by Conrad Black
The battle lines were drawn more sharply on April 27, 1977, with Bill 1, which Lévesque called the Charter of the French Language. English would no longer be used in debates in the National Assembly, nor in Quebec courts, other than by individuals, and all companies with fifty employees or more would have to apply for and qualify for certificates of francization as a condition of continuing in business, making French the sole language of the workplace. All children, apart from those of Quebec-born English-speaking parents, would have to enrol in French schools. This was the complete reversal of the Johnson-Bertrand policy of eight years before, and a sharp escalation even of Bourassa’s repressive measures of three years before. It was, and was declared to be, an outright assault on a bilingual Quebec.
Trudeau, who had not raised a peep over Bourassa’s preparatory outrage of Bill 22, finally picked up the gauntlet and described the new bill as a “retrograde” assault on individual liberties and reviled the Parti Québécois’s independence as a reversion “to the Dark Ages … to tribalism.” Bingo! Finally, we were getting down to the real point. Lévesque’s culture minister, Camille Laurin – another psychiatrist, like François Cloutier – agreed that it was “ethnocentric” and made the point that all nations were. (Of course, they aren’t, but Laurin, like the PQ generally, was not one to be too much inconvenienced by the facts.) Bill 1 was somewhat reformulated as Bill 101 and was undoubtedly popular in Quebec. As always with these measures restricting the cultural rights of the non-French, the second goal was to drive out the English and others, who would put their houses and offices up for sale or occupancy at knock-down rates and increase the chances of nationalist victories in elections and plebiscites. Trudeau noted the popularity of the legislation and declined to disavow it, though its constitutionality was contested. He temporized that he did not wish tactically to play into Lévesque’s hands on a side issue, albeit a vital one. Trudeau was advised by his entourage, especially Keith Davey and his astute and charming principal secretary, Jim Coutts, to go to the country and arm himself with a mandate to fight separation, but his marriage was collapsing and he didn’t feel up to it.
Lévesque, for his part, was now facing the consequences of thousands of executive positions streaming out of the province and large numbers of less prominent people quietly leaving with them. By late 1977, unemployment climbed to 10 per cent, and the euphoria of the post-election honeymoon was wearing off. But so was Trudeau’s surge in rediscovered national appreciation after the Quebec election. In this sense, Lévesque’s tactic of seeming unfrightening was working, and English Canadians outside Quebec were no longer so alarmed by him. In a gesture to the old Quebec nationalists, Lévesque dusted off the statue of Maurice Duplessis that Paul Sauvé had commissioned, and which had been in the basement of the provincial police building on Parthenais Street in Montreal for over fifteen years, making Le Chef’s successors appear ridiculous by seeming to be afraid of his statue. He unveiled it on the grounds of the National Assembly, declaring that while he had opposed Duplessis, all must recognize his immense services to Quebec through five terms as premier. Unveiling statues was the most civilized form of coalition-building, and the next best remembrance to having airports named after departed leaders. Thirty-five years later, statues of Lévesque and (Robert) Bourassa would flank Duplessis beside the National Assembly.
Claude Ryan announced his candidacy for the Quebec Liberal leadership in January 1978. Austere and monastic, but fearless, highly intellectual, and a courteous gentleman, without vanity and incorruptible in every sense, he would be a very formidable opponent. He had often seemed as much a separatist as Lévesque but was more careful to keep his distance from militant nationalists and favoured a special status for the province whose terms were changeable but somewhat on the lines advocated by Duplessis, Lesage, and Johnson. In June 1978, Trudeau published the federal government’s updated constitutional position in the White Paper “A Time for Action,” and then in Bill C-60, which included the elevation of the governor general to a co-equal status with the queen by making him or her the “First Citizen,” who would open and dissolve Parliament personally and not in the name of the monarch. Trudeau and Lalonde, who was now his minister in this area, proposed to dispense with the Senate and replace it with a House of the Federation, half of whose members would be chosen by provincial legislatures to assure their interests in the federal government, and the provinces would have some say in the appointment of Supreme Court justices and the heads of some regulatory agencies. It was an imaginative series of proposals for which Trudeau received inadequately serious credit and attention. He reiterated something close to the Victoria formula for amending the Constitution, and said that only after that was agreed – and he required completion of it by July 1, 1979, or he would proceed unilaterally – would he discuss distribution of powers with the provinces. All ten premiers had their own meeting in Regina in August 1978 and unanimously determined that unless Trudeau put the distribution of powers first on the agenda, they would not discuss any of it. The premiers were back to the game they had first been taught by Duplessis, unctuously claiming to be committed federalists, waiting until Quebec had shaken something loose from Ottawa, and then saying that they had to have it too. But now, Lévesque, despite his secessionist ambitions, had persuaded them to act pre-emptively: they were all going to demand concessions together, even though it was just étapisme for Lévesque on the road to secession. Trudeau had been outmanoeuvred in allowing the premiers to be lured so far into Lévesque’s camp.
