"De Almighty says to quit changin' de subject and answer de focking question."
--Stephen, Braveheart
LOL - If de Almighty don't care for de answer he should quit changin' de focking question
Have him call me, i'll sort him out. I've been meaning to talk to him anyway, i'm a little sick of his holier-than-tho attitude.
Joking aside you must remember we are confederation, not a republic like the states. Basically canada is in essence the european union, seperate entities agreeing to a central power for things like money and travel and work without restrictions and such - although qualifications may differ province to province. Even our constitution gives equal weight to the provincial gov'ts as the federal. About the only difference is that each province is not sovereign.
So a referrendum on changing those powers is actually a referendum on our treaty and our alliances
Whenever we have a referendum to change the constitution it's a modification to the treaty that binds the provinces. And a vote on separation is really the same thing as the vote to leave the eu.
And we've done both of those more than once, and it has been an acrimonious process on occasion, sometimes successful and sometimes not. There's been regrets after and issues have been revisited, etc.
So we do get what the UK is gong through. This is all very similar and familiar. Do we want someone in quebec making all our decisions for us here on the west coast? Does quebec want english canada to tell it what it can do? Are we ok with having different laws etc. "immigration', jobs, economy, refugees, yeah we get ALL that.
And we do vote on it. To be honest - i'm a little surprised the US has never done that more. The mechanisms are in place.