by Conrad Black
On June 23, 1985, 268 Canadians (out of 329 fatalities) were killed on Air India flight 182 from Montreal to London, which was to fly on to New Delhi. The aircraft was blown up by a time bomb in Irish airspace at 31,000 feet and was the worst terrorist incident of recent times prior to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. The national police and intelligence service, RCMP and CSIS, were both found to have been seriously deficient in ignoring warnings of possible Sikh violence against Indians and Indian interests.
The general attitude of the Mulroney government to human crises abroad and old grievances at home was an altruistic one. Canada responded more generously and effectively than almost any country to the great Ethiopian famine of 1983 to 1985, which killed millions of people. The Mulroney government gave $100 million to Japanese Canadians in an ex gratia settlement of the scandalous detention of twenty-three thousand Japanese Canadians in 1942 and the seizure and sale of their property. And it was consistently generous, if not overly successful, in trying to address the particular problems posed by native people in Canada.
As the end of the first Mulroney term approached, the prime minister put his policy and political eggs in three grand projects: the pursuit of free trade with the United States; the partial move from income taxes to consumption taxes as a means of addressing the deficit he had inherited; and an ambitious return to constitutional renewal and attempts to draw Quebec into constitutional arrangements that would end that province’s isolation and effectively lay to rest for a long time the issue of its participation in Confederation. Attempting such a program established Mulroney as a leader of unusually large imagination, and the accomplishment of it all would make him a transformative figure.
Robert Bourassa had identified five principal requirements for Quebec to subscribe to the Canadian Constitution. At a 1987 meeting at Meech Lake in the Gatineau Hills near Ottawa, these points were recognized and modified to be recognition of Quebec as a “distinct society”; a constitutional veto for all provinces; resurrection of the right to financial compensation for provinces that opted out of any federal program in an exclusively provincial jurisdiction (Duplessis was still a ghost rider from the university grants imbroglio thirty years before, his position now unanimously endorsed); increased provincial powers in immigration; and provincial participation in the selection of senators and Supreme Court judges by reference to agreed lists of eligible nominees. Because the Meech Lake Accord was changing the Constitution amending formula (in a very unworkable way, as Prince Edward Island could veto a change), it required unanimous consent within three years.
As it was not even six years after the so-called night of the long knives, Meech Lake was premised on a fast-track healing of deep wounds. The Parti Québécois generally was still led by the hard-liners who had opposed Lévesque, and Johnson resigned and was replaced as PQ leader in early 1988 by former finance minister Jacques Parizeau, who opposed Meech Lake as an insufficient devolution for Quebec. The federal Liberals were divided between the Turner group, which supported Meech Lake, and the Trudeau loyalists, who considered it an unjust and unwise concession of authority to the provinces. The NDP supported Meech Lake, but the new Western group, the Reform Party, led by former Alberta premier Ernest Manning’s son Preston, opposed it.
There were storm signals, but as the country progressed through an election year, support appeared to be holding, despite Pierre Trudeau’s erupting into the accord ratification controversy with a newspaper article on May 27, 1987, entitled, “Say Goodbye to the Dream of One Canada.” The former prime minister’s views were well-known, and his response to the agreement was predictable, but the severity of his words was a surprise, and, objectively, to most of his admirers a disappointment. Trudeau accused Mulroney of having “sold out” to the provinces, denied that Quebec was any more distinct than many other places in Canada (which is nonsense), and claimed that “the federation was set to last a thousand years.” (It wasn’t.) “Alas,” Trudeau wrote, “only one eventuality hadn’t been foreseen: that one day the government of Canada would fall into the hands of a wimp [“pleutre”; “wimp” was his translation for the author]. It has now happened.” There were problems with the unanimous consent required for amendment, which seemed excessive and impractical to many; and there were legitimate concerns about giving the provinces the level of influence envisioned in the selection of senators and Supreme Court justices, and enhancing the powers of the Senate. But for Trudeau to denounce Mulroney in such disdainful terms over such an important issue (whatever Mulroney’s shortcomings, no sane person would call him a wimp, even in relation to Trudeau), and to claim that Quebec was, in St. Laurent’s famous words, “a province like the others,” and to equate any devolution of powers to the provinces almost with treason, was preposterous. Mulroney replied with harsh reflections on the notwithstanding clause, where Trudeau was certainly vulnerable, and the entire exchange that Trudeau precipitated was, to say the least, unedifying and unseemly. Better in all respects was the almost unheard-of statement of support for the Meech Lake Accord by that most knowledgeable of parties Her Britannic and Canadian Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, on October 23, 1987.
