In the constitutional referendum held on October 26, 1992, Canadian voters said “No” to a constitutional package, the “Charlottetown Accord,” contrived explicitly to win pan-regional support. Instead, it evoked pan-regional opposition.

The package Canadians rejected was formidably complex. It became so by a decade's accretion of elements, each calculated to appeal to, or to offset concessions to, groups excluded at an earlier stage—Quebec, the western provinces, and aboriginal peoples. Negotiators hoped that by 1992 they had finally found an equilibrium, a logroll sufficiently inclusive to survive referral to the people. Instead they seem to have gotten the logic of the logroll upside down: they may have overestimated both how much each group wanted what it got and how intensely some groups opposed key concessions to others.

Quebec. At the heart of the package were proposals contrived to induce the political class of Quebec to acquiesce in the political settlement embodied in the Constitution Act, 1982. Although the government and legislature of Quebec had rejected the 1982 settlement, no one contested that it applied to the province. But many agreed, on grounds of either justice or expediency, that the pill had to be made less bitter. The first attempt to bring Quebec on side was the Meech Lake Accord, struck in 1987 and buried in 1990. The failure of this attempt was the immediate background to the 1992 events.