to sign the 1982 Constitution had put the Parti Québécois on the trail to a comeback. After floundering for eight years, the PQ led in the polls only months ahead of a provincial election. And under its hardline sovereigntist leader, Jacques Parizeau, it vowed to hold another referendum after 1980’s unsuccessful plebiscite on separatism.

Canadians old enough to remember that period need no reminding of what happened next. The PQ indeed won power in the fall of 1994, launching the province almost immediately into an all-consuming referendum campaign that resulted a year later in a razor-thin win for the federalist side. The country took years to recover from that near-death trauma, draining political attention away from pressing economic-policy matters.

The PQ, left for dead only a few years ago, sits once again atop the polls. And its hardline sovereigntist leader, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, vows to hold another referendum on Quebec independence if his party wins next fall’s provincial election.

The question now is whether the coming year in Quebec politics will, like 1994, be a prelude to a third referendum, or a false start for the PQ, as was the case in 2012. The PQ that year won a bare minority of seats in a provincial election in a three-way race only to lose power 18 months later........

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