by Conrad Black
Quebec voted on September 12, 1994. Polls indicated that Parizeau and the Parti Québécois would win, but not by a wide margin, and it was not clear that enthusiasm for independence had spiked appreciably. The polls were right, though the margin not as narrow as expected (previous election results in brackets): the Parti Québécois had 77 members of the National Assembly on 44.8 per cent of the vote (29 MNAs and 40.2 per cent); the Liberals had 47 MNAs on 44.4 per cent (92 MNAs and 50 per cent); and Action Démocratique du Québec, a new party trying the old formula of nationalist but not separatist, had 1 MNA and 6.5 per cent of the vote. Parizeau had certainly won the election, but it was not clear that Quebec was in any great hurry to secede, however aggravated it might be by the constitutional roller coaster. Jacques Parizeau, unlike Lévesque, was not an exciting leader for a movement that had such a heavy requirement for panache and the esprit de corps of self-liberation. He was an academic economist and senior civil servant who spoke English with an English accent, but unlike Lévesque, the twitching, benighted little man of the people, Parizeau was a Molièresque haut bourgeois who refined to new levels of self-importance the perquisites of a minister in a camel hair overcoat (usually without his arms in the sleeves) being conveyed in a Citroën DS with Duplessis’s flag fluttering on the fender to a three-martini lunch in a five-star restaurant. Ample, florid, and luxuriantly moustachioed, Parizeau was an intelligent man but no great popular tribune, and slightly difficult to take seriously.
For Jean Chrétien, the world had come along very agreeably: after thirty-one years in Parliament and almost every major cabinet position, disparaged in early years by the Conservatives as “the guy who drove the getaway car” (as Dalton Camp put it), frequently condescended to by Trudeau and his intellectual or at least metropolitan claque, defeated by Turner, he was now at the head of the most numerous caucus the Liberals had had, except for St. Laurent in 1949 and King in 1940, and was facing a clear horizon of certain victory over a pulverized and atomized opposition led by a rag-tag of unserviceable regionalists. There were three problems: Quebec was angry and unpredictable; the Liberal platform (the Red Book) had called for abolition of the GST and withdrawal from the Free Trade Agreement with the United States, which were clearly not good promises to act on; and the deficit built up by Trudeau, and which Mulroney had been unable to reduce, was a threat that was causing problems with interest rates, bond sales, and the value of the dollar. Mulroney had put the emphasis on fighting inflation and approved Bank of Canada governor John Crow’s high interest rate policy to discourage borrowing and suppress demand. This was damaging to government interest rate costs and tax revenues, and the deficit ballooned to $42 billion in Mulroney’s last year. Having promised to fire Crow in the election campaign, Chrétien did so and replaced him with the more expansionist Gordon Thiessen. Chrétien’s convention opponent, Paul Martin, was the minister of finance and proved very capable. After an indecisive 1994 budget that stirred no confidence and appeased no constituencies, Martin, restrained only slightly by Chrétien, imposed a hair-shirted deficit-reduction budget in 1995, promising a $25-billion deficit cut in three years. Every department except Indian and Northern Affairs (one of the eight ministries Chrétien had held personally) was slashed, and $7 billion was sliced out of transfer payments (mainly to Quebec) with no concession of increased taxing jurisdiction. These payments, especially in consideration of health, welfare, and education, would henceforth be block grants that the provinces could prorate and spend as they wished, but it was a straight transfer of spending responsibility to the provinces with no revenue enhancements. (The most frequent provincial response was to lay the same expenses on the municipalities and invite them to raise local taxes to pay for it. It created great pressures on lower levels of government, but they didn’t control the money supply, and the effect on interest rates, the federal deficit, and the value of the dollar was uniformly positive. Martin also cut 45,000 civil service jobs, 14 per cent of the total number of federal government employees, the $560-million Crow rate subsidy for the shipping of agricultural produce was eliminated, and he raised gasoline and aviation fuel taxes to bring in $1.3 billion per year. It was heavy going, and a much harsher dose of austerity than what Trudeau and MacEachen and Chrétien had thrown Joe Clark and John Crosbie out for in 1979, but it worked, and it was one of the more courageous state initiatives of recent years, along with Free Trade and the GST.
