Canadians

by Roy MacGregor

  Spicer was a genuine eccentric, equally capable of telling an off-colour joke as quoting Shakespeare at length. He could be charmingly and impossibly absent-minded. He’d hired me at the Ottawa Citizen four years earlier and, two weeks after the lunch that sealed the deal, did not know who I was when I showed up for work. He could play, by ear, dozens of national anthems on the piano. He was so devoted to an old floppy-eared mutt that, when it lost the ability to climb, he carried the dog in his arms up and down the stairs to his Sandy Hill apartment so that it could relieve itself several times a day. Spicer showed up at the Citizen office wearing a safari suit; he insisted on spending time in every possible facet of the paper; he once asked for a Greek headline over his own weekly column; and he basically gave everyone at the paper his or her own head to the point where it was openly questioned whether he himself even read the publication.

  No matter; for some of us he could not have been a better boss— endlessly enthusiastic, open to any suggestion at all, no matter how expensive or how ludicrous. In many ways the newspaper thrived as never before, particularly after Spicer brought in the impossible-to-putup-with, impossible-to-put-down Marjorie Nichols as his main political columnist. He gave the paper a presence that stretched far beyond the bright yellow rural paper boxes of the Ottawa Valley.

  Spicer had then moved on from the Citizen to chair the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the government’s arm’s-length broadcast regulator. He was a surprise choice to head up the new Citizens’ Forum. Some said it was inspired—if Spicer was anything, he was unpredictable—and some said it was a ploy, Spicer having been largely predisposed toward the Mulroney government while editor and having left for a government appointment at the CRTC.

  Spicer himself would later write in Life Sentences, his 2004 memoir, that he was chosen for being the only high-profile Ottawa type “crazy enough” to take on such a “bizarre adventure.”

  “Bizarre” would be a fair, if somewhat inadequate, description of what was to come.

  Twelve commissioners were named to the Forum, with Spicer serving as chair and the other eleven representing the various regional concerns and special interests. The general notion, deliberately loose right from the opening announcement, was that the Forum would travel across the nation to listen to Canadians talk about their country and then take that message back to the federal government.

  It would be a psychological report on the general state of a depressed nation.

  It wasn’t the first time such an analysis had been attempted. Following the shocking election of a sovereigntist government in Quebec on November 15, 1976, Ottawa had established a task force on unity headed by former cabinet minister Jean-Luc Pépin and former Ontario premier John Robarts. The report, which took months to prepare and cost millions, argued in favour of a classic federation, with constitutional recognition of Quebec’s francophone reality and the extension of increased powers to all provincial governments. Critics tagged it a “dog’s breakfast.” Robarts himself had all but admitted defeat, claiming “It was the best we could get.” The government of the day ignored it.

  The announcement of the Forum was met with ridicule by those in the media who, by dint of time and station, had themselves become part of the very elite that had misread the country over the Meech Lake Accord. The Citizens’ Forum was cast as just another foolish government venture to make it appear to be in touch; Spicer was ridiculed as too goofy to be taken seriously and too beholden to be feared. He would, if anything, produce a highly literate report that would become the parliamentary equivalent of War and Peace—unread even by those who meant to read it.

  I have my own admission here. I chose the sneering route at the start and laughed continually at the commission that began with Spicer heading north in search of “poetry.” I started calling myself “Commissioner 13” and wrote columns that were intended to look like inter-office memos, Commissioner 13 sending briefing notes to the Chairman.

  Knowing Spicer’s freely admitted interest in women, particularly busty women, I early on supplied him with a list of strippers on their way to Ottawa—Busty Brittany and her 52EEs heading for Gypsy Rose’s, L.A. Bust (65-22-32) coming to Barbarella’s—and then compared those breasts with the far-less-endowed strippers working the capital in the weeks leading up to June 23, 1990, the day the Meech Lake Accord died. I think I made some ridiculous point about insecurity or something, but looking back at the column today I cringe to imagine what I was thinking, if anything at all. Sometimes columnists get desperate—perhaps that explains it as well as anything.

