by Conrad Black
MacEachen had already had the chief Opposition whip, Charles Turner, tell all Liberal caucus members to be present for the vote, and Lalonde, presumably at Trudeau’s behest, routed two of the Quebec MPs out of their hospital beds to get them there, on the evening of December 13. MacEachen cancelled all vote pairing, except Serge Joyal’s with Conservative Alvin Hamilton, who was in hospital. The numbers were tight: 136 Conservatives and 5 Créditistes, where the Liberals and NDP had 140, less one on each side for Hamilton and Joyal. But Flora MacDonald was on official business in Europe and Conservative MP Lloyd Crouse was on holiday in the South Pacific. If MacDonald could be got back and the Créditistes stayed in line and Joyal kept the pair, the vote would be 139–139 and the government would win, because the Speaker, James Jerome, though a Liberal, had researched the issue and discovered that the unbroken precedent was for the Speaker to sustain the government where, as in a budget, the issue would be revisited. Jerome told MacEachen when asked that he would honour the precedent. At this late point, the Progressive Conservatives showed their naïveté, and the only person in the entire Clark entourage who had the faintest idea of the danger they were in was Clark’s capable legislative aide Nancy Jamieson, who warned a 9 a.m. strategy session that “I don’t think we have the numbers.” Apart from other factors, the Créditistes were wobbling, and the Liberals were in a position to make their lives easy or difficult electorally in Quebec. It was suddenly very serious, and by the time Flora MacDonald, who had been advised the night before by Clark’s office that there was no need for her to return for the vote, was asked to return, all the flights westward across the Atlantic had departed, and no one thought to charter one, if there was even still time for that. The Clark inner circle still thought the Liberals were bluffing, and did not move to defer the vote as the Liberals would have done had the roles been reversed. They could probably still have done this on a snap procedural vote.
The Liberal faction that wanted Trudeau out, or especially wanted Donald Macdonald in (including Macdonald), was urging caution. But Trudeau smelt the blood of his enemies, and the whips were laid on with the vintage discipline of the party that had governed for forty-seven of the last fifty-eight years. The Créditistes, who had been in decline since the death of Caouette in 1976, abstained, Joyal honoured his pairing with Hamilton, and Flora MacDonald was not present; at 10:21 p.m. on December 13, the government was defeated 139 to 133, with the five abstentions. The prime minister called an election for February 18. But the game was over; the Liberals had a huge lead in the polls, and having sent Trudeau the message, the voters would now bring him back for an encore, and English Canada would unleash him on a Lévesque who, though well-travelled in Quebec politics, would still learn some painful lessons in the vagaries of transcontinental, bicultural politics. The magic thread held: just when it seemed that Lévesque might, with his two-referendum approach, smoke his spurious referendum question past Joe Clark and try to exploit Claude Ryan’s muddled thoughts of special status, which he was about to present in his “Beige Paper,” Trudeau reappeared like a Transylvanian vampire to terrorize the separatists. The predestined leader of the federalists would lead them in the referendum campaign after all.
There was a flurry of consultation within Liberal ranks, and many of the caucus members would have preferred someone other than Trudeau, but, again, not everyone grasped the tide of events and the legitimacy of continuity. Allan MacEachen did, and said it was unthinkable that anyone would lead the party but the leader it had, or that a new leader could be fairly chosen in the middle of a campaign. The party chairman, Alasdair Graham, had devised a system of regional conventions with ballots placed in sealed boxes that would all be opened together one month before the election. Trudeau seriously considered not coming back. But it was nonsense; of course he had to do it one more time. It was his apotheosis; he entered public life to promote a new federalism of bicultural equality; he was armed with public support reinforced by the satisfaction of the country that it was not being taken for granted; and his hour had come. It was so right artistically, it had to be right politically.