The big election issue was free trade, and here opinion was divided closely, but the opposition was split radically between the Liberals and the NDP. As the free trade issue became steadily hotter, the Progressive Conservatives gained relatively from being the only refuge for free-traders. It was a tough campaign; the Liberals this time were well-organized, and despite Chrétien’s skirmishing in the undergrowth against Turner, the Liberal leader led a number of polls during the campaign and Conservative advertising focused heavily on his credibility. In general, Turner fought his corner well and held his own in the debates, but the intensification of both the Liberal scare campaign on the dangers of free trade and the hedgehog defence the government conducted against non-believers in free trade, including some expansive claims for its benefits and a shabby exploitation of Turner’s problems with the followers of Trudeau and Chrétien in his party, gave the Progressive Conservatives an advantage, as the NDP splintered the anti–free trade vote.
On November 21, 1988, the unlikely happened and all three party leaders did well in the general election. Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives lost 7 per cent in the popular vote and 38 MPs from 1984, but were re-elected with 169 constituencies and 43 per cent, and Mulroney became the first leader since St. Laurent to win two straight majorities, and the first Conservative leader since Macdonald to do so (Borden’s re-election in 1917 having been at the head of a coalition). John Turner more than doubled his Liberal deputation, from 40 to 83, and raised the Liberal share of the total vote from 28 per cent to 31.9; and Ed Broadbent led the NDP to the best result in its history, raising the number of MPs to 43 with 20.4 per cent of the vote, up from 30 MPs and 18.8 per cent in 1984.
Most significant, Mulroney retained his pre-eminent position in Quebec. Subsequent events would deprive the Progressive Conservatives of that position, but the tribal tidal wave of support that the federal Liberals had had from that province – from Laurier’s first election as prime minister in 1896 to Trudeau’s last in 1980, broken only by the aberrant and mighty intervention of Maurice Duplessis and his Union Nationale war machine in 1958 – was over, and it has not returned. From here on, as long as there are just two other parties, the Conservatives and NDP, the Liberals have faced a more or less level playing field with an upward incline for them as they move west, and they have not enjoyed the easy formula for victory and natural government that resided in a lock on Quebec and the sole ability to say to Ontario and the rest of English Canada that only the Liberals could deliver the French Canadians to federalism (and to the Liberal Party). It had been a good run, and though hackneyed and overplayed at times, there had been some truth to the Liberals’ claim regarding Quebec, and Laurier, King, Lapointe, St. Laurent, Pearson, and Trudeau had, on balance, brought the country a very long way forward through many crises
over nearly a century. But it was over. Brian Mulroney had permanently changed the electoral equation in Canada, though on a delayed fuse, as it turned out, because internecine strains in his own swiftly assembled electoral coalition of 1984 would contribute to a one-party Liberal Indian summer.
The Supreme Court of Canada declared Quebec’s language legislation unconstitutional insofar as it required unilingual commercial signs, and Bourassa invoked the notwithstanding clause and required that English words on commercial signs be not more than half the size of French words. The whole controversy was so picayune and squalid that it seriously alienated opinion in English Canada, and the consensus to resolve the remaining constitutional patriation issues gave way to a consensus not to make any more concessions to Quebec.
