They never do. Read The Morning After, by Chantal Hebert and Jean Lapierre. Twenty years after the 95 referendum, the major players *still* hadn’t figured out what they would have done in the event of a yes vote. It was all just bluff and improv. But anyone who does try to game the thing out with any rigour pretty quickly comes to the conclusion that it can’t be done: not unilaterally/illegally, and not by negotiation/constitutionally. That needs to be communicated to people. But what needs to be communicated even more is that the whole enterprise is illegitimate; that there is not, and cannot be, any such thing as a right to secede from a democratic country (which is why virtually no democratic country recognizes such a right); that threatening to do so to blackmail your fellow Canadians is as morally bankrupt as it is practically futile; that the attempt to invoke democratic principle in its defence is bogus — you cannot vote to help yourself to something that isn’t yours, namely the territory of Canada — while the right of self determination simply folds in on itself: if Albertans or Quebecers have a right to self determination, do Edmontonians or Montrealers? For that matter, do Canadians? Or is the proposition that the vast majority of Canadians must simply stand mute while their country, which tens of millions have built over several centuries, is blown apart by a single vote on a single day by a small fraction of the population? Even if either Alberta or Quebec had been sovereign states prior to entering the federation, that would not hold water: once you’ve dissolved your sovereignty in the larger entity, you can’t reconstitute it. It no longer exists. There’s nothing to reconstitute it with. But it’s just gaga to make such claims with regard to a province that, like Alberta, was itself the creation of an Act of the Parliament of Canada, or like Quebec, of the Parliament of Great Britain — and then only the relatively minor rump that was carved out of the pre-existing Province of Canada at Confederation. Two thirds of the present-day territory of the province of Quebec was added after Confederation — again, by acts of the Parliament of Canada. So there’s no actual likelihood of Canada breaking up, even if there is a referendum in either or both provinces, and even in the vanishingly unlikely event that either or both of them managed to win a “clear majority” on a “clear question.” What is possible is that either or both of them might land themselves in a ruinous, divisive, and possibly violent mess, whose costs would mostly be borne by their own citizens. But we do not make that prospect more likely by rushing to make offers to dissuade them from leaving or going to great lengths to show “the federation works.” The committed hardliners regard such offers with contempt while the cynical blackmailers regard them as a baseline from which to make further demands. Neither is anything achieved by saying “fine, go.” Acquiescing in the theft of Canadian territory and the destruction of the federation hardy counts as a “tough” position. No, the proper stance is to advertise, well in advance, that neither exercise will be regarded as conferring any right to secede of any kind; that whatever we might be willing to talk about afterward, it would not be secession. It might not even be as advantageous as the status quo.

It is very sad to see the Conservatives go down this path.