  The Forum did not begin well, either. A Quebec commissioner resigned. A prospective British Columbia commissioner, well-known television broadcaster Jack Webster, bailed, claiming he was too busy with “other commitments.” Spicer convened an early closed-door session with a government pollster that seemed to go against the very spirit of the Forum and then unadvisedly told the media that “I don’t think Canadians give a damn about how we organize our meetings.” Perhaps not, but the media sure did. There were instant rumours of disorganization and ballooning costs, which Spicer himself had joked would fall “somewhere between a shoestring and an orgy.”

  Spicer’s hope that volunteers would take over the Forum fizzled as federal “facilitators” and commissioners jockeyed for power. He set off, alone, for Tuktoyaktuk in the Northwest Territories and happened to tell Robert Matas, the Globe reporter along for the ride, that he’d prepared for this trip into the Far North by reading Inuit poetry, which led to a frenzy of satirical editorial cartoons and an inept attempt by Spicer to fight back by spouting doggerel that no one seemed to find very funny in such a serious time.

  None of the media slagging came as any great surprise to those of us who’d worked with Spicer, but this talk had none of the delight in it that our banter had had at the Citizen. It was malicious. I myself wrote, two weeks into the commission, that already “the wheels have all but fallen off.”

  The Forum seemed to have crashed before takeoff. Spicer was fortunate that Canada had no late-night talk show equivalent or Canadians would have not only chuckled at the latest Forum fiasco story in their morning papers but gone to bed laughing at him too.

  “I thought I was singing ‘This Land Is My Land,’” Spicer would later remark, but “media and public heard the theme from Looney Tunes.” Things got so bad that he came within a whisker of quitting and starting up his own, non-government-connected volunteer Forum.

  But then, slowly, matters began to change. David Broadbent, a senior public servant with impeccable organizational skills, came in as executive director. Laurier LaPierre, an excellent communicator, took on the task of training moderators. Patrick Gossage, once Trudeau’s press secretary, came in to talk publicity and planning. And Spicer himself hired on some gifted advisers and writers, among them Martin O’Malley, one of the country’s best magazine writers; Nicole Bourget, who’d worked with Spicer at the CRTC; and Nancy Gall, a woman with sharp mind, tongue, and sense of humour who’d worked for Spicer at the Citizen.

  There was such a good reaction to the “Commissioner 13” columns that they began to appear throughout the wide Southam chain stretching from Montreal to Vancouver (though not, significantly, in Toronto, the national media centre, where Southam had no paper). The papers decided to send me on the road and essentially cover the commission full time until Spicer would table his final report the following June.

  It was an education the likes of which I couldn’t possibly have imagined. We began in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, the oft-called “Cradle of Confederation”—even though the island would initially have nothing to do with Canada’s creation in 1867. When the future Fathers of Confederation held their first conference there in 1864, Charlottetown was, in the words of one historian, “a small, isolated, violent little bailiwick” too caught up in its own infighting and petty politics to care about the larger picture.

  When they met again in London two years
later, P.E.I. was in such a sulk about the way negotiations had gone it didn’t even bother to attend. And when it finally did join in 1873—striking an astounding deal that guaranteed this tiny enclave would forever enjoy four members of Parliament and four senate seats—it was only out of economic necessity. Without federal help the island was headed for bankruptcy thanks to overspending on railways. Still, there was no sense of going cap-in-hand to Ottawa. When the governor general of the moment, Lord Dufferin, came to check out the latest addition to the growing confederacy, he wrote to Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald that “I found the island in a high state of jubilation and quite under the impression that it is the Dominion that has been annexed to Prince Edward.”

