This last point was by no means insignificant. Lesage was correct about Quebec’s—or any other province’s—prerogative to safeguard citizens’ rights. Pierre Trudeau knew this better than anyone and, indeed, had been known in his Cité libre days to defend even the Duplessis government against Ottawa’s meddling. What Trudeau was now saying, however, was that both levels of government, federal and provincial, would have to cede sovereignty to Canadian citizens under the terms of his proposed bill of rights. Just at the moment when Quebec’s political leaders were speaking with a single voice on their demands for more, in other words, Trudeau was explicitly offering less. And he was doing so in the belief that Quebecers had a clearer sense of their own destiny than the politicians who presumed to speak for them. In the aftermath of his CBA speech, Trudeau expressly rejected Jean Lesage’s claim that only nationalists could speak for Quebecers. “Those who believe in federalism do so for the same reasons that Mr. Lesage apparently does not believe in federalism,” said Trudeau. “They want to promote the progress of the French-Canadian people.”81
Trudeau’s tough talk at the Canadian Bar Association turned out to be too much even for members of his own caucus. Meeting behind closed doors at the Maison Montmorency in Courville, Quebec, in mid-September 1967, federal Liberals quarrelled over how best to “crawl out of the political dead-end” in which Trudeau’s “constitutional rigidity” had trapped them.82 Some Quebec MPs, led by Maurice Lamontagne, urged Prime Minister Pearson to seek his own rapprochement with Daniel Johnson. (In response to Lamontagne’s vague support for a policy of special status, Trudeau quipped, “Your particular status is the status quo, so I guess that makes me for it.”)83 The same MPs also criticized Jean Marchand, leader of the Quebec Liberal caucus, for siding with Trudeau and thus polarizing the debate. There was so much heat on Marchand, in fact, that he tried to occupy a middle ground. “Since Quebec already has an unusual constitutional status,” he told the press after the first evening’s deliberations, “one cannot say in advance that all notions of particular status are unacceptable. But some of these notions are not put forward very seriously, for they would lead to the disintegration of the country.”84
Lester Pearson was unsettled by the intensity of the reaction to Trudeau’s constitutional proposals, both in his own caucus and in Quebec. (It is also highly likely that the prime minister was unimpressed by Trudeau’s lapse into profanity before members of the Canadian Bar Association.) Pearson’s resolve weakened. He was, according to some of his own MPs, now “deeply worried by lack of unanimity in the party as to how to deal with the Quebec question.”85 In late September, the prime minister took the extraordinary step of stating publicly that as yet Trudeau spoke for neither the Liberal Party nor the government. All members of the Liberal caucus took the debate over Quebec “very, very seriously,” Pearson told the press. “We’ll be discussing this in Cabinet and caucus a lot. Then I think it will be up to me to make a statement.”86
If Pierre Trudeau was disappointed or, worse, if he thought Pearson had thrown him to the wolves, he did not show it. Regret was a wasted emotion, he liked to say. He cut his losses, accepted that caution was again the watchword on the Constitution, and plunged into his work on the Canadian Criminal Code.
Pearson’s de-escalation of the constitutional standoff impressed his Liberal colleagues, at least for a time. He had been musing aloud about retiring before the next federal election, which everyone expected to come within a year. But a leadership contest held in the current climate might take the form of a very public row over Quebec, which everyone agreed would be disastrous for the party. At a caucus dinner held on September 25, 1967, the prime minister was pleasantly surprised when two of his backbenchers, G.R. McWilliam and T.H. Lefebvre, rose to table a warmly worded “draft Pearson” resolution. In light of persistent divisions within the caucus, they stated, only Pearson could lead the party into constitutional negotiations with Quebec and, if necessary, into the next election. Every MP present voted in favour of the resolution and rose to give the teary-eyed prime minister a standing ovation.
