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Finally, the question. It is not long: only 41 words in French, 43 in English. Nor is it as clear as Jacques Parizeau always promised it would be. It is, in fact, cloaked in ambiguity, carefully crafted to obscure the full magnitude of the decision that awaits Quebec's 4.9 million voters.

On a day when Premier Jacques Parizeau and more than 1,000 of his closest sovereigntist friends were meeting for an occasion they deemed "historic," the man most of them consider Quebec's constitutional devil incarnate was less than 25 km away, doing his best to ignore them.

No guest is so welcome in a friend's house that he will not become a nuisance after three days.

It was 11:30 on the morning after the New Brunswick Liberal party's third consecutive election landslide, but Frank McKenna was still celebrating - his way. Operating on just 4½ hours of sleep, he had followed his usual morning ritual: after waking at six a.m.

Vivian Godfree had just cleared the morning dishes at her Pugwash, N.S., home when her mother called from the British city of Bristol with surprising news - the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to an antiwar movement spawned in the tiny Nova Scotia village where she lives.

The fateful moment looms. And with only days remaining before Quebec voters' crucial encounter at the ballot box on Monday, Oct. 30, the signs were far from comforting for federalists.

It took 128 years to make Canada into the country that it is today - and 10 hours of voting and a margin of only 53,498 votes to almost break with that past and reshape both the map and the country's future. No, 50.6 per cent, total votes: 2,361,526. Yes, 49.4 per cent, 2,308,028 votes.

At first in the House of Commons last week, it seemed that all the major players in the Quebec referendum had decided to go back to the future and behave as though one of the most divisive campaigns in Canada's history never happened.

With mounting concern, Dr. Joel Carter studied the situation in the Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre emergency ward. In one resuscitation bed, an elderly heart patient lay dying, the family gathered around her.

Some things will have changed around the house by the time Prime Minister Jean Chrétien returns home to Ottawa on Nov. 19 from the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in New Zealand and his other travels in Asia.

It does not help Boutros Boutros-Ghali that he has a name some Americans seem to find hysterical. All David Letterman has to do for an easy laugh is work the secretary general of the UNITED NATIONS, yet again, into one of his Top 10 lists.

As the medical administrator of a RED CROSS field hospital in war-wracked Chechnya, Canadian nurse Nancy Malloy did a little bit of everything. One of her jobs was to ensure that the hospital did not run short of drugs or other medical supplies.

Few political eras have begun in grander style. Twenty four hours after PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND's Conservatives ousted the Liberals in the Nov.

If omens mean anything, the members of Prime Minister Jean CHRÉTIEN's new version of Team Canada may have some cause for concern.

Divorced and living by himself in a drab Charlottetown apartment complex for the past 10 years, Roger Bell did not go out of his way to meet people. "He didn't say as much as hello," said John Acorn, Bell's next-door neighbor.

In a downtown Toronto hotel last week, 300 trustees and school board staff had gathered for the annual conference of the Ontario Public School Board Association.

At moments during last week's Liberal nomination meeting in the provincial riding of Humber East in Corner Brook, Nfld., the spirit of the legendary Joey Smallwood seemed to permeate the room. At the microphone, a pumped-up Brian Tobin, in a pugilist's stance, was in full rhetorical flight.

By the standards he set during his street-brawling youth in Shawinigan, it was not much of a rout.

As Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's government tried to evoke a new era of Canadian team spirit in the House of Commons last week, it was no coincidence that the one premier who came to listen was Captain Canada himself.