The election campaign was an anti-climax as the Conservatives complained about an unnecessary election, the NDP, now led by the amiable Oshawa MP Ed Broadbent, railed against a “harsh” budget, and the Liberals dismissed the Conservatives as incompetent skinflints with no support in Quebec and no ability to deal with Lévesque. On February 18, Trudeau welcomed Canada “to the eighties.” The results (with 1979 results in brackets) were: Liberals, 147 MPs and 44.5 per cent of the vote (114 MPs and 40.1 per cent); Progressive Conservatives, 103 MPs and 32.5 per cent (136 MPs and 35.9 per cent); NDP, 32 MPs and 19.8 per cent (26 MPs and 17.9 per cent); Créditistes (who gained nothing for abstaining) elected no MPs and had only 1.7 per cent of the total vote (5 MPs elected and 4.6 per cent), and the picturesque aberration that began with Réal Caouette in 1962 was over. The Liberals took 74 out of 75 MPs from Quebec as they donned their battle armour for the referendum. Looking beyond the referendum, there were ominous portents, as the Liberals took only two MPs west of Manitoba. But for now, all was in place for the climax of the Trudeau era.
The referendum debate started early, as Lévesque put his enabling bill through the National Assembly and won the public debate with Ryan, who, though very intelligent, was always complicated in his exposition of anything, while Lévesque had never lost his old journalist’s knack of packaging even the most complicated and passionately argued issues in simple terms. Trudeau missed his opportunity to legislate that no referendary result in any province would be taken seriously unless it was a clear question and was voted by a substantial majority. He was stuck with Lévesque’s disingenuous insinuation of a question. Lévesque set referendum day for May 20. Trudeau entered the public argument on April 15 in the Throne Speech debate and gave a series of speeches at intervals. He sent the bare-knuckle bruiser Jean Chrétien, the eight-term MP from Shawinigan, Quebec, to be Ryan’s co-leader of the “no” forces, though he himself was the real leader. Chrétien had for years argued the federalist case and the anti-Créditiste position unfailingly in the great circle of Quebec from Abitibi through the Lac-Saint-Jean area into the Lower North Shore and the Gaspé, where the urbane Trudeau-Marchand-Pelletier-Lalonde group rarely ventured, much less Ryan. In his opening blast, Trudeau began by ridiculing the referendum question and said on April 15 that association was out of the question, as the nine premiers of the other provinces had said they wouldn’t have it, and that sovereignty was also impossible, as he had just won a heavy mandate, a thundering landslide in Quebec, to exercise sovereignty in Quebec and elsewhere.
On May 2, he told the Montreal Chamber of Commerce that the original separatists such as Pierre Bourgault had been honest men and independentists and that Lévesque and his colleagues were cowards and charlatans (in so many words), as they presented “a conditional and ambiguous question.” On May 9, in Quebec City, he said that courage was with the “no” side, to stay in Canada and exact what “we” needed, not to barricade ourselves “within our walls.” These were direct, hard blows against the PQ’s chicanery and they stung Lévesque, who blew up on May 12 and played the race card: “Trudeau is naturally for the no, his middle name is English.” 18 It was a sign that Lévesque had lost his judgment. Three days later, Trudeau replied at the Paul Sauvé Arena with one of the greatest speeches of his career. The crowd chanted “Ell-i-ott” for seven minutes before he began. Trudeau pointed out that the Elliotts had come to Quebec two hundred years before and that he was no less Québécois than Lévesque’s ministers Pierre-Marc Johnson, Louis O’Neill, and Robert Burns, all French Canadian, and that this was the sort of division Quebec and Canada could never accept. He put it straight up to English Canada that a “no” vote would not be seen as an affirmation that everything was fine as it was; a negative referendum vote would lead to a new constitution in which Quebec would truly and fully participate.
On May 20, 1980, the “no” side won, 2,1
87,991 (59.56 per cent) to 1,485,852 (40.44 per cent), with an 85.6 per cent turnout. It was a solid victory for Trudeau and the federalists. Admittedly, almost half the French-speaking Quebeckers had voted “yes,” but they had voted to authorize the government of Quebec to negotiate more powers for the province and then come back for another referendum, not to secede. More than half the French-speaking Quebeckers, and almost all the non-French, had not even voted for that, though their ranks were clearly expanded by Trudeau’s promise to strengthen Confederation and reform the Constitution. It broke the momentum of the nationalist rise, as even on this soft question Lévesque had polled a smaller percentage than his party had won at the polls in 1976. The PQ claimed that it had carried the youth and so the future belonged to it, but young people tend to become more conservative as they grow older. Lévesque spoke of federalism having won “a reprieve,” but it was a wan and sobered premier who spoke at the much-frequented Paul Sauvé Arena just five days after Trudeau had been there defending his mother’s Scottish ancestry. Lévesque conceded graciously, as Trudeau accepted victory with exemplary taste and moderation. Joe Clark gave Trudeau great credit and had said in Shawinigan during the referendum campaign that “the Canada M. Lévesque wants to secede from no longer exists.”19 Trudeau said on May 21 in the House of Commons that he would begin at once a drive to constitutional reform. All the premiers, including Lévesque, came to Ottawa on June 9 for a preliminary conference, and a plenary conference to try to resolve the major issues was set for September 8 to 12. Trudeau made it clear that he considered the entire allocation of powers to be open and not just a discussion of what federal concessions there would be to the provinces. He was prepared to hold a national referendum if he could not secure agreement with the premiers. Having come this far and gone to the brink, he was not going to allow the opportunity for constructive change to slip away again.
