The stunning admission will be made public in a CBC-Radio Canada documentary to be aired this week - a little more than a month before Canada marks the 10th anniversary of the Quebec Referendum. The referendum spawned the sponsorship scandal and the shocking revelations that Chretien's Liberals used secret funds to prop up their Quebec wing and hire Liberal-friendly advertising firms to promote national unity in Quebec.

The documentary, Breaking Point: Canada's Referendum reveals that eight days before the Oct. 30, 1995 vote in Quebec, when polls indicated that the Yes side - those who favored sovereignty - was ahead by seven percentage points, about 10 ministers met in an upscale restaurant in Hull, across the river from Ottawa, to examine their options in the event of a separatist victory.

Brian Tobin

Former Fisheries Minister Brian Tobin told CBC the time had come to examine a previously unthinkable scenario: the breakup of Canada.

"We asked ourselves difficult questions such as: Could a prime minister from Quebec (Chretien) represent Canada in negotiations?" Tobin said. Or could a Canadian government team made up of Quebeckers negotiate separation with Quebec? "The answer is that they couldn't. The structure of government would have to change dramatically."

Many ministers from outside Quebec thought that it would be hard for a prime minister from Quebec to hold onto the leadership.

The former ministers indicated that the mood in the rest of Canada would have been so bitter that Ottawa would have had to adopt a tough negotiating strategy with Quebec.

Their comments also confirmed what former Parti Québécois premier Jacques Parizeau had said - that in the event of majority Yes vote for sovereignty, the rest of Canada would refuse to negotiate a new economic and political partnership and outright independence would result from a referendum victory.

Mr. Parizeau's ally in the campaign, former Bloc Québécois leader Lucien Bouchard, thought differently. He believed that a referendum victory would pave the way for a new political arrangement. This was a major point of contention between the two separatist leaders.

Allan Rock

The documentary underscores the panic that overtook the federal government only a week before the vote. As senior civil servants in Ottawa began preparing for defeat, then-Justice-Minister Allan Rock examined the legal implications of a separatist victory. Was the referendum question appropriate? What margin of victory would be considered acceptable? What would have to be done if the Yes side won?

"These were questions to which we had no answers on Oct. 30, 1995," said Rock.

Even former Defence Minister David Collenette devised a security plan that included pulling Canada's F-18 fighter jets out of Bagotville, Quebec to an air base in the United States to prevent them from being used as pawns in any negotiating process.

Ottawa should heed echoes of '95

A decade after the fact, the main federalist protagonists of the last Quebec referendum still cling to the belief that its close outcome was the result of a freak political storm.

That sense is front and centre in a Radio-Canada/CBC documentary broadcast this week in the lead-up to the 10th anniversary of the 1995 campaign. To listen to former prime minister Jean Chrétien, the federalist campaign was derailed by Lucien Bouchard's unique connection to Quebecers, a phenomenon that unfolded outside the reach of conventional strategy.

Throughout the documentary, other federalist strategists expound on the same theme. To hear them, the 1995 close call was the result of a political tsunami, an extreme event that is statistically unlikely to happen again anytime soon.

But what if they are wrong ?

The notion of an unforeseeable act of God is a convenient rationalization for a retired prime minister who came perilously close to losing Canada in the 1995 referendum process.

But it may be a dangerous over-simplification for a country that may yet be tested again by the same forces sometime soon.

While the documentary goes out of its way to connect the dots between Bouchard's epic battle with flesh-eating disease and the positive turnaround of sovereignist fortunes in the referendum, that storyline ends up competing for attention with another compelling and ultimately more ominous tale.

What the documentary exhibits is a federal government so blinkered from Quebec reality as to be blind to the dangers that are staring it in the face.

Does that still sound familiar today?

In one of its most surrealist sequences, Chrétien's nephew Raymond Chrétien — then the Canadian ambassador to the U.S. — recounts how he spent a dinner warning his uncle that Capitol Hill was abuzz with questions about Canada's imminent demise.

A little more than a week before the vote, he worried about the absence of a plan for the day after a Yes victory.

Meanwhile, back in Ottawa, federal ministers from the rest of Canada were contemplating a future without Chrétien at the helm or their Quebec colleagues at their side.

Brian Tobin speaks of gathering a number of ministers from outside Quebec in a Hull restaurant to hash out the issue of who was to speak for Canada after a Yes victory.

John Manley bluntly states that it would not have been acceptable for a prime minister from Quebec to represent the interests of the rest of Canada in such a context.

And Allan Rock, then attorney-general, speaks candidly of scrambling to explore the fundamental legal issues deriving out of a Yes vote — questions the Chrétien government had blithely overlooked because it was so confident that it had a referendum victory in the bag.

Ten years later, and notwithstanding the Clarity Act, there is precious little evidence that the current federal government is any more alert to the fast-changing Quebec climate or more prepared for a storm.

Yet support for sovereignty is as high today as in late October 1995, a fact that flies in the face of the thesis that Quebec was temporarily overtaken by a spell of Bouchard-mania 10 years ago.

The referendum fatigue that had so far prevented a rematch has largely faded, in no small part because of the sponsorship scandal

The Parti Québécois is in the process of choosing a new leader. All its leading candidates are committed to holding another referendum.

The federalist government of Quebec is trailing enough in the polls to suggest that the PQ's return to power could be only a provincial election away.

It is true that none of the PQ candidates is shaping up to be as charismatic as Bouchard. One can only wonder whether that is comfort enough for Prime Minister Paul Martin.