by Conrad Black
The turnout was 71.8 per cent on referendum day, and the country rejected the Charlottetown Accord 54.3 per cent to 45.7. The turnout was highest in Quebec, at 82 per cent, and that province rejected it 56.7 per cent to 43.3. British Columbia rejected it by 68.3 per cent. Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, by the barest margin Ontario, and the Northwest Territories, all approved, and all other jurisdictions opposed. It was the end of the line for constitutional agreement for a long time. The false starts and disappointments had revived sovereigntist fortunes in Quebec, and it now seemed likely that there would be another round on the referendum circuit before anything could be attempted.
Mulroney did succeed in completing a Free Trade Agreement with the United States, and by recourse to a special procedure for adding new senators he gained its adoption by the Senate. It was only supported by about half the people, but it was a signal accomplishment, and despite its fierce vocal opposition, the Liberal Party, when it had the opportunity in subsequent years, made no move to abolish or alter it. Nor, despite a frenzied and effective campaign against the perceived evils of the GST, did they roll that back. These were major achievements for Mulroney, but they stand in a better historic light than they did at the time they were put in place. With the departure in high dudgeon of the Quebec nationalists in Mulroney’s ranks, there also came a full-scale grassroots revolt in the West, as Preston Manning’s Reform Party railed against overindulgence of the Quebec that Parizeau and Bouchard wished to take right out of the country. There were many incidents that annoyed the West, but one of the turning points was the awarding of a fighter plane maintenance contract to a Montreal firm rather than the Winnipeg company that had held it and had been recommended by the Air Force and appeared to have the more competitive bid. It was a thin and ungrateful reward for the government that had dismantled the NEP, but Mulroney’s long dalliance with constitutional agreement strained the patience of the voters, who tired of the issue in both directions, the Québécois and the anti-Québécois.
Brian Mulroney, who grasped passionately and knew intimately the dynamics of the French-English issue, had commendably set himself the very high goal of resolving a problem that had been, as Trudeau had said, the subject of fruitless negotiation for fifty years, and which Trudeau himself could not fully resolve, despite having won a clear mandate from the country three times to do so and having decisively won a referendum on the issue. John Turner had brought his party largely back from the brink of the point of no electoral return, but could not endlessly resist the opposition of Trudeau and Chrétien, and he made his gracious exit, an admired and well-liked politician of the highest dedication and integrity, who went in a few weeks in 1984 from being the man of the future to a man of the past, but who yet retained and will always deserve the respect of the country. He was one of the outstanding justice and finance ministers and Opposition leaders in Canada’s history, and it is a misfortune that he could not await another election, which he certainly would have won.
He retired in 1990, and was replaced by the man he had defeated in 1984, Jean Chrétien (b. 1934), a veteran of twenty-six years in Parliament and a remarkable variety of cabinet positions, including external affairs, finance, justice, the Treasury Board, and, as it was in the late 1960s, Indian affairs. He was a strong and determined personality and an unalloyed and apparently ordinary man, which included having only a colloquial grasp of both official languages. He could not have been a greater contrast to his former chief, Trudeau, pillar of the bicultural Montreal socio-economic elite. Chrétien was plausibly challenged by Paul Martin Jr., who gave it a good try but was no match for the long history of service and bruising political combat that had been Chrétien’s life for thirty years. (He had retired as an MP for most of Turner’s time as Liberal leader, from 1985 to 1990.)
Mulroney had led the country with firmness and effectiveness in the Gulf War, and Canada was in combat in the air in assisting the immense alliance led by President George H.W. Bush in the move to expel Iraq’s Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, which he had simply seized, in 1990. The war ended after only a few days of fighting, and the Iraqis were completely routed by the overwhelming might of the American-led coalition. Mulroney also showed great agility in transforming an Open Skies meeting in Ottawa in 1990, where the free access to aerial reconnaissance that had first been proposed by President Eisenhower at Geneva in 1955 came to full fruition, and the meeting focused on the smaller group of the two Germanys and the four postwar occupying powers and terms were swiftly agreed for the reunification of Germany. It was effectively the end of the Cold War; it happened in Canada, and Canada’s leader played a valuable role in it. It closed admirably the chapter opened by the First Canadian Army’s penetration of Germany in the final campaign in the West in 1945.
Buffeted suddenly and harshly by events, Mulroney followed the example of Trudeau and Lévesque and dodged the electoral bullet intended for himself and announced his retirement as Progressive Conservative leader and prime minister in February 1993. Kim Campbell (b. 1947), the defence minister, and Jean Charest, now minister of science and technology, and still startlingly young at thirty-five (Campbell was only forty-three and Mulroney only fifty-three), were the chief contenders to replace him. Manning was vacuuming up votes in the West and Bouchard had gutted Mulroney’s Quebec support, so the task ahead of either contender would be a daunting one. Campbell prevailed, was installed as prime minister on June 25 with only a few months left in the term, and soon called an election for October 25. Chrétien’s well-organized Liberals, the Trudeau-Turner schism interred in the deep earth of prospective victory, were the clear favourites, facing a severely divided range of regional and sectional parties (from right to left, Reform, Progressive Conservative, NDP, Bloc Québécois; from east to west, Progressive Conservative, Bloc Québécois, NDP, Reform).