Brian Mulroney pressed on into 1989, trying to herd the Meech Lake Accord toward ratification in all the provincial legislatures and to negotiate free trade with the Americans while puzzling through how to get any final agreement past the Senate. The Goods and Services Tax had been adopted and would come into effect in the new year, and resentment at it, inflated by voter amnesia that income tax abatements had been announced as pre-emptive compensation for it, soon was audible. For the re-elected Mulroney, the wheels started to loosen and depart the axles quite soon after his impressive victory at the polls.
Meech Lake came under a steady crossfire of divergent criticism: to Trudeau’s allegations of a sellout – taken up incongruously by redneck circles, especially in the West – and Quebec nationalist allegations that it was an inadequate recognition of Quebec’s rights as a French country and of their reluctant participation in the whole Canadian idea, was added the populist fatuity that Canada was being remade by “eleven suits behind closed doors,” supposedly unrepresentative and arrogant bourgeois fixers acting without authority, though all were elected to do what they were trying to do. Meech Lake became a symbol, a totem, for discontent, as the long deadline for ratification elapsed. Liberals Frank McKenna in New Brunswick and Clyde Wells in Newfoundland (the latter a disciple of Trudeau) won their elections and announced the revocation of their province’s ratification of the Meech Lake Accord. This was almost entirely partisan, as they had nothing to complain about, and their role was raised above the marginal level only by the heavy price of unanimous provincial consent that had been laid on the whole project. This was the ultimate playing-out of the long-running game of the nine other provinces posturing as Union Jack– or Maple Leaf–swaddled pan-Canadians while Quebec extracted concessions from Ottawa. Then they instantly became a pudgy-faced children’s choir of psalm-singers to the moral imperative of equal treatment of provinces.
It was a tactical mistake for Mulroney to have rallied the collegial backslapping solidarity of the brotherhood of the premiers for gaining approval of the Meech Lake provisions rather than working it out with Quebec and then dealing with the others. It was difficult to proceed in this way, given the power of Ontario and the benign way Davis and McMurtry had played their hand, but the whole ancient and hoary-headed bugbear of federal Liberal Party orthodoxy to the effect that all the provinces are identical jurisdictions makes the entire process submersible. Canada wasn’t an agreement between four provinces; it was an agreement between the French- and English-speaking people of what became Canada, and they were initially grouped in four provinces, two of which had French minorities and one of which had an English-speaking minority. The Liberal Identikit fetishism of turning the issue from a one-to-one to a nine-to-one matter of agreement was intellectually unrigorous and tactically dangerous, and Mulroney, as most of the other nine provinces were in his party’s hands, and he was building on a process begun by his Liberal predecessors, who had a different political compass, constructed his Meech Lake Accord, with the best and most assiduous will possible, on a foundation of sand.
Mulroney entrusted his final drive to adopt the Meech Lake Accord to the youthful Jean Charest (b. 1958), future Progressive Conservative federal leader and Liberal premier of Quebec, who at twenty-eight, when he was appointed minister of youth in 1986, was the youngest cabinet member in Canadian history. Charest padded around the crumbling edges of the consensus and made some peripheral concessions, but in doing so he broke open the greatest and most dangerous fissures. Lucien Bouchard, a university friend of Mulroney’s and his ambassador to Paris, and now the environment minister after a strenuous by-election campaign in Chicoutimi, Quebec, became discouraged with his entire effort as federal official and MP. He resigned from the government and the Progressive Conservative Party and sat as an independent for a time, before setting up the Bloc Québécois with five renegade Conservatives and two renegade Liberals. It was a movement waiting for its time and would not have long to wait.