Pearson was not the only political leader endeavouring to tiptoe through the constitutional minefield. Far from it. By the fall of 1967, it was evident that the feds and the provincial governments could postpone their date with destiny no longer. Premier John Robarts had not intended to trigger a national-unity crisis, of course, but that was the inevitable consequence of his fixing a date—November 27, 1967—for his premiers’ meeting. Every party with a stake in the constitutional debate was now forced to scramble towards some kind of unified position. “The Centennial celebrations have shifted, ironically, from arts and games to survival,” fretted the dean of law at McGill University, Maxwell Cohen.87 And he was not alone in fretting.
While Lester Pearson was quietly trying to heal the breach in his own caucus, members of the Progressive Conservative Party were feuding openly over the related questions of special status for Quebec and John Diefenbaker’s fitness to lead. In August 1967, the Tories had held their own “Thinkers’ Conference” at the Maison Montmorency. The keynote speaker was Marcel Faribault, the prominent Quebec businessman and federalist whose personal commitment to deux nations would decisively affect the course of the 1968 federal election. At Montmorency, Faribault pressed hard to persuade the Tories that special status for Quebec was the only means of saving Confederation. “The question of the two nations is no longer debatable in the province of Quebec,” he insisted. “You must put, in the preamble of a new constitution, something which recognizes that there are in this country two founding peoples.”88 Faribault faced considerable opposition, but he managed in the end to persuade the convention’s resolution committee to adopt the following precepts: “That Canada is and should be a federal state. That Canada is composed of two founding peoples (deux nations), with historical rights who have been joined by people from many lands. That the Constitution should be such as to permit and encourage their full and harmonious growth and development in equality throughout Canada.”89
Then and later, Tory strategists agonized over the exact meaning of the parenthetical insertion of the phrase deux nations. This question would come to haunt them throughout the 1968 campaign against Pierre Trudeau. Some PCs read the French term nation as more or less synonymous with the English word, an interpretation that evoked the idea of a “sovereign state.” Others, including Nova Scotia premier and federal leadership hopeful Robert Stanfield, understood the term nation to carry a more nuanced meaning. They believed that it considered Quebecers as a “people” or a “society”—or what Faribault himself would later call “a nation in the sociological sense.”90 On September 6, at the national convention of the Progressive Conservative Party, the policy committee voted to approve Faribault’s deux nations concept by a vote of 150 to 12. The members also voted to extend protections for French-language education across Canada.
Both ideas were extremely contentious. Party leader John Diefenbaker gave a rousing speech to convention delegates the evening of September 7, urging them to vote against the policy committee and support instead a “one Canada” policy.91 To Diefenbaker, deux nations remained anathema. “The theory that Canada is two nations can only lead to division and dissension and finally to de-confederation,” he told convention delegates, sounding very much like Pierre Trudeau. “I don’t believe that the true heart of French Canada wants the two nation idea. I hope that the convention will repudiate it before we leave here.”92 Although Diefenbaker’s struggle to retain the party leadership had more to do with internal party politics than with national unity, he nonetheless put delegates on notice: a vote for deux nations would be a vote against him personally. He was delighted when the convention agreed to table the deux nations resolution but not vote on it. He could not, however, salvage his leadership bid. Diefenbaker went on to lose the Progressive Conservative leadership to Stanfield, and lose badly.
Even the federal Tories’ headaches paled in comparison with the emer
gency now facing the Quebec Liberal Party. The day after leader Jean Lesage appealed to Premier Daniel Johnson for a truce on the Constitution, his star MLA, René Lévesque, appeared before his Montréal-Laurier riding association and asked delegates point-blank to support souveraineté-association. “Quebec should become a sovereign state,” said the plain-speaking Lévesque. “To English Canada we must then propose to maintain an association not only of neighbours but also of partners. We would have a regime within which two nations, one whose homeland would be Quebec, the other arranging the rest of the country to suit itself, would associate themselves in a new adaptation of the current formula of the common markets to form a new entity which could, for example, call itself the ‘Canadian Union.’”93 There was never any doubt what the Liberal delegates of Montréal-Laurier would decide. They voted to approve Lévesque’s proposal and also to table it at the convention of the Quebec Liberal Federation scheduled for October 13, 1967.
