POLITICS : American May Play Key Role in Canada’s Future : The Orange County-reared wife of Quebec’s separatist leader eschews the public eye. Her concerns about balancing family and career could prompt Lucien Bouchard to shy from leading independence charge.

From the way it played on the evening news here, one might assume the fate of Canada rests with a 36-year-old American from Orange County who now lives in Montreal.

At least, that was how anchorman Peter Mansbridge, tongue slightly in cheek, framed the story naming Audrey Best as the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.’s “newsmaker of the week” last Friday.

Best is married to Lucien Bouchard, 56, the politician who led Quebec separatists tantalizingly close to their goal of independence from Canada in the province’s Oct. 30 referendum.

The Bouchards and their two sons head off this weekend on a Florida vacation during which they will decide his future in politics--or, more accurately, whether he has a future in politics. Best’s undisguised distaste for the profession will be a major factor in the decision.

It’s Canada’s version of the recent Colin L. Powell syndrome: Will he or won’t he?

Bouchard actually has three options. He could continue as leader of the opposition in Canada’s federal Parliament. He could seek the office of Quebec premier, which Jacques Parizeau has said he will vacate by year’s end. Or he could retire from politics and resume his career as a lawyer.

“It’s no secret that my wife’s not crazy about politics,” Bouchard told reporters at an unusually candid news conference in the federal capital, Ottawa, three days after the referendum. His sons Alexandre, 5, and Simon, 4, aren’t big fans either, he added.

“They’ve learned the word referendum . They hate it. They spit when they pronounce it,” he said.

Because Bouchard is the most popular and credible politician among Quebec voters--and the most reviled by Canadian loyalists--it does not seem much of an exaggeration to say, as did the CBC, that this nation’s political future may hinge on the decision.

Bouchard’s charismatic performance in the referendum campaign--in which he nudged aside a lackluster Parizeau--is credited with making the vote breathtakingly close: Quebeckers rejected secession 50.6% to 49.4%. With another referendum looming, perhaps as early as next year, the separatists have visions of victory--if Bouchard assumes full control.

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The immediate assumption when Parizeau announced his resignation on Halloween was that Bouchard would switch to the provincial Parliament, where he would be named premier by the governing separatist party.

But Parizeau took him and his family by surprise, Bouchard said this week. “It put us in a position to make a decision we really weren’t ready to make,” he said.

It also put Best squarely in the spotlight, a place she strives to avoid.

Born in France but reared in the Los Alamitos area of Orange County, Best met Bouchard in Europe in 1987, when he was Canada’s ambassador to France and as yet uncommitted to Quebec secession.

Although she has stood dutifully beside her husband through various campaigns, Best eschews the role of political wife. She never gives speeches and spoke only one sentence to a television camera during the entire five-week referendum campaign.

While Bouchard spends most of the workweek in Ottawa, she is 100 miles away in Montreal, raising the children and pursuing a law degree.

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Her cultivated anonymity has been interrupted only a few times in the last year: in December when Bouchard lost his left leg and nearly his life to a rare, muscle-destroying bacteria; this fall in the referendum campaign, and earlier this year when the Bouchards filed a libel suit against a Montreal radio personality who suggested on the air that their marriage was in trouble.

Having operated on the expectation that the separatists would win the referendum and therefore clear the way for Bouchard to spend more time at home, Best said she finds herself ambivalent about the choices before the family.

“You know, he’s given so much already,” she said of her husband. “But we’re just going to go away on vacation and put all the cards on the table and decide.”

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In the Spotlight

American Audrey Best is at the center of a Canadian political storm: At stake is the political future of her husband, Quebec separatist leader Lucien Bouchard, who is mulling whether to take over as premier of the province. Best, who has never been comfortable with her husband’s life in politics, is opposed to the move, and the family-political drama has been caught in the public spotlight.