On October 25, 1993, there came the most dramatic realignment of political preferences in any single federal election. Back as solid as ever as the most durably successful political party in the Western democratic world were Jean Chrétien’s Liberals, who gained 94 MPs and 9.3 per cent of the popular vote from 1988 to win a solid majority with 177 MPs representing 41.2 per cent of the electorate. Their opponents were very radically and conveniently divided: the Bloc Québécois had 54 MPs and 13.5 per cent of the vote (in 1988, 10 MPs); Reform had 52 MPs and 18.7 per cent (in 1988, 1 MP and 2.1 per cent); the NDP fell from 43 MPs and 20.4 per cent of the vote in 1988 to 9 MPs and 6.9 per cent; and the governing Progressive Conservatives lost all but 2 of their seats and fell to 16 per cent after having had 169 MPs in 1988 and 43 per cent. The prime minister was defeated personally, and her next official position was as Chrétien’s consul general in Los Angeles. Jean Charest, who was re-elected in Sherbrooke, succeeded Campbell as head of the battered remnant of the Progressive Conservatives.
Thus, the former pieces of the great Mulroney coalition, the Progressive Conservatives, the Bloc Québécois, and Reform combined, had a formidable 48.2 per cent of the vote. It was an absurd state of affairs: the official federal Opposition was a provincial separatist party, and Reform and the Progressive Conservatives would have to compose their differences and re-amalgamate, and when they did, the Bloc Québécois would hold most of the balance of power between the Conservatives and the Liberals, unless the NDP could subsume the Bloc in Quebec.
Brian Mulroney was not popular as he left office, but he had been a capable leader who had repaired all the damage Trudeau had done in the Western Alliance, and importantly repositioned the country in economic and fiscal terms. The share of Canada’s GDP generated by trade with the United States increased from 25 to almost 45 per cent, but Canada did compete and did not become a “fifty-first state,” and the total gradually receded as China and India, representing nearly 40 per cent of the world’s population, became steadily committed to economic growth and became important markets for Canada. Free Trade was a success, and as economic growth returned to Canada, the use of the GST becam
e more evidently a wise move that permitted Canadian income tax rates to subside. Mulroney had grated on his countrymen with what was seen as his hyperbole and his somewhat contrived optimism. And his term ended on an unhappy note, with his record clouded by the fragmentation that afflicted his party for the following decade. His retirement would be disturbed by unsubstantiated reflections on his probity, though his judgment was open to some question (especially in temporarily accepting $300,000 in cash shortly after he retired, which he refunded, from a dubious financial and political adventurer who was ultimately extradited back to a lengthy prison sentence in Germany). But his record in office was impressive.
Brian Mulroney had understood as well as any Canadian leader in history the implications of the English-French double majority, but in trying to complete Trudeau’s quest for a new constitution and the reintegration of Quebec into a more bicultural Canada, at least officially, he had gradually stretched the tent of national conciliation farther and tighter, from Quebec nationalists to Western assimilationists, until it tore. Canada was founded as a country of two official languages and founding groups, but the exigencies of constitutional discussion amplified the insidious process of the other provinces piggybacking on concessions made to Quebec because of its special status. And the result, at Meech Lake and Charlottetown, was first a fragile agreement and then an unsatisfactory one. These attempts at constitutional renewal did not deserve Trudeau’s strictures, but a constitutional veto for every province will not work, and is not needed where opting out is provided in provincial fields, and the spectacle of the eleven government leaders pandering to women’s and native and territorial and welfare rights, and to other groups, is not ultimately credible. These are statutory and not constitutional fields. Trying to reconcile official French–English equality with the artificial preoccupation of equal treatment of provinces and unofficial segments of society made it an attempt to square a circle. The fundamental rights of founding peoples became confused with the jurisdictional ambitions of transitory and not always very disinterested provincial officials and interest groups. This was the problem that Trudeau so dramatically attacked at Pearson’s Federal-Provincial Conference in 1968.
Mulroney was aware that he was taking a chance; it was his version of what Lévesque called the beau risque when Lévesque chose to try to make an agreement with Mulroney in 1985. In risking his government and his party for this elusive goal, Mulroney approached in patriotic devotion the service of Laurier when he accepted the division of the Liberal Party and defeat in the 1917 election to avoid the complete isolation of Quebec or the reduction of the Liberals to an exclusively French-Canadian party. When Bourassa affronted the Supreme Court of Canada and the non-French, who provided about 40 per cent of the Quebec Liberals’ support, by invoking the notwithstanding clause against the English language in Quebec, he deprived Mulroney of his English majority, as they drew the line at further concessions to a government, a province, and a people that appeared to be accepting pre-emptive concessions from the majority while intensifying the cultural oppression of English-speaking Quebeckers, who technically had less freedom of expression, at least in commercial matters and access to government services, than much smaller French-speaking communities in English-speaking provinces.
