Stephen Carter (former chief of staff to Jyoti Gondek) claimed in a CBC article that Alberta’s October 19 referendum could “lead to an exodus of industries and businesses uncomfortable with the uncertainty, similar to what happened with the Quebec referendum in 1995.”

The problem is that didn’t happen.

The Quebec analogy Stephen Carter is using is historically sloppy. The corporate and population shift out of Montreal was already well underway two decades before the 1995 referendum, and the most cited departures were driven as much or more by language policy as by a ballot question.

Bill 101 was imposed by the Parti Québécois in 1977, and it made French the official language of work, commerce, government, and (with limited exceptions) education. The bill’s intent wasn’t so much to preserve French as it was to drive out non-French-speaking citizens, and it was effective that way. It also drove corporate headquarters from the province as the companies were losing valuable staff to the language law.

Federal data cited at the time recorded 91 headquarters leaving Quebec in the four months after the 1976 election. By early 1979 the count of registered head-office moves since late 1976 had reached 368.

Sun Life announced in January 1978 that it would move its head office from Montreal to Toronto. The company said Bill 101 would make it hard to recruit and retain English-speaking staff and that it could not operate its national and international business under the new language rules. The Bank of Montreal made a similar move in 1977. No referendum for independence was on the horizon at the time.

Alberta in 2026 is not Montreal in 1977.

There is no Bill 101. English is the language of the oil patch, of head offices, and of most interprovincial and export business. Further, Alberta’s prime industries are geographically fixed. The oil, gas and agricultural sectors couldn’t pick up and walk away even if they were inclined to. They provide value-added products that will have export value no matter whether Alberta is independent or not.

Instability can chill investment, and an independence referendum could do so in a short-term way. Using Quebec as a cautionary example about voting in a referendum is making an invalid comparison. There are issues within Quebec dogging investment, but it has little to do with holding referenda.