Lévesque’s souveraineté-association speech was published in full in Le Devoir and excerpted extensively across Canada. Editorialists everywhere recognized immediately that Lévesque’s words had escalated the constitutional crisis. “The tension in the dialogue between French and English Canada increases,” said a Globe editorial. “The prospects for derailment of a united Canada seem to grow greater.”94 In Ottawa, the Liberals were reportedly “jolted” by Lévesque’s speech, prompting Prime Minister Pearson to accelerate planning for his 1968 federal-provincial conference.95 Lévesque’s proposal also had the effect of bringing Pierre Trudeau and Maurice Lamontagne into agreement on both the need for a timetable for constitutional reform and “the necessity of making a more articulate strategy.”96 Some of Trudeau’s allies credited him anew for his incisive critique of nationalist politics in Quebec, since it now appeared that bipartisan demands for special status in the province had indeed emboldened the separatists. Ironically, René Lévesque’s speech also appeared to strengthen Canadian federalism, at least superficially, since it forced advocates of deux nations in Quebec to distance themselves explicitly from his sovereignty option.
Chief among these advocates was Quebec Liberal leader Jean Lesage, who announced immediately that he would fight Lévesque’s separatist vision. Quebec should seek “the maximum degree of autonomy compatible with the existence of Canada,” Lesage asserted.97 Eric Kierans, president of the Quebec Liberal Federation, also rejected Lévesque’s proposal out of hand. “This party is not a separatist party,” he said. “It is an anti-separatist party and it will remain so.”98 Later the same week, Kierans told CBC-TV that he would resign from the Liberal Party if it endorsed Lévesque’s separatist program. In truth, this was not much of a threat. Even before Lévesque had pitched souveraineté-association to his own constituents, a poll of Liberal MLAs revealed that 88 per cent supported special status for Quebec but not sovereignty.99 By the time the provincial Liberals held their party convention as planned over the weekend of October 13, the major players had already staked out their positions. The defeat of souveraineté-association was a foregone conclusion. Lévesque did not wait around for the inevitable. He withdrew his resolution and announced his resignation from the Liberal Party.100 Hundreds of Quebec Liberals left with him.
For Pierre Bourgault, his young RIN comrades, and thousands of other sovereignists, René Lévesque’s break with the Liberal Party was the fork in the road they had long been waiting and hoping for. Thereafter, events moved at lightspeed. Two weeks after he left the Liberal caucus, Lévesque held a press conference to proclaim that a broad-based sovereignist party could win power in Quebec within four years. (He was off by five.) Two weeks after that, on November 19, 1967, he hosted a meeting of sovereignist groups from across Quebec that resulted in the founding of the Mouvement souveraineté-association.101 Less than a year later, the MSA would be recast as the Parti Québécois. It would unite all but the FLQ extremists and their ilk under a single sovereignist banner with the genial social democrat Lévesque at the helm.
All of a sudden, the separatist threat to Canada was no longer hypothetical.
In early October 1967, before René Lévesque’s formal break with the Liberals, Premier Daniel Johnson offered the feds an olive branch. It could not have come at a better time.
