Canadians

by Roy MacGregor

  Through May and the first part of June, Commissioner 13 regularly berated Spicer about following through, about telling the truth, about not letting down the 400,000 ordinary Canadians who’d come into some contact with the Forum. Spicer hadn’t said a word about what he’d found, but already the case against him was building in the media. There were, of course, exceptions—The Globe and Mail’s Michael Valpy, for example— but for the most part the Ottawa media bought into the elite line that Spicer was a bureaucratic joke worthy only of ridicule. They said the expense, a budget of $27.4 million, required its own commission of inquiry. They laughed at his figures; they said the Forum was unscientific (of course it was); they said Spicer was more interested in finding an apartment in Paris than the pulse of a nation he wished to leave behind. They said he’d be offering no solutions, not realizing that solutions had never been part of the mandate. The role of the Forum had been merely to listen—and then to report back.

  As Spicer later revealed in his memoir, the government made sure to get certain discreet messages to him that if he played the game right he could be in line for a nice embassy posting or, as he wrote, a $400,000 golden handshake “which nobody would find out about.” None of this, of course, was ever put in writing. Nor was it ever denied.

  In late June, only days before Spicer was to table this report, Commissioner 13 struck hard, telling Spicer—whom I quite liked and admired—that he had a “sacred pact” with those 400,000 that could not be broken. I advised him to forget the media response because they were only going to laugh anyway. And if there was bound to be widespread knocking because of the Forum’s failures in Quebec, go with them rather than deny them and let it be known that this would be the first time ever that the voice of the Rest of Canada had come through so loudly and so clearly. All Canadians—and this included Quebec and the chortling elite—needed to hear this. Commissioner 13 then supplied his own “minority report.” I said that Keith Spicer knew better than anyone what Canadians were thinking and saying. No matter where he travelled, they told him about their enormous love of the country and enormous outrage toward those supposedly running it. They were aghast at the political behaviour that had come out of Meech Lake. They were ashamed of their political leaders, the prime minister in particular, and they had lost faith in the political process.

  Having been excluded by a process that wanted nothing to do with them, I said, these Canadians wanted in on whatever process might follow. They had no interest in abandoning something that, in their minds, had once worked wonderfully and must be made to work again. I mentioned a short note I’d received that said it all. “Let me put it to you this way,” the handwritten note said. “If Canada dies, then I die.” It was signed “Pete.”

  Spicer’s job, then, was to speak for all the Petes. And Pete lived in every region of the country, was both man and woman, Native and non-Native, new Canadian and old Canadian, young and elderly and everything in between, spoke not only both official languages but several, and when asked by the commission before each session to list the things most treasured about Canada had named medicare first and, to the great surprise of many, but not all, hockey second.

  In the days leading up to Spicer’s scheduled report, there was panic in his office as the chairman seemed to vacillate. The official report had gone to the printer containing two dissenting opinions—one from Quebec publisher Robert Norman, one from Newfoundland union leader Richard Cashin—that largely questioned the validity of the exercise. The report had also found its way into government hands, though it had never been intended to. Some staff members were convinced Spicer had decided to throw caution, and perhaps his own future, to the wind and tell the truth about what he’d heard. Others were equally sure he was going to downplay the anger and suggest it had passed, much like the tantrum of a small child.

  On the day that he was to report, Spicer was said to be carrying two speeches in his jacket pocket, still uncertain which way he’d go in his introductory remarks, though his press secretary, Nicole Bourget, had strongly advised him to ignore the notes he’d been working on and instead just speak “from the heart.” Enough of the official document had been leaked to let people like Michael Valpy know that unless Spicer came through it would end up on that infamous Ottawa shelf that holds hundreds of unread and instantly forgotten commission and parliamentary reports.

  After 241 days of pulse taking and lint sorting, Spicer finally reported on June 27, 1991. The venue, nicely chosen, was the Grand Hall of the Museum of Civilization, a magnificent structure on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River opposite Parliament Hill.

  It could hardly have been a more dramatic setting. Spicer stood nervously on a tall stage in front of the West Coast totem poles, the assembled cameras and media below and, through the vast glass walls opposite, dark clouds gathering over the round Library of Parliament, the sky rumbling and periodically flashing with lightning.

  Spicer’s personal “Chairman’s Foreword,” which he verbally summarized with little use of notes, became the story of the nine-month Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future. The Citizen would headline it as nothing less than the “Scream of a Nation.”

  If Spicer did indeed carry two speeches into the building, he elected to go with the one that would take no prisoners. He laid the blame for what had gone so terribly wrong with this country’s spirit squarely at the door of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

  Spicer’s contribution was a literary Hail Mary Pass, a play kept from the other commissioners when the official report was sent off to the printer— thirty-five hundred words only, but every one lacking the bureaucratic governor that had been applied to the official report.

