Pierre Elliott Trudeau

by Nino Ricci

  But slay the dragon he did. If Trudeau’s last term was his most officially triumphant one, however, and the culmination, really, of a lifetime of thinking and effort, it was also his most cynical and perhaps his most boring. By that time, spending, seemingly now through true indifference rather than as a matter of actual policy, had burgeoned out of control: in his last term alone Trudeau managed to double the debt, to $200 billion, leaving a legacy of interest costs that has hobbled every government that has followed him. Then there were the preferments and the patronage, including a spree of appointments as he was going out the door that completely doomed his hapless successor, the former golden boy John Turner. But at least he brought the constitution home, succeeding where many others had failed, and he managed to have enshrined in it, perhaps forever and for all time, his beloved Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

  Trudeau had set the stage for his last, ultimately successful constitutional push the night before the 1980 Quebec referendum. Speaking to a capacity crowd in the Paul Sauvé Arena in Montreal, where four years earlier René Lévesque had celebrated the PQ election victory, he made clear that he had no intention of negotiating sovereignty association in the event of a “Yes” victory but promised to interpret a “No” as a mandate to begin at once the process of constitutional reform. In essence he turned the referendum on its head, portraying a “Yes” vote as a dead end and a “No” as a vote for change. Commentators would later say that his speech that night, one of only four Trudeau made during the referendum campaign, turned the tide of the referendum. That may have been the case, though it was clear at the time that he was speaking to the converted. Perhaps not so much converted to the “No” as converted to Trudeau: he was why people were there. On referendum night, it would be the loser, René Lévesque, whose hall would be packed to capacity, while the arena of the “No” side, presided over by the crotchety new provincial Liberal leader of the day, Claude Ryan, who had taken over from Bourassa, would stand half empty.

  If Trudeau tilted the results—polls a week or so before had had the “Yes” side in the lead—he likely did so simply because he was Trudeau. Trudeau appeared very much the elder statesman at Paul Sauvé Arena, as if with the turn of the decade he had shed his old, gunslinger image. Yet, despite the frequent ovations and his own apparent emotion, there was a certain political hollowness to his speech, a certain posturing. If Quebecers took him at his word it was because by now he had grown truly iconic, a father figure to take direction from at a difficult turning, not so different from what his old nemesis Maurice Duplessis had once been. Claude Charron, Lévesque’s point man during the referendum, later put it this way: “Lévesque is what we are, but Trudeau is what we would like to be.”

  Marshall McLuhan once identified the secret of Trudeau’s charisma as his ability to look as if he contained many different people rather than a single lowly one. That night at the arena, thanks to the opening Lévesque had given him by his disparaging reference to Trudeau’s “Elliott” side a few days earlier, Trudeau became the quintessential Canadian. In a rare moment, he vaunted his dual heritage, calling his name truly “canadien,” with a sense that reversed the old Quebec exclusivity of the term. Then he pointed to himself and said, “I ask you: is this the face of an exclusively European man?”—a reference to the frequent speculation about his own Aboriginal blood. Whatever rhetoric there might have been in the ploy, it was also as if he was facing the anonymous accuser back at Brébeuf who had suggested he would betray his race, but with an understanding now of the insidiousness of this type of racialist thinking.

  Later, of course, Trudeau’s promise in this speech to interpret a “No” as a vote for change would come back to haunt him. “But what change?” Lévesque said afterwards. “The sphinx kept his secret.” Trudeau responded that everything was on the table, though by everything he didn’t mean his Charter and he didn’t mean federalism itself. What he meant, it began to grow clear as the first talks started, was more or less what he had meant ever since the first constitutional conference he had attended in 1950 as a junior clerk with the Privy Council. By now Trudeau was an old hand at constitutional discussions, which had been going on almost continuously since he’d taken office, and he had developed a fairly limited idea of what were acceptable compromises to his notion of federalism. He also knew that the broader the discussions grew, the harder it would be to reach any consensus. With a plump majority in Parliament and the mandate of the Quebec people for constitutional change, he sent his new constitutional bulldog, Jean Chrétien, across the country to work out a preliminary package with the provincial premiers.