Johnson happened to be in Hawaii, where he was taking a rest cure for a bout of phlebitis. La Presse reporter Martin Pronovost flew to Hawaii to track down the premier and query him on the recent surge of separatist activity in Quebec. For his efforts, Pronovost had to settle for a statement from Johnson, which La Presse published on October 3. “The Union Nationale did not receive a mandate to build a Great Wall of China around Quebec,” read the communiqué. “We promised the people to exercise the rights recognized in the British North America Act and to put them to work to obtain a new Canadian constitution, made in Canada, by Canadians and for Canadians, by virtue of which every citizen, French-speaking or English-speaking, regardless of ethnic origin, would feel at home everywhere in Canada.” The statement concluded with a gentle prod at federalists who refused to see that Canada could be the homeland of two nations. “It is a disservice to the country to label as separatists all those who are looking for democratic and peaceful ways to achieve the emergence of the French Canadian nation,” it stated.102
“Made in Canada” was certainly a far cry from “égalité ou indépendance,” Daniel Johnson’s earlier appeal. The relief felt in Ottawa at the premier’s new spirit of co-operation was almost palpable. It fell to the federal justice minister to respond on the government’s behalf. “We are in perfect agreement with Premier Johnson,” Pierre Trudeau told the House of Commons on October 5. “We are happy that he is finally coming around to our point of view.”103 In a press scrum later the same day, Trudeau affirmed that government ministers were truly delighted. “This is the position we have taken for a devil of a long time,” he said. “I think it takes some of the heat off, in the sense that the statement is a very reasonable position.” As for Johnson’s point that all nationalists were not separatists, Trudeau responded with an equally light touch. “I think this is perfectly true, but I hope the converse is also true, that one doesn’t become a traitor simply because one wants to defend Quebec’s rights at the federal level and works for continuance of a stronger Canada.”104
When the interprovincial Confederation of Tomorrow conference convened in Toronto in late November 1967, Premier Johnson carried with him a twenty-two-page brief that set out the position of his government. It began with a fallacy that has bedevilled negotiations between Quebec and the rest of Canada up to the present. “In Canada there exists a French-Canadian nation of which the mainstay is Quebec,” stated the brief. “It can likewise be said that there exists an English-speaking nation, although its cohesion and self-awareness may, for understandable reasons, be less apparent than they are among French Canadians.” The document was half-correct. Quebec may well be imagined as the national homeland of French Canadians, but as constitutional experts have been reminding Canadians for decades, there is no Canada without Quebec. “The Rest-of-Canada enjoys only a shadowy existence,” Professor Alan C. Cairns wrote poignantly in 1997. “It is the empty chair at the bargaining table. It is headless and therefore officially voiceless.”105
Under the subheading “An Impotent Constitution,” the Quebec brief went on to state that the British North America Act was “no longer capable of providing the guarantees that should properly be expected from it.” It must, therefore, be scrapped. A new Constitution must be written to “acknowledge the existence in Canada of two nations, bound together by history, each enjoying equal collective rights.” It must clearly designate English and French as the country’s official languages, and it must include a “charter of human rights” governing areas of federal jurisdiction. In order to placate the other provinces, such a constitutional makeover would have to be accompanied by massive decentralization. “All provinces would, at the outset, be granted identical constitutional powers,” ass
erted the brief. Once the provinces had acquired all of the powers that Quebecers needed to achieve their dream of nation—in “international relations, culture, manpower and the administration of justice”—the other provinces could cede them back to Ottawa if they wished.106
Unsurprisingly, Johnson’s proposal did not appeal to his fellow premiers. Even before Alberta premier Ernest Manning showed up in Toronto, he stated that he would oppose any plan to extend French-language rights across Canada. (When Trudeau learned of this reaction, he responded drily, “I am sure Mr. Manning’s point of view will be listened to with great respect and I am suggesting that it won’t change our plans.”)107 Other provincial delegations proved more accommodating. Ontario and New Brunswick offered to provide French-language educational opportunities province-wide, while Newfoundland, Saskatchewan, and B.C. agreed to offer French-language instruction in areas where student numbers warranted it. These initiatives derived mainly from the Blue Pages of the Bi and Bi Commission, which had recommended almost two years earlier that English and French become the official languages of any province where francophones made up 10 per cent or more of the population. Seen from the perspective of Quebec nationalists like Daniel Johnson, these accommodations did little to “acknowledge the existence in Canada of two nations.” Tellingly, Johnson could find no takers among the premiers for his proposal to junk the Canadian Constitution.
Pierre Trudeau kept a wary eye on the premiers’ meeting. Months earlier, he had stated publicly that he hoped it would not be “a demolition job” on the federal government, setting off a minor row with Premier John Robarts.108 Several days before the start of the conference, NDP MP Andrew Brewin pressed Trudeau in the House of Commons to attend the meeting himself and make clear his government’s position on a bill of rights. Trudeau skewered this suggestion and along with it the New Democrats’ deux nations policy. “Mr. Speaker,” said Trudeau, “the member should know that the federal government is not invited to that conference; it is an interprovincial and not a federal-provincial conference. Nevertheless, I hope that members of his party will attend the conference to get better information on special status. It seems that his own party shilly-shallies on that matter.”109
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