Spicer was highly attuned to media and wanted television to be a part of his travelling circus. He himself was superb on television, a master ad-libber, capable of saying things like “I’d like to make four points” and then actually making four. He could quote from Shakespeare, Euripides, and Dizzy Dean. He was equally comfortable in French as in English. He liked the camera. He was hardly an ordinary Canadian himself, yet he assumed that televised town hall meetings would draw out the thoughts of everyday people and that a little community centre or church basement could somehow, magically, be electronically transformed into a huge meetin’ tent that would cover the entire country.
Spicer did not, at least not at this point, understand the ordinary Canadian. One bright light, one camera, one earplug connecting these people by satellite to some distant interviewer and they instantly changed. Rather than say what they thought, they’d say what they thought they should be saying, what the interviewer wanted to hear. Instead of the anger pouring through, reason seemed the order of the day. On television they sounded tolerant, reasonable, hopeful, resigned; off camera, and in the sessions where no cameras showed up, they seethed, they accused, they threatened, they swore to avenge and punish those politicians who’d been involved in the whole sorry process leading up to the Meech Lake debacle. Ontario premier David Peterson had already paid the price; others would follow. Even the prime minister would have the sense to bail before daring to face such wrath.
Commissioner 13 argued that the televised town hall meetings were a disaster and not at all reflective of what people were feeling. What television—particularly the then-powerful CBC news program The Journal— had done, even if inadvertently, was create a third official language that Commissioner 13 took to calling “BarbaraSpeak” after Barbara Frum, then the most recognizable news media personality in the nation. People spoke as if they were on stage.
The commissioners swept across the country. Hardly a night went by when there wasn’t a meeting somewhere. They met to talk about the meaning of Canada, the current state of Confederation, the Constitution. They discussed how they might fix things through everything from senate reform to a full Constitutional Assembly that would start from scratch to redesign this bumbling bumblebee called Canada.
There were official meetings and unofficial meetings, meetings in people’s houses over wine and cheese, meetings in community centres over tea and those little multicoloured crustless sandwiches that seem as much a part of church life as Sunday prayer. And it worked.
In Brandon, 472 people showed up to talk to Spicer. The crowd was so large that organizers came up with a rather novel, made-in-Canada scheme to deal with the situation.
They brought in uniformed Canadian Tire cashiers to act as ushers.
BETWEEN MEETINGS and panel discussions, Commissioner 13 stopped in across the country to visit with various touchstones of its history.
In Quebec City I visited the Ursuline convent to check what was going on in the head of the Marquis of Montcalm, the last man to declare this North American turf French rather than English property. Only a short walk away, on an early September day in 1759, the English under the command of James Wolfe scaled the cliffs overlooking the St. Lawrence River and moved on to the Plains of Abraham. There they encountered the French defenders and, following a volley that lasted all of fifteen minutes, Wolfe lay dying in the grass, the wounded Montcalm was being carried off to be hidden in the fort, and that great can of worms that would become Canada’s “two founding nations” was opened.
Montcalm died the following morning despite the Ursuline sisters’ best efforts. For reasons that baffle, the sisters held on to his skull, and to this day they display it, yellowed and toothless, in a glass case beside the chapel. On the stand holding the glass case is a typed note that instead of lamenting Montcalm’s shortened life attacks the King of France for abandoning the people of Quebec following his death. Four years after that pivotal battle on the Plains of Abraham, France and England agreed to end their long war. When the King of France was asked what parts of the New World he most valued he immediately listed Santo Domingo, Martinique, and Guadeloupe, three sugar-bearing islands that appealed to his sweet tooth far more than the deep snow of New France.
That’s hardly surprising, given that France was well on the way to giving up its stake in the New World anyway. Fur was one thing, but was beginning to wind down as stocks thinned and fashion changed. Champlain had always believed that enormous mineral wealth—gold and diamonds—would one day be found in the rough terrain beyond the riverbanks, but his promises had proved so empty that in Paris “false as a diamond in Canada” had become a popular phrase.