6. Trudeau’s Legacy: A Canadian Constitution at Last, 1980–1984
The September 8 opening of the First Ministers’ Conference was rocky, as Newfoundland’s abrasive Brian Peckford said his views conformed more closely to those of Lévesque than of Trudeau. This misjudged the mood of the country, as Trudeau had defeated Lévesque in the referendum and most Canadians felt that it was Trudeau’s role and duty now to produce his promised constitutional reform and that he should be encouraged to do that. Trudeau again threatened, as he had intermittently since 1976, to hold a national referendum on patriation and go to London without any provincial accompaniment. If he was rebuffed there, he would consult the country on a unilateral declaration of sovereignty. When Manitoba’s premier, Sterling Lyon, a tough, red-haired Conservative, said that if Trudeau did such a thing he would “tear up the country,” Trudeau retorted that if the country was “torn apart because we bring back from Britain our own constitution after 115 years of Confederation and after more than fifty years of fruitless discussions, and because we ask for a Canadian charter of rights and most of you already have provincial charters, then the country deserves to be torn up.”20 He had the momentum and he had a mandate, in the post-referendum ambiance, to settle these issues, and, as he later wrote, “The time had come for Canada to choose to be or not to be.”21
Trudeau’s proposed charter would restrict the ability of provinces to infringe minority language rights, but to gain NDP support for it, he did concede further authority to the provinces over natural resources and allowed his charter protection of property rights to lapse. Trudeau’s amending proposal was unanimity for two years, followed by the requirement of the Victoria amending formula for the approval of either five provinces representing more than half the population – but with the right for a province to opt out of an amendment in provincial areas, with compensation where applicable – or eight provinces with 80 per cent of the population, with a referendum to choose between those two alternatives. Premiers William Davis of Ontario and Richard Hatfield of New Brunswick agreed with Trudeau, but the Western premiers were virtually up in arms. Lévesque was playing it cagily, saying the great issue was now the economy (“People don’t eat constitutions”22). There was no progress toward an agreement, and as soon as the First Ministers’ Conference ended, Trudeau sent a ministerial delegation to London to begin discussions with the government of that country, now in the firm hands of Margaret Thatcher, for the passage to Canada of its Constitution.
The next step in the federal-provincial tug-of-war came on October 28, 1980, with Trudeau and energy minister Marc Lalonde’s National Energy Program (NEP), a draconian assault on oil-rich Alberta. International events in the 1970s, following the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and the Arab boycott of most of the West, had spiked oil prices and conferred on Alberta economic muscle it had not had before. Trudeau objected to what he considered an inadequate share of the profits from that industry for the federal government and also saw the opportunity to emphasize the value of federalism in Eastern Canada by providing cheap oil in the areas which incidentally elected almost all of his MPs while slapping down the obdurately unappreciative Albertans. The NEP was unveiled with the budget, which foresaw a four-year, 25 per cent reduction of the federal deficit essentially by seizing a surcharge on oil production and prices. The NEP produced a blended price for Canadian oil averaging domestic and foreign oil and assuring what was assumed to be a rising price but not more than 85 per cent of the lower of imported oil or the U.S. price, and this subsidized price would be financed by a Petroleum Compensation Charge on refiners. The price of natural gas would rise less quickly than the oil price but would be subject to a new federal tax. There would also be a new 8 per cent petroleum and gas revenue tax on net, pre-royalty, operating gas and oil revenues, and depletion allowances were to be phased out and replaced by direct incentive payments designed to encourage exploration by Canadian companies on Canadian territory. The federal government share of production income would rise over three years from 10 per cent to 36 per cent, and the provincial share and producers’ share would descend from 45 per cent each to, respectively, 36 and 28 per cent. There would be incentives offered to producers to encourage conservation and alternative energy sources, including extension of the natural gas distribution network through Quebec and the Atlantic provinces and a Canadian ownership levy to assist in gaining 50 per cent Canadian ownership of the industry by 1990.