Trudeau came back and astounded the premiers at a First Ministers’ Conference, as they were now called, on October 21, 1978, at Ottawa, when he offered concurrent movement: if the premiers would agree to his points, he was prepared to move at once to concede jurisdiction in a number of areas, including family law and some communications regulations. Even Lévesque said, “Something is happening at last.” All that happened, however, was that the joint committee to which the whole package was referred agreed on the handover of family law entirely to the provinces. The premiers, under Lévesque’s disingenuous and Mephistophelean influence, had overplayed their hand. If they had accepted Trudeau’s proposals, they would have added much more to their jurisdictions than was subsequently on offer. By dragging their feet, they forced a wait for a new federal election and Lévesque’s referendum, which, by the beginning of 1979, had to be held within the next two years. Trudeau, as he said, found it “depressing and distressing” that the premiers as a group, and not just Quebec’s separatist leader, would, for increased powers for themselves, retard a charter of rights for all Canadians and a patriated power of constitutional amendment. If Trudeau had not wasted the year after the Quebec election treading water amid his marital problems, he could have required action on his proposals and, failing action, have gone to the voters at high tide in 1977 and surely been re-elected on that issue at that time.
As it was, 1979 had dawned, the federal Parliament would have to be dissolved within a few months, and the economy had deteriorated, with double-digit interest rates and stagflation. The federal government’s Task Force on Canadian Unity, chaired by former Ontario premier John Robarts and former Liberal federal minister Jean-Luc Pepin, reported out, criticizing Trudeau rather gratuitously and calling for a “distinctive” but not “special” status for Quebec with a general devolution to all provinces of increased powers. Trudeau was taken to task in the report for failure to recognize Canada’s “duality and regionalism.” The report was relatively well written, stylistically, by the standards of these things, but it was rather strange coming from two men who had spent their public careers claiming to be unreconstructed federalists. Lévesque and Trudeau both praised the report, though Lalonde was outwardly hostile.
Trudeau had run out the clock; unemployment was over 8 per cent, the dollar had fallen to the mid-80s in U.S. cents, the annual deficit was 25 per cent of federal revenues, there was a substantial trade deficit, and Trudeau’s giveaways to buy votes, espe
cially in Quebec to gain favour for federalism, were straining the treasury. The country was tired of him. Joe Clark was no one’s idea of a galvanizing leader, but after sixteen years of the Liberals even a semi-plausible change would work. Lévesque lay low as his Péquistes simulated a secular equivalent of prayer for a Clark victory. Trudeau called the election for May 22, 1979, after a flourish of expense reductions and promised layoffs in the civil service, which was generally dismissed as a deathbed conversion that was too little too late and insufficiently penitent. (It was all of that.) For good measure, his estranged and flaky wife produced a keyhole-opening memoir in April called Beyond Reason, detailing some of her somewhat flagrant promiscuity, including with U.S. senator and surviving womanizer-in-chief of his family, Ted Kennedy. This didn’t seem to change things politically, and most people had some sympathy with Trudeau, who retained custody of the couple’s three sons. Trudeau won the all-candidates’ debate, but Clark held his corner adequately, and, in the circumstances, the country – in the fickle, reflexive, peevish way of electorates that are not permanently addressed by a self-renewing leader like Franklin D. Roosevelt – was afflicted by an infelicitous combination of anger at the economy, ennui, resentment of Trudeau’s hauteur, and briefly induced and renewed complacency about Quebec. They thought they could take the plunge. Trudeau was respected, but it was time to put him in his place. Clark was roughly treated by cartoonists, was still often referred to, after a Toronto Star headline from 1976, as “Joe Who?” and had lost his luggage on an overseas trip, but he was incidental; he wasn’t Trudeau and needed only to clear the low hurdle of not being completely unsuitable. He cleared that; he was unspectacular but competent. Canadians were tired of their leader’s churlishness and answered with churlishness of their own. On May 22, Canada strained its fortune but did not quite shatter it. The result of the election was (with 1974 results in brackets): Progressive Conservatives, 136 MPs and 35.9 per cent of the vote (95 MPs and 35.5 per cent); Liberals, 114 MPs and 40.1 per cent (141 MPs and 43.2 per cent); NDP, 26 MPs and 17.9 per cent (16 MPs and 15.4 per cent); Créditistes, 6 MPs and 4.6 per cent (11 MPs and 5.1 per cent). The Liberals led the popular vote by nearly five hundred thousand, and the Progressive Conservatives were seven seats short of a majority in an expanded House; it was not a very convincing mandate, and it wasn’t really intended to be a mandate for Clark but a rap on the knuckles for his chief opponent.
