We cannot know precisely what Lucienne Robillard, the federal minister responsible for the Quebec referendum, intended by suggesting that Ottawa would "respect the vote," or that Quebeckers have the right to "express themselves." But the meaning of those who spoke after her, from Preston Manning to Daniel Johnson, could not be clearer: If the vote is Yes, the province secedes. As a particularly muddled Toronto Star editorial put it: "We live in a democracy. Quebeckers can choose to stay or go as they wish."

So mesmerizing is the word democracy, it robs its victims of all capacity for reason. It's a fine thing, I suppose, for people to "express themselves." But it is another thing altogether to give this exercise the imprint of democracy. To be blunt: Just because you say you want something doesn't mean you get to have it. The mere holding of a vote is not sufficient. There are also rules. You cannot vote to break the law; you cannot vote to take what isn't yours; you cannot vote to deprive other people of their rights, or to decide the fate of those beyond your jurisdiction. But let us take each of these in turn.

. That secession, unless ratified by constitutional amendment, is in violation of our basic law is no longer a question of opinion: After last week's Quebec Superior Court ruling in the case brought by Guy Bertrand, it is fact. The ruling has not been appealed. It has now the force of law, and would after a Yes vote. No group, no matter how democratically, can decide to exempt itself from the law.

. The Parti Quebecois does not propose to withdraw only the province's citizens from Canadian jurisdiction. It intends to take the territory of Quebec with it. Those who say "let Quebec go" and think themselves hard- nosed are in fact proposing to surrender one-quarter of the land mass of Canada to a foreign power. But the territory of Quebec does not belong to Quebeckers; nor is any province the jurisdiction only of the citizens of that province. It is the sovereign territory of Canada, and of all Canadians.

This is not only a matter of the northern two-thirds of Quebec, appended by acts of Parliament in 1897 and 1912. The province has no historic boundaries but those it has enjoyed as part of Canada. Quebec did not enter Confederation, as if it were a party to a contract it might now revoke: It was the creation of it, carved with Ontario out of what was then the single province of Canada.

If voting were all there were to democracy, then Quebeckers should have a democratic right to vote themselves title to the Ottawa Valley. Or they might vote on what share of the national debt they would assume. Those who pronounce it anti-democratic to deny to any group of people what a majority of them have voted for would have no choice but to go along. For to set conditions of any kind is to imply that Quebeckers' democratic right to secede is not absolute.

. To accept that 50 per cent plus one of the people of Quebec may vote to secede is also to abandon the other 50 per cent minus one who would have their Canadian citizenship stripped from them against their will, and with it their rights as Canadians. Admittedly this would be in a long and dishonourable tradition of Canadians looking the other way at abuses of minorities. So consider the matter from another perspective: By what democratic principle are the 2 million or so Yes voters in a Quebec referendum entitled, on their own, to divide and destroy a country of 30 million?

It's all very well, in short, to say majority rules: but a majority of what? Fifty per cent of whom? Why is the only majority that counts that of the people of Quebec? Why not a majority of the people of Canada? Why not majorities within Quebec? If the principle is that a majority of Canadians may not bind Quebeckers to remain in Canada, then why should the decision of a majority of Quebeckers be binding upon the Inuit, the Outaouais, or the Westmountese?

Why? Because the PQ says so. Because the intellectual orthodoxy of our times holds that real nations are ethnic nations. This is odious enough in the mouths of the PQ; for Canadians, it is self-obliterating. To insist that Quebeckers have a democratic right to self-determination is only to say that Canadians have not: that, indeed, there is no such thing as a Canadian nation. In which case, why even contest the referendum?

A final democratic thought. If Lucien Bouchard can be so cavalier about the popular will as to declare the separatists would not accept a No vote - as they did not in 1980 - the least the rest of us can do, should the Yes side win, is to propose a rubber match. In the unlikely event that Quebeckers do vote to secede, federalists should have no hesitation in responding: a la prochaine.