“I spent the referendum taking my younger son to entrance exams for high school in Montreal,” she explains on a cold, bright January morning in Montreal, the city she continues to call home. “I didn’t want my sons to be Ottawa people. I wanted them to be in a place where there were four universities.”

For a woman who has devoted the last forty years to discussing national politics on air and in print, Hébert seems surprisingly dispassionate. The Morning After, her fascinating new book about the 1995 Quebec referendum, contains not a whisper of her own political views.

She is sixty years old, although the smiling woman sitting across the table from me seems younger. Perhaps it’s the jeans she’s wearing, or the absence of make-up. Or perhaps it’s the curiosity and the glint of humour in her eye. She belongs to the baby boomer generation, which has been the heart and soul of the Quebec sovereignty movement since the 1960s. In her approach to that issue, however, she defies generational stereotypes.

“I’ve covered a lot of constitutional stuff,” she says, “and I have to say, the bigger the story, the less I’m invested in it. That’s the way we are trained as journalists. You cover a good story, but it’s not a story in which I’m the main character.”

Far from being the main character, in The Morning After, Hébert is completely effaced. The book is a series of interviews with seventeen key players in the 1995 Quebec referendum (including Jean Chrétien and Daniel Johnson Jr., from the No camp, and the triumvirate of Jacques Parizeau, Lucien Bouchard, and Mario Dumont from the Yes). In every case, Hébert steps aside to let others tell their stories.

But here’s the kicker. Instead of requesting a rehash of actual events, Hébert (with help from former Liberal and Bloc MP Jean Lapierre) asks her subjects what they would have done had the Yes side won.

Why, I ask, did she decide to write about the referendum twenty years after the fact?

“These people have never told their story,” she replies. “There weren’t many referendum books by the main players. I thought, before they disappear and their voice becomes what other people make of them, I’m going to … ask them to tell me how they imagined the nine-o’clock news that night, if [Société Radio-Canada news anchor] Bernard Derome announced the Yes had won.”

Parizeau is eighty-four years old today; Chrétien is eighty-one, and Bouchard is in his mid-seventies. The book is a time capsule. The revelations it contains, however, puncture time-worn myths.

The No camp offered Hébert few surprises. She had expected divergent views concerning what to do in the event of a Yes victory. She had also guessed correctly that the people in Quebec would be at loggerheads with Jean Chrétien in Ottawa, and that the rest of Canada would skirmish over conflicting local interests.

What Hébert found astonishing was the level of chaos in the Yes camp. It was common knowledge that Bloc Québécois leader Lucien Bouchard was more cautious about secession than Premier Parizeau. Even so, Hébert was surprised at how fundamentally they disagreed about what a Yes victory would have actually meant. Even more disconcerting was that the two Yes leaders showed so “little inclination to talk to each other about the way forward.” On the day of the referendum, Parizeau refused to take any of Bouchard’s calls and left his so-called “Negotiator-in-Chief” on his own to watch the results come in. Bouchard admits that when the final result was announced, he was completely in the dark as to Parizeau’s plans.

Yet, according to Hébert, Parizeau was “possibly the only adult in the room.” He was, she says, the only one in the Yes camp “who seemed to have been thinking about the reality of creating a country.”