“He let the Canadians down,” the Ursuline sister who typed the note had written of the King who loved cane sugar better than maple syrup.
Now, 232 years later, it seemed a remark worth mentioning again— though this time it had nothing whatsoever to do with the King of France.
ON THE BANKS of the South Saskatchewan River on a fine spring day that tortured year, Commissioner 13 went to sit by the grave of John Diefenbaker. Diefenbaker should be the patron saint of all politicians: six straight electoral defeats, then victory, then the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, then prime minister of Canada, then the largest majority victory of the time in the 1958 general election. He would never again rise so high.
Diefenbaker had always been larger than life, with his thundering oratory, the shaking jowls, the searing stare, the scalpel wit, the enormous flaws and, of course, the outrageous ego. Because his wife, Olive, also buried here on the university side of the river that cuts through Saskatoon, had once taught school in the small Ontario town I came from, he was always open to a visit. I would go to his office in Ottawa long after his fall from leadership and listen to him carve, brilliantly, all those who dared succeed him. His death in 1979—only a few weeks after the return of his party to power since his own glory days—had been a national event, his personally planned funeral train easily the rival of the train that carried Pierre Trudeau back to Montreal.
For most of an afternoon I sat by the tomb and watched visitors come and go. They came from all across the country, including his own Prince Albert riding. They were young enough not to remember him at all and old enough to remember, vividly, the way he had once fired the Canadian imagination with his powerful rhetoric.
Those who came to the Diefenbaker Centre said it brought back old memories to visit the gravesite and tour through the small museum with its election posters, photographs, and speeches. To them Diefenbaker was a leader, and today there were no leaders. To them Diefenbaker was a Canada that looked ahead with confidence, not a Canada that looked back with regret.
“It’s just not the same any more,” Tom McCloy said as his granddaughter ran shrieking about the grounds, oblivious to the gravesite of the former prime minister. “There’s just no respect. Changing times, I guess. I don’t know.…”
McCloy once had a farm in Diefenbaker’s riding. He and his wife had once ridden in the local fair parade with the man they still called “The Chief.” They were no different from most other Canadians encountered during the months of the Spicer Commission, deploring the state this seemingly fragile country had allowed itself to fall into.
With McCloy as an eager guide, I walked through the museum, staring at photographs of Diefenbaker with the likes of American president John F. Kennedy and French president Charles de Gaulle; Diefenbaker standing on the back platform of a train staring out at a sea of faces that were the “ordinary Canadians” of the time, though never so insultingly called that. Back then, however, it seemed to those faces smiling back that the country was coming together. Now, to those faces frowning down at the photographs, it seemed it was breaking apart.
“This is a time for greatness,” Diefenbaker thundered in one speech prominently displayed at the museum. “National unity requires it.”
On scratchy black-and-white video, the speech was riveting
to a visitor in early 1991. “The object of Confederation,” Dief shouted, “was not to produce Siamese twins in this nation…. We are in a national crisis. National goals will never be attained by following uncertain courses designed to secure immediate advantage.…
“… We need to instill in every Canadian the spirit of Sir George-Étienne Cartier. ‘Before all, let’s be Canadians’ …
“… What has the nation done for an ordinary person like me? What can it do for those who are prepared to devote themselves? Your Canada, my Canada. I give you a line from a young Canadian poet, Stephen Smith, who died in Montreal in 1964. He left a memorable line worthy of Rupert Brooke: ‘Canada should be a reflection of God’s eyes.’”
It was a truly remarkable speech. And it was delivered, history requires me to point out, at the convention that tossed out John Diefenbaker as party leader.
COMMISSIONER 13 also stopped in on the living.
In Edmonton, it was to spend a day with Fil Fraser, the human rights activist and filmmaker who was one of Spicer’s eleven commissioners on the Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future—or, as Fraser preferred to call it, the “Yo-Yo Commission.” One day up, one day down; one day filled with hope, one day filled with despair.