  If Trudeau had been the front man for the “No” victory, then Chrétien, le p’tit gars de Shawinigan, had been his enforcer. It had quickly grown clear that Claude Ryan, the Quebec Liberal leader but also Trudeau’s old adversary as editor of Le Devoir, had had only a half-hearted commitment to the “No” side, putting forward tepid, abstract arguments and sulking at being seen as a puppet of the federalists. Chrétien had worked the province from end to end, replacing Ryan’s abstractions with his from-the-heart straight talk and with many jibes at the condescending intellectualism of the Péquistes. Now he met with each of the premiers and got rough consensus from all but one, Lévesque, who refused to meet with him. Everything fell apart, however, at the first joint conference: Lévesque showed up, but the Quebec delegation had got to the other premiers and undone all of Chrétien’s legwork, getting them to sign on to a list of twenty-two concessions they wanted from the federal government before agreeing to patriation.

  In his memoirs, Trudeau would maintain that it was already clear by then that Lévesque had no intention of letting the process succeed. “Listen, Jean, don’t waste your time,” one of Lévesque’s ministers had apparently told Chrétien. “We are separatists. So we are not really interested in renewing Canada.” The logic is hard to dispute. In the face of it, however, it had to be clear to Trudeau that the entire objective of this round of talks, that of rewarding the Quebecois for their “No,” was doomed from the start. Why, then, did he press on? “What’s the hurry, Prime Minister?” the premiers had said to him in the 1970s, a question repeated in a Globe and Mail editorial in 1980. Trudeau, of course, had an answer. In reference to the Globe editorial, he told Clarkson and McCall he was afraid that if the opportunity was missed this time, the country might not last long enough to get another one. “It would become a confederation of shopping centres,” he said, a snipe at Joe Clark’s view of Canada as a “community of communities,” which to Trudeau suggested a place without a centre, without a vision of itself. Whatever cynicism had come into Trudeau by then, he apparently still retained this unusual idealism about Canadian federalism, the sense that with a proper balance of powers for its governments and proper constitutional protections for its citizens it could achieve a kind of utopian state.

  There had always been something of an American spirit to Trudeau, despite his affront at the charge back at Brébeuf. That had been his father’s spirit, reinforced in Trudeau by trips to New York and his summers at Old Orchard, and especially by his stint at Harvard. Harvard had been his turning point, and after it, an American idealism had always lurked beneath his Canadian pragmatism, notable particularly in his ongoing commitment to a charter of rights and freedoms. Trudeau was never one to kowtow to the Americans, and he was soundly loathed by some of their presidents. “Asshole,” Nixon had called him on one of his tapes, and Trudeau had responded, “I’ve been called worse things by better people.” But nowhere was constitutionalism more a religion than in the United States. Trudeau was the man of bilingualism and of language rights, yet he knew that the ultimate function of a charter of rights was to shift a country’s culture away from the commonalities of history and language and blood toward a commonality of values, values that ultimately knew no borders. That made people citizens of the world. If Quebec nationalists saw a threat to their own notion of Quebecois culture in his vision, they were right to. However m
uch a charter would protect the right to difference, it would ultimately be assimilationist in its emphasis on universality and on the individual, as the American model showed.

  It would be hard to be sure, then, what promise Trudeau had imagined he was making to Quebecers at the Paul Sauvé Arena, much as René Lévesque afterwards suggested. In his memoirs, Trudeau said, “And the changes I was promising, were, of course, those we subsequently accomplished: bringing home our constitution, with a charter of rights and an amending formula.” Such a claim, however, can’t help but sound disingenuous. If he had offered these things from the stage—the very ones he had always been fighting for, Trudeau said in his defence, but also the ones Quebec had always rejected—the referendum would surely have been lost. In a documentary on the referendum, Le confort et l’indifférence, Denys Arcand replayed over and over that promise in the arena, juxtaposing it to subsequent events until it seemed the worst sort of snake-oil salesmanship. “Yet some people,” Trudeau complained, adding they were “usually separatists,” had “the gall” to charge “I led Quebeckers to believe that I would transfer all sorts of powers to Quebec and give it special status.”

