I’m in Canada and it’s only marginally better with respect to police under/overreaction. A friend and I once got the “don’t go to school on X day” message and we went immediately to local, provincial, and federal police. No one took us seriously. We had a friend working at CSIS (American analogue would be CIA) look into it and later that week we saw the article in a local paper.

Police investigated the home and found:

• 5000 rounds of ammunition
• body armor
• explosives
• only thing he couldn’t get was legal firearms because of his history of mental illness, but he had been working on connections to acquire illegal ones

Point being we couldn’t get the police to lift a finger to check out what we believed to be a credible threat (this guy never even joked about that stuff), but boy were they willing to burn rubber racing to my school when I committed the crime of defending myself in a “normal” school fight and one of my bullies claimed they felt threatened by me. This event set off a whole series of events, like requiring me to get a full evaluation at a psychiatric facility, before being allowed back in school. Our system is broken.

I cannot possibly imagine trusting a school issued device.

Imagine it’s 1995 and you’re an average person. You don’t know all that much about separation, you just know that the coming referendum is about it and you don’t want to separate. You likely are not a college/university graduate and a significant amount of the people you know haven’t even graduated high school. You probably don’t have a personal computer or internet access even if you do. Your primary news source is likely the odd updates you get on the radio while driving to or from work, and you haven’t been following and aren’t familiar with how people talk about separation. You show up to vote and you get this question:

Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership within the scope of the bill respecting the future of Quebec and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?
French:
Acceptez-vous que le Québec devienne souverain, après avoir offert formellement au Canada un nouveau partenariat économique et politique, dans le cadre du projet de loi sur l’avenir du Québec et de l’entente signée le 12 juin 1995?

What the hell are you even voting for or against here?

The Québec referendum on separation was so confusing people remarked they didn’t actually know what they were voting for. The situation resulted in a law (Clarity Act) that forced all secession votes to pass some tests to be considered valid, and also indicated that a secession requires amendment of the Constitution of Canada, which makes it incredibly difficult to actually do.

I really don’t want to give Québec undeserved credit on this, they handled it quite poorly tbh and the whole thing felt like it was exploiting the ignorance and anger of a minority population that had even less education and literacy than the average Canadian at the time. That said, Canada has since devolved further into being a neoliberal anglosohere shithole so perhaps they were on to something.