  Spicer called the current state of the Canadian spirit “a pessimist’s nightmare of hell.” He said “Our democracy is sick. Citizens do not accept their leaders’ legitimacy. This begins with the prime minister, but does not end with him. It includes leaders of the Opposition and provincial leaders.…”

  He warned that Canada had become a country “dying of ignorance, and of our stubborn refusal to learn.” He said Canada faced “twin crises— one of structure, the other more profound and delicate, of the spirit.” He said people were losing the symbols and institutions that made a country and made a country’s people believe in it.

  He even slammed the “consensual editing” of the official report that had muted the degree of fury out there toward the prime minister. Mulroney, Spicer countered, had become a “lightning rod” for all the anger the commission had encountered.

  “From most citizens’ viewpoint,” Spicer went on, “our report lets the PM off too lightly. At least for now, there is a fury in the land against the Prime Minister.” Canadians, he said, had become “the wind that wants a flag.”

  As Spicer finished up the storm broke, thunder and lightning raging over Parliament Hill, rain pelting the high windows of the Grand Hall.

  And then the power went out. The sound system that had carried Spicer’s hot, surging words had blown the circuits.

  IT CAN BE ARGUED that nothing ever came of Spicer’s report. It was tabled, reported on for a few days, raised in Parliament a few times, and then carted off to wherever it is politicians put things they never want to see again.

  But it would be wrong to say it vanished.

  I often think of a stop Commissioner 13 made in Edmonton during those months of the Forum. I took a cab out to a small yellow clapboard house on 85th to sip coffee with seventy-five-year-old Marjorie Bowker, a retired family court judge who for years had been spending her mornings at the University Hospital ministering to the terminally ill and her afternoons in what was once her children’s nursery ministering to Canada.

  Bowker’s tough questioning on free trade in the late 1980s had elevated her to such populist status in this country that The New York Times featured her on the front page and Dan Rather interviewed her on the CBS Evening News. She had lost the battle against free trade but had warred just as strongly against Meech and was n
ow one for two.

  The rubber match was going to be on the very survival of Canada, and at the moment she had no idea which side was winning.

  On an old Smith-Corona in the old upstairs nursery Marjorie Bowker had sat, ramrod straight, not a white hair out of place, and hammered out slender treatises on both free trade and the Meech Lake Accord. In a telling tribute to the Canadian penchant for belly-button lint, both had been published and soared to number one on the bestseller lists. She’d even been awarded the Order of Canada for her work—something that surely grated on the political forces of the day.

  Bowker’s grassroots writing had coincided with the rise of the Reform Party in the West. And it had flourished during the increasingly testy split between the elites and ordinary Canadians that began with the birth of the Meech Lake Accord. She had become, Commissioner 13 wrote, “The Patron Saint of Canadian Crankiness,” considered by her followers as the Voice of Common Sense and dismissed by some of her critics as a bigot for her views on the failures of official bilingualism.

  “If you do something important,” she said, “there will always be critics. If you don’t like critics, don’t do anything important.”

  Her interpretation of Meech Lake was widely shared, particularly in the West. Rather than a sop to Quebec, a document intended to bring the one province left out of the 1982 Constitution Act happily back into the Confederation fold, she saw it more as a power grab by the premiers, with the prime minister, desperate to be the one to “solve” the Quebec issue, both witting and unwitting accomplice to the premiers’ real designs.

  Bowker argued that Canadians wanted, and needed, a strong central government, not one willing to turn over so many powers to the provinces that the balance shift would call into doubt the very need for Ottawa. She endorsed Trudeau’s long-ago warning to Joe Clark that giving away too much power had the potential to turn the federal government into little more than a “head waiter to the provinces.”

  “This debate,” the Albertan grandmother said as she straightened the various folders holding her carefully scissored newspaper clippings, “is all about power. The premiers want more power, and not for the people, but for themselves.

  “If there’s one thing we need in this country, it’s a strong central government. We need it because of our geography. And we need it because of our very small population. A strong central government is the ideal structure for Canada.”

  She did not feel, however, that this ideal structure was going to hold, nor that it would return. If the country survived this crisis at all, she said, it would be at the expense of the core. Meech Lake or no Meech Lake, the provinces were gaining power and the only way to keep this cat’s cradle called Confederation together was to continue on at the expense of the old structure.

  Over time, under Mulroney, Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin, and Stephen Harper, she would be proved largely right.

  “Meech Lake is not dead,” she said with a smile. “It will live forever as the turning point for Canadians’ distrust of the political system.”

  SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER the Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future reported, I got a call from Spicer suggesting a lunch with him and David Broadbent, the bureaucrat who put the Forum back on track and carried it through to the end.

  We met across the river at Café Henry Burger and, at the end of a lunch in which some astonishing stories were told of government interference and internal fiascos, Spicer reached down beside the table and pulled up a framed certificate. It looked official, complete with the Canadian coat of arms embossed at the top. It read “Commissioner 13— In recognition of your valuable contribution to the work of the Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future” and was signed by both the chairman, Spicer, and the executive director, Broadbent. I will treasure it forever.