  Whatever was driving Trudeau forward in the talks, then, it didn’t seem to be a wish to appease the people of Quebec. Pure megalomania, some would later argue, the need for a legacy; or unbending idealism; or perhaps, again, the same paternalism he had derided in people like Duplessis, the sense that he knew best. As for Quebec, he must have hoped that no one there would notice his sleight of hand: he had played one thing off against the other, using the promise of constitutional talks to defeat the referendum and the referendum defeat to force the talks. Yet at the end of the day there would seem very little connection between the two matters.

  TRUDEAU’S RESPONSE to the premiers’ list of twenty-two demands was to put into action a threat he had been making since the mid-1970s, that of bypassing the provinces entirely and attempting to patriate the constitution on his own. He knew he had the support of Margaret Thatcher and of the Queen and that nothing in the law clearly prohibited the move. He announced his intention publicly in October 1980, presenting a patriation package that included his Charter. Immediately two premiers signalled their approval of the action, Bill Davis of Ontario and Richard Hatfield of New Brunswick. Both of them had been around at the last full-fledged constitutional conference in 1971, when a tentative agreement had fallen through after Quebec’s Robert Bourassa had got cold feet.

  The remaining eight provinces, however—the Gang of Eight, they came to be known as—were officially furious, though only one of them, Quebec, understood the true perfidy at work. With the unveiling of his package Trudeau had let the cat out of the bag, making clear that what he had meant by change was merely more of the same. In English Canada, the Trudeau stratagem was depicted as just one more chess move in the long game of federal–provincial negotiations, but in Quebec the sense of betrayal was palpable. The plan was “a revolting attempt to emasculate Quebec’s history to better block its future,” René Lévesque said, sounding almost too disgusted for words. But some of the people most furious were Trudeau’s former allies in the referendum campaign. “Trudeau’s screwed me,” Claude Ryan fumed to anyone who would listen, an assessment verified when Lévesque called an election in spring 1981 and buried Ryan at the polls.

  The Gang of Eight began a three-tiered attack to stymie Trudeau’s plan for unilateral patriation, lobbying the British parliament to oppose him, putting together an alternative package that left out the Charter, and initiating a legal challenge that slowly wound its way to the Supreme Court of Canada. A year had passed since Trudeau had introduced his package by the time the court handed down a decision. The judges ruled, in a dog’s breakfast of split decisions, that while Trudeau’s move was not downright illegal, it was certainly not conventional, since convention in Canadian constitutional matters had normally required “substantial” provincial support. Having pronounced on convention, however, the court, to further complicate the issue, made clear it had no jurisdiction over convention, which was a matter for politicians.

  Trudeau very briefly played the ruling as a victory, though apparently he had had an agreement all along with B.C. premier Bill Bennett to return to the table in the event of a mixed decision. Political scientist Peter Russell called the judgment “questionable jurisprudence” but “bold statecraft”: by balancing the federal government’s legal rights against the provinces’ political ones, the court was essentially ensuring that the only prudent course for all parties was to return to the negotiating table. Trudeau’s opponents were quick to point out that “convention” was not such a small matter in the Canadian system. The office of prime minister, for instance, was a matter of convention, as was another major underpinning of Canadian democracy, the five-year limit on a government’s term in office. In any event, by the time of the ruling Margaret Thatcher had already begun to backtrack on the promise of easy patriation, after a slew of provincial delegations had passed through London denouncing Trudeau’s plan.

  In November 1981, Trudeau and the ten provincial premiers met at the old Ottawa train station, now converted to the National Conference Centre, to try to hammer out a deal. In the opening parry the Gang of Eight, ostensibly still holding solid, presented their Charterless alternative package as if it were a fait accompli. Trudeau would later claim that the package clearly showed Lévesque was negotiating in bad faith, since it contained an amending formula that gave up the veto Quebec had traditionally considered non-negotiable. Abandoning the constitutional veto amounted to accepting the principle of provincial equality that had always been anathema to Quebec nationalists. The compromise, in Trudeau’s view, could only mean Lévesque had no intention of signing a deal and that his sole purpose was “to keep the Gang of Eight intact to thwart me.”

