I probably should go first.
I was ten years old. My parents were Albertans so they were sneering at the Quebecois to vote Oui and leave. They were staunch Reform supporters at the time and still are, my dad still carrying fond memories of Ernest Manning and would still to this day cuss at Peter Lougheed. They would have, in the likelihood of events following an Oui vote, voted for the separation of old Rupert's Land+British Columbia from Canada. The Federalist Non campaign seemed to be in a mad scramble to keep things together and the cultural movement to keep Canada together was anemic. The separatists had big cultural icons like Robert Charlebois and Raymond Levesque singing odes to an independent Quebec.
In the end, more than half - not a lot more than half - voted Non. I think it is largely due to the previous efforts of Trudeau to strengthen the position of the French in Canada and subsequent governments to try and build on it that the people of Quebec saw enough hope for staying in Canada at the time.
I think one of the interesting results of the referendum is how the old Tories - you know, the old conservative loyalists - seemed to have lost their party. It is now the populist Reform Party, who want to see significant reforms in the Canadian constitution (even if they have no coherent plan on how to do it) with their power base in Calgary who gets to call themselves "Conservative". In fact, it looks good for the French language in Canada, despite the rates of bilingualism falling recently in Canada. Here's to hoping that the Canadian experiment can continue on.