The case could be made that the federal government was entitled to more than 10 per cent of the revenues of this industry, but this was not the way to make the case, and it was an outright declaration of war on Alberta and on the private sector of the oil industry, including the domestically controlled part of that sector. Given the delicate negotiations under way constitutionally, it was an astonishingly blunt instrument to apply to this subject, and one that was, as events would reveal, based on completely mistaken pricing assumptions. Alberta’s formidable Progressive Conservative premier, Peter Lougheed (who ended the thirty-six-year Social Credit rule of his province in 1971), responded by reducing shipments to the East by 180,000 barrels a day, forcing the importation of more expensive foreign oil. Trudeau began a series of retreats with an agreement on September 1, 1981, by which Canada would go, over five years, to 75 per cent of the world oil price; the federal export tax on natural gas was eliminated; and, in the 1982 budget, the division of revenue between the federal government, provincial governments, and the industry went to 26, 37, and 37 per cent, respectively. The declared objectives of the NEP were defensible, but the extreme assault on Alberta as a punishment for good fortune and sensible government was an outrage. In 1983, Alberta had only one-fifth the national average in income growth, while unemployment almost tripled from 1981 to 1984, rising from 3.8 to 11.1 per cent, and in the same period business capital expenditures declined by 30 per cent.23 No aspect of the ill-considered and abusively imposed program survived the next change of government.
On April 13, 1981, promising not to hold another referendum in the next term, Lévesque and the Parti Québécois were re-elected as the two-party system wa
s effectively restored in Quebec. In a National Assembly expanded to 122 constituencies, Lévesque’s Parti Québécois took 80 members (a gain of 9) on 49.3 per cent of the vote (up from 41.4 per cent). Claude Ryan’s Liberal’s had 42 elected legislators (a gain of 16) on 46.1 per cent of the vote (up by 12.3 per cent). The Union Nationale’s leader, Rodrigue Biron, had defected to the PQ, and former federal MP Roch La Salle led the party to complete extinction and only 4 per cent of the vote. In the sharply formulated debate over the future of Quebec and Canada, there was no longer room for a middle ground between seekers of sovereignty and adherents to Confederation, beyond the sovereigntists’ claims to “association” and the federalists’ to “special status.” Having clearly voted “no” in the referendum, Quebec seemed to be signalling that it did not wish to be seen as surrendering to the federalists. With the parties only three points apart in the popular vote, either side could easily win the next election, and there was no mandate to rock the boat constitutionally or to subscribe to whatever Trudeau might propose.
Just three days after the Quebec election, Lévesque joined with all the other premiers except Davis and Hatfield in what became known as the Gang of Eight to make a serious constitutional proposal to rebut Trudeau’s claim, which he had been bellowing from the height of the parliamentary Peace Tower since 1976, that the provinces were trying to hold hostage any progress in bringing the Constitution to Canada and amending it in Canada so as to win a massive concession of federal powers. They proposed patriation of the British North America (BNA) Act to be the Constitution of Canada, without a charter of rights, and with amendment by agreement of at least seven provinces with at least 50 per cent of the total population, and with the right of individual provinces to opt out of amendments that reduced or infringed provincial powers. Quebec gave up its veto, a significant concession by Lévesque, though somewhat a symbolic one, given the right to opt out and Lévesque’s continued professed determination to secede and renegotiate an association with Canada anyway. Trudeau rather sharply dismissed this proposal – though not without some insight into Lévesque’s tactics – as amounting to the gradual disintegration of Canada, adding, with his characteristic talent at expressive derision, “A confederation of shopping centres is not my kind of Canada.”24 In fact, it would not have been a bad proposal if it had envisioned a consolidation and extension of provincial charters into Trudeau’s long sought federal charter of rights.