Apart from ignoring the horrifying Rwanda genocide of 1994, which took nearly a million lives and which the Canadian government was well informed of – and for which Canada would apologize to the Rwandan survivors in 2000 – little happened in Chrétien’s first two years and he rather complacently awaited events in Quebec. Before the referendum campaign began, all polls showed that a sovereignty vote would fail. The federal government had no strategy, and Daniel Johnson was not a strong or aggressive Liberal leader within Quebec. Chrétien relied on the completely unqualified public works minister, Alfonso Gagliano, to advise the cabinet of his desultory polling and lethargic preparations. On June 12, 1995, Parizeau, Bouchard, and Action Démocratique (ADQ) leader Mario Dumont supported and signed an agreement on the desirability of common political and economic institutions with the rest of Canada. The Reform Party’s shadow minister for federal-provincial matters, future prime minister Stephen Harper, declared that his party and Western Canada, which his party represented, had no interest in any such arrangements.
Parizeau announced the referendum question on September 7, calling the vote for October 30. The question was “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?” The bill and the agreement were the updated successors of Lévesque’s wheeze of fifteen years before about sovereignty-association. A “yes” vote was an authorization to work out something better for Quebec, but the sucker punch was that if Ottawa didn’t agree to whatever Quebec was offering, the government of Quebec would declare its independence and purport to be independent. Confident that the sovereigntists were going nowhere, Chrétien and his inner circle sat on their hands and had no contingency plans if things heated up. Given what was at stake, it was an attitude of negligent passivity.
Quebec had never, and did not in the future, take to Jean Chrétien with any enthusiasm, and he was not a strong or instinctively well-endowed leader for this kind of battle. It was fairly tranquil for a few weeks, and then the discouragement of the angry “yes” committee in Quebec caused a putsch: Lucien Bouchard was named negotiator-in-chief for Quebec in the event of a victory, which put him in charge of the campaign, and Parizeau was effectively emasculated and sacked.
Lucien Bouchard, Mulroney’s university chum, who had broken bitterly with him after Meech Lake, was a brilliant and passionate man who immediately electrified the campaign. He had recently had a near-death encounter with a freakish flesh-eating bacterial infection that cost him the amputation of a leg, and he embarked on the last three weeks of the “yes” campaign across Quebec with a great reservoir of public sympathy. He was a committed and strenuous man who knew as well as Lévesque and Duplessis had how to pitch to the underdog pride and pugnacity of the Québécois. He was from an even more remote corner of Quebec than Chrétien was (Chicoutimi, rather than Shawinigan), and he carried an ark of resentments that had some racial overtones, though they were mainly of economic exploitation of the Québécois by English-speaking commerce. (He certainly had no grievance against any individual on ethnic or cultural grounds, and his wife was an American.) But he exploited the resentments of many Quebec Liberals at Chrétien’s opposition (in emulation of Trudeau) to Meech Lake, and he took up the cry of Lévesque that Quebec had been betrayed by the Gang of Eight and Trudeau and Chrétien in 1982, even appearing on television with a false cover of Le Journal de Québec purporting to show Trudeau and Chrétien laughing at Lévesque in 1981. The h
eadline was “Quebec Betrayed by Its Allies,” and Bouchard sharply stated, “Mr. Chrétien, you won’t pull the same trick on us twice.” It was very effective. Bouchard was a firebrand and an evocative speaker who suddenly enflamed every reservation the Québécois had ever had about their status in Canada, and he was diabolically well-qualified, with a powerful up-country inflection, except with a more sophisticated vocabulary than Chrétien, standing on crutches and speaking of the completion of centuries of hope and sacrifice, yet all of it on a simple question that polls showed many Québécois thought was just a mandate for a better deal. In the “yes” posters, the o in “oui” was the Canadian dollar coin. Eat the cake, and you will still have it in front of you.
The whole atmosphere was suddenly one of pent-up tension, with extreme resentment requiring resolution on one side, and on the other side a lingering non-confidence that came only very late to a realization of great danger. The tension and antagonism obscured the logical wisdom that no clear-cut outcome was likely.