  Those who came to Charlottetown early in 1991 to sit in the cradle and talk about the current state of this aging confederation were, like the original gatherers, mostly older and completely white. They did include an equal number of women, however, whereas none had been present in 1864. That first Charlottetown Conference had its twenty-two participants sit around a mahogany table in a room that remains largely unchanged since those times and has long been a major P.E.I. tourist attraction. Sharon Larter, the provincial guide working that day, told Spicer that, since the Meech fiasco she’d seen Canadians stand and weep in that room, some even getting down on their knees to pray.

  It had been a tough few years for Canadians. The bumblebee was on its back. The economy was sour, the deficit soaring. The Mulroney government had brought in free trade and the GST, much to the outrage of many. Wayne Gretzky had been sold to a hockey team operating out of Hollywood, the Canadian dollar was slipping and, of course, the Meech Lake Accord had upset ordinary Canadians more than all the above combined. No wonder they were falling to their knees in Charlottetown.

  The Canadians who came this cold evening listened politely as Spicer made some opening remarks about the aim of the Forum and then let them know he hadn’t come to talk but to listen, and that they should feel free to express themselves. After all, it was their country. One participant practically spit, telling Spicer that Canada had become “a disgusting example of a nation” that couldn’t be bothered talking or listening to its own people. Another participant, an elderly man, stood up to tell Spicer he personally could not see what the fuss was all about if Quebec left— “sure as heck shorten up the drive to Toronto.”

  It is difficult now, looking back sixteen years, to accept the near utter despondency of those who came out to this first formal session of Spicer’s Forum. One bespectacled, grey-haired seventy-six-year-old blueberry farmer, who had served as premier of this, the smallest province, from 1979 to 1981, wanted it known that, in his considered opinion, “We’ve been hoodwinked into thinking the Fathers of Confederation did a very good job.”

  He pointed off toward a far wall: “I know there’s a plaque over there saying that, but I think they did a very poor job. I’d have to say, in hindsight, the Fathers of Confederation botched it.”

  Angus MacLean, of course, could not be numbered among the “ordinary Canadians” Spicer was seeking out. But Bonnie Howatt could be, and she’d let her sentiments be known even as she worked her way past the former premier to take a seat nearer the front.

  “Evening, Angus.”

  “Evening, Bonnie.”

  “Oh my God but things are in a terrible state, Angus, are they not?”

  “Yes, they are.”

  The quiet, polite people of Prince Edward Island could not possibly represent all the other citizens in Canada, but this first sense of a “terrible state” held for the entire length of the Forum and the breadth of the country. Canada, in the minds of most of those who turned out, was either going to hell in a handbasket or was already there, the handbasket nothing but smouldering ash.

  During the nine months of the Spicer Commission it seemed that everywhere people looked they saw signs indicating the very end of the country. The Hudson’s Bay Company decided to get out of the fur business. Renowned Canadians who passed on included literary scholar Northrop Frye, the great mind that once asked “Where is here?”; Eugene Forsey, the constitutional expert and inveterate letter-to-the-editor writer who served as conscience to the nation; former Newfoundland premier Joey Smallwood, the last living Father of Confederation; Roland Michener, the governor general who had once so inspired Canadians; and Hugh MacLennan, the novelist who made “Two Solitudes” part of the Canadian lexicon and left this world as bleak as, perhaps even bleaker than, Bruce Hutchison would be about the country’s future prospects that wet day in Victoria.

  The real Meech Lake, high in the Gatineau Hills overlooking the capital, might be filled with clear, cold water, but the paper Meech Lake held nothing but poison. Quebec was leaving, institutions were falling, faith was evaporating, and the end was nigh—a half hour later in Newfoundland.

  “Like a dying person clinging desperately to the life he knows,” the Charlottetown Guardian (“Covers Prince Edward Island Like the Dew”) had editorialized the snowy day Spicer rolled into town, “Canadians have sunk their claws into a nation of the past, and perhaps even of the imagination….” A letter to the editor wanted Mulroney charged for what he’d brought about. A wire story carried a survey claiming that Canadians were so anxiety ridden over the state of their frail nation that they’d stopped having sex.