The English-Canadian voters had made their point and instantly regretted it. Trudeau was gracious and philosophical, handed over at once, and wished his successor well. Clark too was gracious and began well. But there was something odd and not believable about this whole turn of events. It was as if the country had wanted to send Trudeau a message that he was dispensable and it was tired of his condescensions but wanted him to continue as prime minister, and it instantly resented Joe Clark for not being as formidable a leader as Trudeau was, even though the country knew that when it made the change. This was the season of multiple simultaneous choice: English Canada would dismiss Trudeau but still have him, and French Canada would have sovereignty and exchange embassies with the world and remain in association with Canada. It was a fantasy world that would quickly be reconciled to the facts.*
Trudeau had no interest at all in being leader of the Opposition. While Clark assembled his government and enjoyed a honeymoon of sorts, Trudeau went on a camping holiday in the Northwest Territories, and then to China and Tibet; he had always been an inveterate traveller, even when it was much less fashionable and comfortable. Clark was well-liked and appreciated for his courtesy and personal thoughtfulness, not his predecessor’s strongest suits. The redoubtable John Crosbie of Newfoundland was the finance minister and Flora MacDonald the secretary of state for external affairs. Former senior merchant banker Michael Wilson was minister of international trade. Most of the cabinet were competent, and they were fresh faces after the Liberals, who had been clinging to the ministerial furniture since the time of Khrushchev, Kennedy, Pope John XXIII, and Harold Macmillan, and we were now in the era of Thatcher, John Paul II, and (almost) Reagan. But Clark was awkward on television, and he was only forty and didn’t appear to be like a prime minister, though he did seem an estimable person who had come a long way by perseverance and the breaks. By October, polls showed the Liberals ahead and that, if there were an election, they would win. Clark, showing his inexperience and his background as a political insider and careerist, had little sense of the country or of his own vulnerability.
It was untimely, though not exactly premature, that at this point – in the midst of a tumultuous time he would have enjoyed, and further confused – John Diefenbaker died, on August 16, a month short of eighty-four, and in his thirteenth consecutive term and fortieth year in Parliament. Clark, Trudeau, Stanfield, Lewis, and Tommy Douglas eulogized him generously.
Trudeau told an Ottawa constituency association on October 30, “We’ve got to throw the government out as soon as we can.” But as he saw the polls, he assumed the NDP and Créditistes would not evict the government, and on November 21 he announced that he would retire as Liberal leader. Trudeau encouraged Donald Macdonald to run to succeed him, as he regarded Turner as disloyal. His political obituaries in English Canada were generally unflattering; they, like most of posterity to date, had no ability to evaluate the difference he had wrought in the Quebec equation. A Liberal leadership convention was fixed for Winnipeg on March 28. It would not be held; bombshells began falling like confetti.
Lévesque finally revealed the wording of the referendum question in early December. It would ask the voters of Quebec:
The Government of Quebec has made public its proposal to negotiate a new agreement with the rest of Canada, based on the equality of nations; this agreement would enable Quebec to acquire the exclusive power to make its laws, levy its taxes and establish relations abroad – in other words, sovereignty – and at the same time to maintain with Canada an economic association including a common currency; any change in political status resulting from these negotiations will only be implemented with popular approval through another referendum; on these terms, do you give the Government of Quebec the mandate to negotiate the proposed agreement between Quebec and Canada?
It gave new breadth and meaning to the concept of étapisme. The voters were asked to allow Lévesque to try to negotiate the joys of independence while retaining the benefits of Confederation, with the obligation to bring anything agreed upon back to another referendum, or, if nothing could be agreed upon, to come back for an explicit secession vote. It was essentially a fraud, but with the federal Liberal Party going through a leadership change and the provincial Liberals being regrouped by Claude Ryan, who was about to release his own paper on constitutional change, and with a long time to prepare for the vote, it landed softly. The first polls showed the “no” vote about 10 points ahead of the “yes” vote, but a fierce campaign impended, and Trudeau let it be known that he would enter it as a private citizen.
The propensity of the other premiers to hide behind the skirts of Quebec while agitating for more was much in evidence. Newfoundland, as prosperity (from off-shore oil) hove into view for the first time in four hundred years, was now refusing jobs on offshore oil rigs to non-Newfoundlanders, and Alberta demanded a doubling of its oil revenues from Eastern Canada with no increase in volume of sales. Canada was already very decentralized without any devolution in Quebec, and Trudeau had only been gone for less than six months. Clark declared that he would govern “as if we had a majority.” This was commendably purposeful, but in practice, with the polls where they were and so much in flux, it was impetuous.
On December 3, Gallup reported the Liberals leading the Progressive Conservatives by nearly 20 points. On December 10, John Turner announced he would not seek the succession to Trudeau; he knew Trudeau would put all his influence behind Macdonald, who would have the advantage of the support of the incumbent equivalent to that of St. Laurent over Gardiner in 1948, Pearson over Ma
rtin in 1958, and Trudeau over Winters in 1968 (chapters 7 and 8). On December 11, John Crosbie delivered the government’s budget, his party’s first since Donald Fleming’s pre-electoral effort in 1962. In keeping with the Clark position that there would be no compromise due to the Conservatives’ minority status, Crosbie introduced tax increases of nearly four billion dollars to cut the deficit in half within four years and, in particular, an eighteen-cent per gallon gasoline tax. Allan MacEachen, the Liberals’ House leader and a very agile parliamentarian, told the Liberal caucus on December 12, after Trudeau had said the party had to fight the budget, that an all-out fight had to be waged against it. It was resolved to support a routine NDP motion against the budget. Trudeau casually eschewed any interest in rescinding his retirement.