In his opinion, what the Spicer Commission had done, if nothing else, was show that “a quiet revolution was going on in the country.” The immediate anger that flashed across the nation after the accord failed—complete with “Impeach Mulroney” bumper stickers—was merely the opening salvo in a battle still being played out nearly a year later.
“Maybe people aren’t marching in the streets,” Fraser said as he slipped his black Jaguar through the Edmonton traffic, “but the amount of emotional energy being expended is similar.”
Fraser conceded that he’d fallen into a pit of despair over the country. As little as three weeks earlier he’d admitted to himself, and then to those closest to him, that the country was finished, done, over with. But then, he said, came the beginnings of a “sea change.” The national venting was having an effect, and a good effect.
“If I had to tell you when I realized how important it was,” Fraser told me over lunch, “I’d pick the time I went into northern Saskatchewan. I flew in to Île-à-la-Crosse, the most unbelievably beautiful but poverty-stricken place you ever saw. The village is all Natives and Métis. They used to run traplines but now there’s no point, the fur industry is dead. They used to fish, but now the fish are mostly gone. They’ve got 80 percent unemployment and third world birth rates.
“We sat in a circle and they handed around an eagle feather. Whoever held it got to speak. It took three hours and they just spilled their guts on the floor. One young man said he was going to burn down the whole northern forest because he had nothing to lose. Old people talked about there being nothing for the young but welfare and despair.
“When it was over they came up one by one and some of them shook my hand, but most of them hugged me. Hugged me. And you know what they told me? They said, ‘Go and tell them.’ …
“We’re going to do that. We’re going to tell what people said. Not how many people said this or how many people said that—but what they said. We’re going to say what we really heard….”
SINCE THE FUTURE of Quebec was a central focus—the theory being that, having been snubbed by the accord’s collapse, Quebeckers would now choose to go their own way—Spicer was keen to head straight into the province and find out what “ordinary Quebeckers” were thinking. Wearing his signature trench coat and wide-brimmed black German fedora—looking more as if he was tromping around the set for Casablanca than Canada—Spicer took his commission into the Saguenay, straight to the heart of bluet country where the sovereigntist movement had long been strongest. On a radio talk show he was asked what he’d gained by bringing the topic of Canadian unity there. Spicer considered a moment, placed a finger over his mouth, then lifted his hand away and held his finger almost tight to his thumb. “About two millimetres,” he said.
It might have been a generous estimation. The province was in turmoil and paid scant attention to the Citizens’ Forum. It seemed that every day produced a new idea, each new one banging its head against the rising prospects of an independent Quebec.
One man was proposing the “corridor option.” It would allow most of the province of Quebec to go its own way while providing for a superhighway running south of the St. Lawrence between the Ontario border and New Brunswick. Surrounding this wide ribbon of highway would be a preserved corridor considered part of Canada.
A political movement calling itself the Equality Party was pushing for the creation of “The Republic of Laurentia.” This idea would have Quebec returning to its tiny New France borders as they existed before the 1759 Conquest.
Another group wanted to create “The West Island Nation,” a sort of Luxembourg that would hold the West Island of Montreal where most of the Anglos, most of the businesses, and much of the money were to be found.
The grand schemes went both ways, of course, and included a suggestion by a sitting member of Parliament, Pierrette Venne, that Quebec take over Labrador from the huge land mass that is the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. To her it seemed a sensible idea, given that Quebec had already developed the Churchill Falls hydroelectric project in the region. This suggestion, no surprise, outraged the people of Newfoundland and Labrador, who have long railed against the controversial deal that allowed Quebec to dam the Churchill and profit, enormously, from selling the electricity of Newfoundland and Labrador to the New England states.
Then there were the Cree of James Bay, talking about their own separation from Quebec should Quebec try to separate from Canada….
And all this nattering and threatening, of course, didn’t even get to the burgeoning topic of Western separation. The farther west Spicer ventured, the greater the fury he encountered over whatever it was Canadians believed had happened when Meech was hammered out behind closed doors.