In the last few days, Chrétien and his entourage, especially his heavy-handed chief assistant, Jean Pelletier, panicked, and Chrétien almost broke down in front of 170 MPs of his caucus on October 25. Where in 1980 there had been unity between Trudeau, Ryan, and Chrétien, and a complete absence of overconfidence, there was now general disunion and mutual disrespect between the federal and provincial Liberal parties, neither of which had the upper hand at its political echelon in Quebec, and the leadership was in a state of terror. There were elements of farce, as there usually are in Quebec votes. On October 26, disc jockey Pierre Brassard telephoned Queen Elizabeth pretending to be Chrétien and asked her to make a speech supporting a “no” vote. She said she would and that he should send a proposed text. (It did not hold the queen up to ridicule; she was sensible and was entitled to take the advice of the prime minister. The London Daily Mirror then hired someone to dress up as a red-coated Mountie and enter Brassard’s radio studio and arrest him for affronting the sovereign.) On October 27, Bouchard sent a press release to all military installations in Quebec saying that in a few days Quebec would be setting up its own military. Paul Martin gave speeches in the province warning of the cost to Quebec of independence; the defence minister, David Collenette, evacuated RCAF fighter planes from Quebec to ensure that they did not become entangled in any power play by Bouchard. There was a large unity rally of between 50,000 and 150,000 people in Montreal, and Chrétien gave a somewhat fearful but clearly earnest televised address extolling Canada and offering, implausibly at this point, some unspecified concessions to Quebec apart from restoration of its constitutional veto, and urging caution in a series of paragraphs ending with the exhortation “Think of this before going to vote to break it [Canada] up.” It wasn’t strong, but it was not entirely unpersuasive, and it seemed that the two sides may finally have frightened and aroused some of Quebec’s bourgeois susceptibilities. As the campaign ended, all polls showed it was a toss-up.
Ninety-four per cent of Quebeckers voted on October 30. When the votes were counted, it was 2,308,360 “yes” and 2,362,648 “no”; 50.58 per cent for the federalist side to 49.42 for the separatists. It is unlikely that even a modest “yes” victory would have led to more than a few federal concessions and then a serious campaign, bringing back Trudeau, Mulroney, Ryan, and others, massively financed, to prevail upon Quebec to reconsider. Jacques Parizeau imputed the result to English money and the ethnic vote, a statement that he later regretted, and resigned as premier of Quebec. Bouchard was acclaimed as his replacement. Bouchard had raised the soufflé, but he still couldn’t win, even against a terribly inept campaign, and shaken from their torpor the federalists finally played their high card. Chrétien treated the victory as if it were a decisive rejection of the separatists, but shifted the argument to the illegitimacy of a razor-thin plurality on a vague question. Here he had the separatists by the windpipe, and had, by the narrowest of margins, again broken their momentum. The day after the referendum, Chrétien told a Toronto Liberal meeting that such a crisis would never happen again.
As if to illustrate that the federalists were not completely free of their propensity to accidents, a fuming separatist, André Dallaire, broke into the prime minister’s residence in the middle of the night intending to cut Chrétien’s throat but was detected by Aline Chrétien, who awakened her husband after locking their bedroom door. While Dallaire bumbled around looking for the prime minister’s bedroom, Chrétien stood in night attire with an Inuit sculpture in his hand as a cosh and waited interminably for the RCMP, whom he had telephoned, to arrive. Dallaire was disarmed, and the episode wasn’t publicly taken too seriously, but it added to the indignity of the whole sequence of events.