Another First Ministers’ Conference was convened for June 3, 1990, less than three weeks before the expiry of the deadline for ratification of Meech Lake. A new accord was agreed after a week of intensive negotiations, though it was also agreed that there would be a further meeting to “clarify” the agreement, and there was a new commitment to Senate reform by July 1, 1995, including its transformation into an elected chamber and the conferral upon it of increased powers by the House of Commons. It was agreed that if unanimous agreement was not achieved in the time allowed, the Senate would have twenty-four Quebec members, eighteen Ontarians, four from Prince Edward Island, and the other seven provinces would have eight each. Further guaranties were layered in after the latest canvass of the ambitions of the premiers, for gender equality, the right of the territories to participate in naming senators and Supreme Court justices, and further discussions on Aboriginal issues, minority language rights, the admission of new provinces, and a revisitation of amending procedures (though it was hard to imagine how they would go beyond unanimous consent of the provinces, unless native people and sketchily populated territories were to have a veto as well). There was no end to the demands to be satisfied when it had to be unanimous and the deadline loomed.
Mulroney and most of the premiers had done their best, but in the Manitoba Legislature, MLA Elijah Harper raised objections as a native person. It was agreed to give Manitoba three more months, and this could be done because Bourassa had the votes to have the accord re-ratified by the National Assembly. But Clyde Wells and the Conservative Opposition leader in Newfoundland, Thomas Rideout, had pledged a free vote, and it now seemed that this would not be carried. It was absurd that such a measure would be derailed by one legislator in Manitoba and parliamentary niceties among the Newfies, but such was the extended vulnerability of this kind of discussion. The process was just too wide a circuit, and after each completion of the tour of necessary signatories, things had come unstuck and more concessions were needed. For want of a nail, a shoe, a horse, a battle, and the whole project went down. It was not a particularly good agreement anyway. Unanimity for amendment was nonsense; an elected Senate is probably nonsense, as the Commons will not really surrender it any rights and no serious person would go through an election to sit there. A Supreme Court chosen by one level of government from lists of eligible candidates selected by another level has many problems. All the placebos thrown to every conceivable constituency, down to gender rights, were best left to the regular statutes, not constitutional discussions. It was a well-motivated effort and a grand ambition of Mulroney’s, but it couldn’t fly, and his government was mortally wounded.
Even now, Mulroney fought on and sent out the former language commissioner Keith Spicer to canvass the country on constitutional matters, following which former prime minister Joe Clark, who had served capably as secretary of state for external affairs, became minister of constitutional affairs and helped arrange the Charlottetown Accord, in which all the provinces and territories and native peoples’ organizations agreed on a new devolution of powers restricting federal spending powers and rights of reserve or disavowal of provincial legislation. The accord envisaged a “social charter” about Canada’s supposedly defining social programs, a “Canada clause
” defining the values of the country (a particular playpen for the platitudinous), and the Senate would be reduced in authority, with six senators for each province and one for each territory, but a double majority would be required in matters involving the French language; that is, an overall majority and also a majority among the primarily French-speaking members. This was a sharp turn from Meech Lake, which had an elected Senate of greater authority, and with provincial representation that conferred an enhanced status on Quebec and the smaller provinces.
The Charlottetown Accord could have been adopted by the parties to the negotiations, as all provinces ratified it, all three federal parties supported it, and all the governments of the provinces and their official oppositions, except the Parti Québécois led by Jacques Parizeau, supported it. Quebec, Alberta, and British Columbia had adopted laws requiring approval of constitutional amendments, and against Clark’s advice Mulroney put it to a national referendum, which was held on October 26, 1992.
Opposition was led by Pierre Trudeau, who, in a speech delivered at the Montreal Chinese restaurant La Maison du Egg Roll, blasted the accord as the end of Canada; by Jacques Parizeau and the Parti Québécois and Lucien Bouchard and the Bloc Québécois, who were outright separatists and seekers of an independent Quebec; and, on the other side of the ledger, by Preston Manning and his Western-based Reform Party, which opposed bilingualism outside Quebec. Mulroney campaigned hard but rather aggressively, calling opponents of the accord “enemies of Canada,” a difficult charge to make against Trudeau, however obstreperous he might be. Bourassa stood by the agreement but had taken to referring to “a uniquely sovereign Quebec in a Canadian common market” and heavily qualified his support of federalism, having invoked the notwithstanding clause and overridden the Supreme Court of Canada to reduce the language rights of the English in Quebec.