  A few months later, with the government showing no inclination whatsoever to follow up on any of the Forum’s suggestions, Spicer headed back to his post at the CRTC. He was now, he would later say, a “non-person in the style of George Orwell’s 1984,” his name gone from official Ottawa as effectively as names were once erased from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

  As for Commissioner 13, he, too, vanished, happily leaving Parliament Hill for a new beat. He’d been assigned to cover the second matter ordinary Canadians said they valued most about their troubled country: a part of Canadian culture that, some would argue—me happily among them— tells as much about this country as anything else.

  Hockey.

  Five

  Hockey, the National Id

  THERE ARE FEW MATTERS in Canada that penetrate as deeply into the national soul as hockey. This is hardly surprising. The more dominant of the two national sports, with its heavy equipment and its vigorous effort, is exactly the sport that should have evolved in a land of ice and cold, just as baseball, with all its standing around, its thin uniforms, and its brief, periodic bursts of effort, is the perfect sport for the warmer climes of America.

  In some ways, you can know a country better by knowing how it plays. That golf—with its strict rules and orderliness—would develop in Presbyterian Scotland comes as no surprise, any more than the military formations of American football.

  “In a land so inescapably and inhospitably cold,” Bruce Kidd and John Macfarlane wrote a generation back, “hockey is the dance of life, an affirmation that despite the deathly chill of winter we are alive.”

  I discovered just how deeply the penetration of hockey into the national psyche goes on two different occasions in the same month in late 2003.

  The first was November 5, when I was assigned by The Globe and Mail to spend the day with Prime Minister Jean Chrétien in his final week in office. The Liberal leader was retiring after a decade in the top job and having easily won three majority governments in a strange time of little opposition in Ottawa. Only ten weeks away from turning seventy, he should have been taking it easy, but he was up before dawn working on his file folders, in this case signing off on nearly four dozen appointments that would make headlines the next day.

  We had breakfast together and then headed in to Parliament Hill, his Royal Canadian Mounted Police security force having chosen one of several different routes they used to break the routine and, theoretically, to foil those who might have nefarious plans. On this day we headed down Sussex Drive and then MacKay Street, just to the side of the Rideau Hall grounds. He was in a good mood, showing me the emergency telephone that was always within reach in the prime ministerial limousine and joking that he didn’t think he even knew how to use the thing. There had never been cause. With the exception of the 1995 Quebec referendum, which his side almost blew to the point of losing Quebec altogether, and the growing scandal over the use of sponsorship money following that nail-biting sovereignty vote, there had been fewer bumps along his three terms than there were this fall along Sussex Drive. It had been a relatively easy ride.

  But then he settled back and became pensive. And why not? Forty years in Parliament were about to come to an end. He would, very shortly, no longer be prime minister of his country. His lengthy term in office was being compared—with considerable debate—to the records of King, of Laurier, of Macdonald … only I was about to discover he was thinking of none of these names but of a name not even in politics.

  “You know,” he said, “I am like Rocket Richard. He was maybe not the most elegant player on the ice, but he had the instinct for the net.

  “It is a game,” he added with a slightly crooked, undeniably sly grin. “And I am the pro.”

  There was no need to say any more. Any Canadian would understand, immediately, how Jean Chrétien viewed himself as a politician.

  Little more than two weeks later, on November 22, the Globe sent me to Edmonton for the Heritage Classic, where 57,167 spectators—thousands of them outfitted in snowmobile suits, thousands of them further warmed by hot chocolate and Baileys—showed up in –20°C temperatures. They had come to watch Oilers legends and multimillionaires Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messie
r play shinny on an outdoor rink and then, like neighbourhood kids almost anywhere in the country, pitch in to shovel off the ice between periods. Organizers claimed that ticket requests were so wild for the oldtimers’ afternoon game and the evening NHL match between the Oilers and Montreal Canadiens that they could have sold 800,000 tickets if only the stands had stretched all the way to the Rocky Mountains.

  During the Salt Lake City Games, Gretzky had said that winning gold was not the only goal of the players, but to live up to the expectations of the entire country. I asked Cassie Campbell, the captain of the women’s Olympic team, if she felt the weight of the nation, and she agreed. “When you put on the Canadian hockey jersey,” she said, “that’s what you expect as well, and that’s what you want. It’s such a great game. The traditions of the game are that this has been passed down from generation to generation.”

  Campbell knew her history without even having to study it. Back in 1924, when the first Winter Games were held in Chamonix, France, Canada sent the Toronto Granites over to represent the country. The top player on the senior team was a ringer brought in by the Granites, big, handsome Harry “Moose” Watson of St. John’s, Newfoundland. Moose made arrangements, presumably financial, to send periodic reports to a Toronto newspaper once the team reached Europe.