  This sense of apocalypse—almost comical looking back—could be found everywhere during 1991, even on the bestseller lists, where the summer’s top-selling book was on suicide and was bumped off in the fall by a book titled The Betrayal of Canada.

  Canada, it appeared, was ending the second millennium not far removed from those Europeans who’d approached the end of the first with such a sense of Doomsday panic that families took to caves to hide and inventors desperately rushed to create a flying machine that could somehow lift people free of a world about to blow up on them.

  Such is progress.

  FOR TWO HOURS in Charlottetown, with Spicer and the other commissioners listening carefully and periodically scribbling notes to themselves, ordinary Canadians railed against the GST, Quebec language laws, the Oka standoff between Natives and the army, the prime minister, the bungled accord, and even the media.

  The media was out in force for this first meeting, CBC’s The Journal running satellite interviews, all the major papers and all the main columnists poised to comment on what happened when the Spicer Circus came to town—just as another circus, albeit a real one, had been in town 127 years earlier during the original Charlottetown gathering.

  None of the cameras picked up the small bust along one wall of Joseph Howe, an original invitee to the 1864 conference and a journalist who later worked to keep Nova Scotia out of Confederation. Howe eventually became so disenchanted with the idea of this thing called “Canada” that he stopped using the word “Confederation” in his columns and editorials and took to calling it “Botheration.” A year after Confederation actually took place, however—without Prince Edward Island, incidentally— Howe was ready to concede that he’d lost the fight and that harping on against Confederation was as meaningless as “the screams of seagulls around the grave of a dead Indian on the coast of Labrador.”

  There was little doubt that most of the media considered this exercise in Charlottetown just as meaningless. They stifled yawns, whispered among themselves, made plans for a late dinner, and sighed, gratefully, when one of Spicer’s commissioners, Susan Van de Velde, began to close matters down by saying that they’d listened and what they’d heard would not be lost.

  It was at this point that an old man with soaring black-grey eyebrows suddenly took to his feet near the back of the room. He hadn’t said a word all evening but was now determined to be heard. He said he was a farmer from Pownal and a father of twelve. He said he’d been born dirt poor and was still dirt poor. He spoke with an incredible calm and certainty of voice. The entire room stilled as he stood, carefully unfolded his scarf, and placed it around his neck. He was leaving. He put on his coat
and held his gloves in his hand, a man dressed for the cold as he spoke under the hot lights.

  Leo Cannon had a story to tell about his garden. He talked about the magic he feels when he takes a small carrot seed in his huge hands and pokes it down into the soil and how, a few months later, thanks to a lot of care and a little faith, the next time he moves the earth aside it reveals a beautiful, full-grown carrot. That is how you grow a carrot; that is how you should grow a country.

  “The problem with this country,” Leo Cannon wanted the Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future to know, “is that we have lost our faith. This country is morally bankrupt. It’s about money and profit and greed. We are morally bankrupt, and unless we are willing to change, there’s not a hope in hell.”

  And with that he pulled on his gloves and walked away, off into the night where the snow was just beginning to swirl again along Charlottetown’s University Avenue.

  FROM THE OPENING SESSION at Charlottetown to the moment Spicer reported at the end of June 1991, Commissioner 13 trailed after the Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future. After Charlottetown, nothing about the Spicer Commission seemed quite so funny any more. Ordinary Canadians, most so angry they visibly seethed and shook, were being listened to by Spicer and his eleven real commissioners. And these people—most often older, most often white, far more often in one official language than the other—had a great deal to say.

  The ones not usually listening were the media, and it wasn’t entirely the media’s fault. I had noticed before, but it struck me particularly during the Spicer hearings, that Canadians do not speak as themselves when television cameras are around. Perhaps it’s our innate politeness, perhaps our desire to please, perhaps even some genetic connection back to the days when we automatically deferred to authority. Whereas Americans seem eager to reveal, to star in their own fifteen-second movie, Canadians seem keen to conceal, to let stardom remain where, in their minds, it should be—with the television interviewer.