The sense was growing fast that, under such pounding traffic, the line down the centre of the road could not possibly hold.
I’D CREATED THE COMMISSIONER 13 persona as a lark, thinking that if it got a laugh that was enough. But soon it was getting much, much more. This was a time of faxes and old-fashioned telephones that people actually answered, and Commissioner 13 began receiving inside material and inside calls. Spicer would later say in Life Sentences that Commissioner 13 had somehow “become nationally known as the Forum’s ultimate, well-informed quasi-insider.” I can’t say who was passing on the details only because the list was so long it would make “insider information” sound ludicrous. It seemed as though everyone was involved, from the highest level to the lowest. But those working for the commission had noted the same phenomenon as I had: the ordinary Canadian was in an absolute shitfit about the state of the country and that fact wasn’t coming across in the media, which had pretty much dismissed the commission and Spicer altogether.
In late winter the commission produced an interim report. It touched on the fuming resentment toward politicians but gave little indication of which way the final report would go. There was obviously a split in the Forum’s office. There was also a split among the commissioners, with some wishing to gloss matters over in favour of the government that had appointed them and a very few others determined that the truth get out as to how outraged so many Canadians were about the conduct of the governments they had elected. Spicer himself often seemed to be waffling. Members of his own staff weren’t sure which way he was leaning and several were desperately prodding him to go the distance.
These were among the people who wanted Commissioner 13 to keep the coals tight to Spicer’s heels. There were rumours, widely believed, that Spicer had been offered the ambassadorship to France if he played along and reported back, mildly, that ordinary Canadians had vented their anger and were now feeling much better for it, thank you very much. Spicer had once lived in France, was a known Francophile, and in fact would later
return to live in Paris, so the rumour certainly had legs. In his memoirs, published fourteen years later, Spicer would recount a telephone conversation with the prime minister in which he said Mulroney promised him any embassy he wished—“just name it and we’ll work out whatever you like.” Spicer says he politely told the prime minister “Thanks, but I don’t really want anything. Let’s just get on with the job.”
By now Commissioner 13 had turned into something never intended and certainly never expected. What had begun as a small joke had become something of a small political force—certainly within the Forum.
But also beyond the Forum, all the way to the Prime Minister’s Office. A friend who was tight with Mulroney passed along a memorandum from the PMO in which it was clear that the column was getting to someone. A handwritten note given to the prime minister had suggested that a backward check of Citizen archives could produce a number of older MacGregor columns that would show his political judgment in a bad light. Attached to the memorandum was a November 9, 1988, column in which I’d written that the Mulroney campaign was stumbling over the free trade issue—the suggestion being that the column looked pretty silly when the Conservatives had gone on to win a second majority. The prime minister himself had signed the memo, adding “This is for P&P on Monday”—meaning a three-year-old column was about to be discussed at cabinet’s Priorities and Planning Committee, the most powerful decision-making body in the land.
Surely the country had rather more pressing matters requiring attention. The pressure on Spicer was mounting, and it was beginning to look as if he might buckle. It was undeniable—even if France wasn’t in the works—that he could personally benefit by largely clearing the government name on this file. Spicer had always been both iconoclast and survivor, and it seemed now that those two elements were running at cross-purposes. If he chose to gloss over the anger as a sort of temporary venting he’d lose the respect of a great many close to him, but if he went the other way and reported, accurately, the deep disenchantment of ordinary Canadians he might lose his own future prospects—something anyone entering the last decade of a career would surely consider. Spicer was fifty-seven and the stress was telling. He was eating poorly and drinking too much. His assistant, Barbara Ursel, forced him to see a doctor, who wanted to hospitalize him for “burnout” and advised him to stop working for a two-year period. Hardly something Spicer wanted to hear with only two months left before he’d have to report. Instead he promised to cut back quietly, go for a daily walk, and restrict his red wine intake to two glasses—as he put it, “minimum and maximum.”
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