  Clarkson and McCall, however, gave a different view in Trudeau and Our Times. The new amending formula had been cobbled together by the English members of the Gang of Eight back while Lévesque had been busy with his election. Rather than a veto, it offered a clause that would allow Quebec—though also every other province—to opt out, with compensation, of national programs that encroached on provincial jurisdictions. According to Clarkson and McCall, Lévesque was pressured into flying to Ottawa for a late-night session with the other premiers just three days after his election victory, where he agreed to the new formula without having thought through its implications. It was not the first time Lévesque had made that sort of impulsive error, sometimes with grave consequences. The previous year, he made what might have been a fatal one with regard to the timing of the referendum. It had always been agreed within the party that a referendum campaign shouldn’t overlap with a federal election, because people’s loyalties would be divided; when Clark’s Tories fell and Trudeau was suddenly crisscrossing the province again on the campaign trail and packing assembly halls, the assumption was that the referendum that had been set for that spring would be postponed. But when Claude Ryan rose up in Quebec’s National Assembly to ask if the referendum would proceed as planned, Lévesque, to his party’s horror, announced that it would. For the Parti Québécois, it was a first strike against their once-steadfast leader. His agreement to the new amending formula was a second one; the third was shortly to come.

  Essentially, then, Trudeau was right in his analysis, even if for the wrong reasons: Lévesque could not sign an agreement that gave him no veto. Quebec thus went into the talks with its hands so severely tied that the talks’ failure would have been practically the only acceptable outcome. For that outcome, however, Quebec was entirely dependent on the solidarity of the Gang of Eight. Lévesque had initially signed on with the group simply as a stratagem, to defeat what he called, using a term he knew would be especially laden for Trudeau, an “authoritarian” view of federalism. But the Supreme Court decision, which had made reference to the convention of “substantial” rather than unanimous provincial agreement, had in fact completely changed the
rules of negotiation: no longer could Quebec play the spoiler against the rest, as it had in 1971. Even though the Supreme Court had claimed no jurisdiction in the area of convention, its ruling on the matter would prove crucial. Essentially it had argued that the veto Quebec had traditionally assumed, in fact, by “convention,” didn’t really exist.

  The glue that bound the members of the Gang of Eight was their common resistance to Trudeau’s Charter. They objected in general to the limitations a charter would place on provincial power by giving the courts a much broader say in many areas of provincial jurisdiction, and they objected specifically to some of the clauses that were especially dear to Trudeau, in particular the entrenchment of minority language rights. This was a hot-button issue in the West, where both anti-Trudeau and anti-French sentiment were running high at the time. But for Lévesque, the issue was a deal breaker. In Quebec, minority rights meant English rights. Entrenching minority language rights would have repercussions across a whole range of powers that Quebec saw as central to the defence of its culture, most notably the coveted loi 101, which under the Parti Québécois had firmly entrenched French as the province’s sole official language and had ushered in a wide array of language reforms. Quebec nationalists had little faith in Trudeau’s vision of a bilingual country, convinced their French-Canadian brethren outside Quebec were doomed to extinction. They had thus found themselves in the peculiar situation of having common cause with those anglophone provinces where bilingualism had become a symbol of federalist tyranny.

  From the outset of the November negotiations, however, rifts began to appear in the coalition. Roy Romanow, the Attorney General of Saskatchewan and a born conciliator, was seen making asides to federal negotiator Jean Chrétien. An air of mutual distrust began to arise between the anglophone premiers and Lévesque, who felt that there was much more at stake for him than for the others and that issues that were central to Quebec were just a matter of horse-trading for the anglophones. Daniel Latouche, one of Lévesque’s advisers, described the other premiers as “a bunch of Kiwanis presidents,” ready to make a deal for a promise of money or a new factory. For two days the coalition held firm, but on the third day, in the suite at the Château Laurier where the Gang of Eight gathered every morning to discuss strategy, Saskatchewan premier Allan Blakeney presented a new compromise proposal that his people had obviously been working out for some time. It offered no veto for Quebec and no provision for opting out of federal programs. Lévesque was livid. It seemed the anglophones were trying to take away, bit by bit, everything that mattered to Quebec. The coalition was cracking.