Chrétien was still in a daze as he set out to give Quebec back its right of veto. He aimed at a constitutional amendment, which under the existing arrangements required seven provinces, and tried to line up six and then snooker Bouchard by inviting him to be the seventh. But Ontario’s new Conservative premier, Mike Harris, balked, which would deprive Chrétien of the 50 per cent of the population required, unless Bouchard agreed. He then proposed a regional veto for Ontario, Quebec, the West, and the Atlantic provinces. British Columbia demanded its own veto, and the squabbling of what Duplessis had called for years the “circonférences” started up again. Eventually, Chrétien gave way to British Columbia’s demand and the reinstatement of Quebec’s veto was made, not in the Constitution, but by the revocable method of a parliamentary resolution, along with a vague statement that Quebec was a “distinct society” and some changes to jurisdiction over labour training. Bouchard dismissed it as tokenistic window dressing, and for once in federal-provincial matters was fairly accurate. There was a good deal of non-confidence in Chrétien at this point, though he had no difficulty holding his heavy parliamentary majority.
Jean Charest, who had replaced Kim Campbell as the leader of the federal Progressive Conservative Party and its caucus of two people, violently criticized Chrétien’s inept performance as leader of the federalist forces in Quebec, and Preston Manning, the senior figure in the unofficial opposition, implied that Chrétien had lost his senses and publicly advised the governor general, Ramon Hnatyshyn, to be ready to change prime ministers within the Liberal Party. This was going too far, but it was indicative of the severity of Chrétien’s inadequacy in the latter stages of the crisis that arose in the referendum because of his own mismanagement. Such a shambles is unimaginable under most of his recent predecessors. Such counterattack as there was came from some of the native peoples’ groups in Quebec, which announced that if Quebec seceded from Canada, they would secede from Quebec and remain in Canada. Chrétien, at least oratorically, took this up, and it was awkward for Bouchard and his colleagues to deal with it. At the start of 1996, Chrétien brought into his cabinet academic Stéphane Dion (b. 1955), a rigorous intellectual federalist (and son of noted academic Léon Dion, who styled himself “a tired federalist”; in that milieu, federalism would take what it could get), and Montreal lawyer Pierre Pettigrew. They weren’t Trudeau, Marchand, and Pelletier, but they had sight in a valley of the unseeing.
Everything went quiet, Chrétien had no particular idea what to do, and Bouchard had no more initiatives to take. Martin continued to manage down the deficit, and the principal issue in Ottawa in 1996 was the allegation, in a letter from a Justice Department official to a Swiss analogue, that Brian Mulroney had taken a five-million-dollar bribe in the acquisition of Airbus planes by Air Canada, and requesting the opening up of Mulroney’s bank account in Switzerland. Mulroney sued for fifty million dollars for libel and there was a considerable controversy, which in 1997 led to an admission that the Justice Department could not dispute Mulroney’s word that he had no bank account in Switzerland and had not accepted one cent in respect of the $1.8 billion Airbus contract. The charge was withdrawn and more than two million dollars was paid to the former prime minister. It was eventually revealed that the RCMP’s entire authority for pr
ompting such a letter from the Justice Department to a foreign government was from the rabidly anti-Mulroney Globe and Mail reporter Stevie Cameron (who published a book in which Mulroney was censored even for accepting a box of Oreo cookies from an old friend who was the head of the company that manufactured them). Justice minister Allan Rock tried to allege that Mulroney had released the defamatory letter, and Chrétien claimed to know nothing of it. The whole affair was an unmitigated disgrace, and Mulroney, who took congratulatory calls from many world leaders when the charge against him was withdrawn, declined to take a call from Chrétien, and apart from the merest pleasantries when necessary the two have not spoken since. The RCMP continued their investigation for six years before abandoning it, and there was never any official statement of apology to Mulroney. With a fragmented opposition, Canadians soon had reason to appreciate the problems of a one-party state.
In international affairs, Canadian peacekeepers were found to have tortured a Somali to death, whereupon even senior officials had gone to considerable lengths to cover it up; the government made a ludicrous shambles of the GST, which it had pledged to repeal but now retained; and it paid sixty million dollars to a Conservative consortium when it arbitrarily cancelled the contract to privatize Toronto’s Pearson Airport. The government simply shut down the three-person commission it had set up to study Somalia in order for Chrétien, for no reason, and with no issue and no program, to hold an election barely halfway through his mandate, an election he could not lose against four squabbling opposition parties. (The government fired General Jean Boyle, chief of the Defence Staff, and considered the Somalia matter closed.)