Rule of law as institutional substrate — contract enforcement, judicial independence, equal treatment before the law. Upstream of most other axes.
Second Quebec sovereignty referendum, called by PQ Premier Jacques Parizeau under Bill 1. Question on "sovereignty with partnership offer to Canada" (after June 1995 tripartite accord PQ-BQ-ADQ). Results: No 50.58%, Yes 49.42%; turnout 93.52%. Parizeau's election-night speech blaming "money and the ethnic vote" led to his resignation. Federal Clarity Act response came in Chrétien second term (Bill C-20, 2000).
Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.
Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".
Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.