Replies

"If the conservatives win, will secession rear its head again?"

Absolutely, because the REASON the Conservatives are winning the election, or have a shot at it, is because the Liberals are being decimated in Quebec. But's it's not the Conservatives who are decimating them, nor the NDP, nor the Greens.
It's the Bloc Quebecois, the French separatists.
They're polling at around 50% of the electorate, which is furious at the Liberals for having larded Quebec with bribes to try and prevent another secessionist vote. The Liberals are toast in Quebec. The Conservatives, as the only federalist option to the Liberals that can do anything, is picking up some votes, but there's a terrible tear among the federalists because some really are more leftist than federalist, and this will divide the federalist vote.
Result: the Bloc are going to come in strong. Very strong. The big winner in this election will be the Quebec Separatists.

Now, the current provincial party in Quebec City are the Liberals, but they are dead men walking. Come the next provincial elections, the provincial Parti Quebecois, the provincial version of the French separatists, are going to roar to the fore. The Bloc's sweeping victory will only boost the PQ, no matter who wins the national election, and you will have a strong Bloc Quebecois representing the French separatists in Parliament, and a strong PQ Premier pushing separatistm in Quebec City.

There is nothing the Liberals can do about any of this other than facilitate it by clinging to power. But there is also damned little the Conservatives can really do about it either, especially if they have a minority government.

What Conservatives have to rely upon is splitting the separatist vote between hardcore separatist sovereigntists who want their own country, period, and the more appeasable group of separatists who are willing to remain in Canada if Quebec has internal control over its own affairs, with a massive and permanent abridgment of federal powers there. Think of the relationship of individual sovereign Southern States to the US Confederacy or the original 13 Colonies under the Articles of Confederation and you have an idea of their vision. That group could be persuaded to remain in Canada...maybe...if Canada were radically reconstructed so that the provinces essentially had a veto over federal law.

If I were Harper and determined to keep Canada together, I would take a different tack than he is likely to take. He is likely to try and appease Quebec by deconstructing the Canadian federal government. Now, since that's what the West wants too, that will be what he does. But that's not likely to keep Quebec, because in the end Quebec wants to be its own French country, and this desire is probably as unquenchable as the desire of the Catholics of Ulster to remove that province from the UK and reattach it to Ireland. There is no combination of blandishments that can persuade hard-core nationalist patriots to give up their desire for self-determination.
But I expect Harper to try the devolution route.

If he really wants a better shot at keeping Canada together, he needs to try a different tack: even if he wins a majority he should invite the Bloc into government with the Conservatives, and give the Bloc the very cabinet posts that would make them think they died and went to heaven. Give the Bloc control over immigration (Quebec province already controls its own immigration). Give them control of the Native Affairs portfolio. Give them Culture.

What result? A taste of national power for the separatists - direct French separatist control over the levers of power on those things that they most desire to set their own policies as a foreign nation. It's pretty tough, once you have commanded the world's second-largest nation, to decide that really you just want to rule Alaska instead. Give the Bloc national power and national responsibility for serious posts - the very things they crave control of, and they will neither very greatly screw things up, nor will they want to leave off control. They will be very likely, instead, to start fielding Bloc candidates from the francophones all across Canada, starting especially in New Brunswick, and once the Bloc turned into a national French party, separatism would go by the wayside. They would end up being a more conservative brand of Liberal, because based on a national principle instead of Marxist theory.

The way you keep the French in Canada is by letting their separatists have command of significant parts of Canada.

But that is probably beyond anything that a Conservative can realistically do, so instead the negotiations and battle will be intense, and while Conservatives are probably the better bet to keep Quebec in the country, it's still better than even odds, in my estimation, that Quebec will go at some point.