The Brexit referendum was non-binding for important constitutional reasons.

Legally, leaving required an Act of Parliament. To hold a binding referendum, they would have had to pass an Act that says "here are the exact details of how we'll leave the EU, coming into force if the referendum passes".

But that would have required them to figure out all the exact details of what it means to leave the EU, and they didn't bother - they just held the referendum and assumed they could figure out the details later if Leave won, which they didn't expect would happen.

We all saw how well that worked out.

> there was sufficient political capital to push it through without a follow up vote.

This seriously overstates how smoothly things went between 23/6/2016 and 31/1/2020

> This seems extremely surprising - I've never heard of this sort of thing before with any other country.

It's a little surprising - even as a Canadian - if you're unfamiliar with Canadian politics/history/civics, but Canada is more loosely held together than most other countries, including the US. And a comparison with the US is instructive, because Canada's founders were unifying the country the wake of the US Civil War and were working very much in response to it: there was a fear that the US would turn imperial in an exercise of national unity and begin trying to snatch up the rest of the continent from the British and a belief that the British wouldn't care to defend them, which was arguably the primary motivation for Confederation: to form a unified front against American expansionism. And the Fathers of Confederation had seen how horrible the Civil War was and wanted to prevent that sort of thing from occurring, so the provinces - like in the US, formerly independent colonies - were given more power than the States, with the separation of powers clearly and rigidly defined.

The Clarity Act itself wasn't part of Confederation, but that's the cultural legacy that informs it: a civilized process allowing provinces to separate without bloodshed is just about as fundamentally Canadian as anything.

It's a result of the second Quebec referendum. The Clarity Act may appear like it facilitates leaving the federation, but many critics (among them federalist and sovereigntists) believe that the law is too vague as it give the House of Commons the responsibility to determine "whether a clear majority had expressed itself". What that means in numerical terms? Nobody knows. Further the House of Commons has the right to override the referendum if they deem it to contradict any of the under-specified tenets of the Clarity act. Finally, you need to amend the Canadian constitution to finally separate, which according to my understanding, requires the approval of all the (remaining) provinces.

So it can be argued that the Clarity Act is a way to legislate friction to defederation.

Of course Quebec (and like Albertan) separatists hold that all this is moot and that they can self-govern as they wish following a referendum. Others look at the "no-deal" Brexit as a template.

It was put into place after Quebec held a referendum that was close in 1995. Canada remedied the situation by making clear what it would take to leave.

EU famously has one. Of course you might not consider it a country.

It's a thing because Quebec has tried to separate before.

Discussing separation is okay when QC threatens it - hence the clarity act. But when AB wants to do it, they are just a bunch of redneck traitors according to the rest of Canada.

(Cue the "AB is nothing", "AB has no culture", folks that don't have a clue what they are talking about).

It should be the least surprising thing about Canada - it has been dealing with separatist referendums for decades.

> Is there actually even a legal process for leaving Canada?

Does there need to be a legal process? If Albertans are willing to fight a war over it then all they need to do is declare that they don't recognize Ottawa's authority anymore and then go about trying to get other countries to recognize their independence.

It's a very complicated situation in Alberta. There were basically two competing petitions. A "Forever Canada" petition which supported Alberta staying in Canada, however it was built to force the provincial government to hold a vote in parliament about separation, therefore forcing all representatives to show their true feelings on separation.

A second petition by "Stay Free Alberta" asked the government to hold a referendum on separating. However, it was blocked by a judge because a previously ruling basically said that separating would violate treaty rights of Indigenous peoples in Alberta. It's also fraught with controversy as the individuals running the petition were able to (likely illegally) obtain the voter rolls for every Albertan. They used it to build an online tool to track their progress. There is speculation (without evidence since the signatures on the petition is not public) that they simply used it to fill out the petition for people they knew. There are pieces of evidence that point to this being a possibility, for example, a Stay Free Alberta leader claimed that in some communities, nearly 98% of residents signed the petition. These are generally right leaning communities, however, getting 98% of people in a community to do a single thing would be incredibly hard.

Interestingly, my state (Wisconsin) has a two step process for constitutional amendments. An amendment has to pass a referendum in two consecutive legislative sessions. It still doesn't prevent us from doing stupid things, but it seems to be programmed as a check on hasty voting, or on people assuming that nobody's going to vote.

> I don't get it. They're having a referendum on whether or not to have a referendum?

Exactly. Albertans are scratching their heads, wondering what on earth Premier Smith is trying to accomplish. Utterly ridiculous ''solution'' to some internal problems within her party, I'm guessing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarity_Act

Bill C-20 passed in 2000. It's not so much effort to type "canadian clarity act" into a search engine or wikipedia.