Any more victories like this and Premier Lucien Bouchard will need a search party — or, better yet, a time machine — to find the “winning conditions” he wants before calling another referendum on Quebec secession.

The upside of Monday’s vote for Bouchard is that his separatist Parti Quebecois added one seat, a 75th, to its majority in the 125-member provincial legislature Monday. The downside of the landslide that wasn’t just goes on and on.

The pro-unity Liberals actually got a bigger slice of the popular vote, 44 percent to 43. Add to that the support for the new Democratic Action Party, which advocates greater autonomy but not secession, and more than 57 percent of Quebeckers also want to be Canadians. Throughout the mercifully brief 33-day campaign, Bouchard increasingly backed away from portraying the election as a prelude to another secession vote and turned it into something about providing “good government.”

This is a far cry from those glory days of 1995 when secession lost by a scant percentage point and so-called “English” Canada — the part populated by all those MacDonalds, Suzukis and Gretzkys marching in lockstep — was beside itself trying to entice Quebec into staying. This is what happens when the theory and symbols of sovereignty give way to the reality of the checkbook.

Quebec has perhaps the worst conditions for economic growth in Canada. Yes, its economy is big, second in size only to Ontario, but two decades of threatening secession have made it weak, flabby and utterly unappealing to investors. Quebec pays the highest interest rates in the country for public-sector borrowing and its residents pay the highest taxes. Long after other provinces started to wean themselves from government spending as the cure for economic stagnation, Quebec continued to embrace it.

To his credit, Bouchard has provided some good government. Quebec’s crushing debt is being reduced, as is its reliance on massive public-works projects to boost employment. In short, he is beginning to provide the kind of sovereignty Liberal leader Jean Charest promised — the sovereignty of individuals to keep as much of their wages as possible, to make their own decisions, to take their own risks. Reaganomics, eh?

Still, enormous problems persist, problems that are familiar to Maine. Quebec’s population is in decline; one of the greatest dinner-table concerns is that bright young people have to move away — to Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver — to build their futures. The myth persists among separatists that the only reason English Canada wants Quebec to stay is that their province is Canada’s “cash cow,” when in fact it is a substantial net-gainer in federal dollars flowing from Ottawa.

Howard Cody, a political scientist at UMaine’s Canadian-American Center, offers these observations for Canada watchers: Bouchard, thanks to his nearly heroic stature as a champion of separatists, may be the right leader at the right time — he has “reservoir of good will” needed to get Quebec through the difficulties that lie ahead, secession or not; the upstart Democratic Action may be a new force in Quebec politics or a temporary holding area for separatists gone temporarily soft.

And — of special interest to the those in the new Northern Maine secession campaign — Cody notes that separatist movements, such as those festering in Maine, Quebec and Scotland, “always start based on emotion, on the belief that that region is being neglected and taken advantage of economically. There is always the belief, mistaken in these three instances, that they pay more in taxes than they receive back. For a secession to succeed, the people have to be guaranteed the full benefits of participation in the larger, stronger economy without the obligations. That rarely happens.”