The English-speaking minority in Quebec had for 230 years been exercising rights that were now being abridged, and were a large and strong segment of the Quebec population and the local linguistic representatives of 70 per cent of Canadians and 95 per cent of North Americans north of Mexico. The speed and unapologetic brusqueness with which Bourassa invoked the notwithstanding clause did maximum damage to Mulroney’s English language support, and the Reform Party in the West and the Liberal Party in Ontario surged in strength. When Mulroney was then unable to deliver Canada to ratification of Meech Lake, the Quebec nationalists deserted the federal Progressive Conservatives for Bouchard, as they had deserted Jean-Jacques Bertrand for Lévesque in 1970. If Mulroney had remained and fought the hopeless battle as Laurier had in 1917, he would have salvaged more in Quebec and Ontario than Campbell did, but Alberta was going to be a long-term problem. In the violent disintegration of the federal Conservatives that ensued, Mulroney tasted the hemlock offered to those who make the supreme effort for a good and long-sought cause that is not quite attainable.
He, his party, and the country paid a high price for his avoiding the Trudeau policy of demarcated confrontation, and the King policy of creative evasion. He tried, he lost, and he paid for it, but he deserves the credit at least for a brave and imaginative effort to solve a very difficult, long-festering, and dangerous problem by shoring up national unity with durable constitutional arrangements. Though it ended in rancorous schism and rejection, he had been a skilful political leader who had governed with vision and talent, and he was an important, and in most respects a successful, prime minister. He must rank with St. Laurent and a very few others just behind the country’s ablest leaders. Brian Mulroney, John Turner, and Joe Clark left Parliament together; all had contributed importantly to Canadian public life and deserved a greater taste of public respect and gratitude than they, for a time, received. Kim Campbell in other circumstances might have been a passable leader, and she too deserved better than the absurdly immense defeat she suffered.
For the time being, Chrétien had a clear sail and his opposition was the Parti Québécois, which seemed to be on the rise again after the effective mutual rejection of Quebec and English Canada. For the PQ, it was an attempt to raise a fallen separatist soufflé; but it might have been possible to capitalize briefly on the anger of disappointment and rejection, the rage of quarrelling spouses, before realities asserted themselves. Where in 1980 the Quebec nationalists had had the sense that they were invincible and on a permanent rise, they were now recoiling from finding that English Canada, contrary to one of the holiest tenets of the separatist canon, had drawn the line and would not retreat, challenging Quebec to be less demanding or see what the exploration of alternatives to continued participation in Canada really entailed. The decades of fire-breathing oratory, dire threats, and vivid dreams were rudely interrupted by a unilingual shout, in English, to put up or shut up. In the Charlottetown process, the entire political class of Canada had been rejected; the love of the jurisdictional carve-up had so entranced the participants that they got away from their popular underpinnings and cantilevered themselves out over an abyss.
Quebec was angry enough to hold a suspenseful referendum, but the separatists did not have the élan, the exaltation of soul, of the original Lévesque movement. The ambiance of Quebec nationalists had been diluted by disillusionment, some of it of a startlingly tawdry nature. The supreme architect of the advance of Quebec separatism for nearly twenty years, under Lesage, Johnson (père), and Lévesque, had been Claude Morin, who had retired as intergovernmental affairs minister in 1982. It was revealed in 1992 that he had been in the pay of the RCMP from 1974 to 1977 (most of which time he was out of office). He had been a very articulate and persuasive advocate of the independentist cause, and the revelation that he was a federalist mole of ambiguous views and defective financial probity was a very demoralizing blow to the militant Péquistes. In place of the joy of creative idealism, there was the anger of spite and rejection; it would be much more difficult to sell that as the shining future, especially with this humdrum cast. Bourassa, Parizeau, and Chrétien were vieux jeu, and were an unlikely trio to bring this issue back to the boil. Lucien Bouchard, now the leader of the federal Opposition, but more importantly of the separatist avant-garde, was the man to watch. The political ground was shifting underfoot, impairing everyone’s balance, yet again.
8. Jean Chrétien and Lucien Bouchard, 1993–2000
Just eleven weeks after the federal electoral watershed of October 26, 1993, Robert Bourassa followed the example of Trudeau, Lévesque, and Mulroney, and made way for someone else to finish his term and take the fall that the electorate appeared to have in mind for his government. Da
niel Johnson Jr., Bourassa’s head of the Treasury Board, was elected to succeed him, making the Johnsons the only family in Canadian history to provide three provincial premiers. Bourassa had retired for good, and would die of cancer two years later, aged sixty-three. He had never been excessively popular and was not a strong man or an electrifying leader, but he had been an astute and capable premier whose efforts were devoted altogether to political longevity. He was a skilful political whitewater canoeist, and an unusually intelligent and charming man personally, even by the high convivial standards of most French-Canadian politicians.
The first eight months of 1994 were a run-up to a general election in Quebec, and Parizeau made it clear at every opportunity that he would quickly hold a referendum on separation and independence. A great many Quebeckers, and not only the nationalists, were now spoiling for a fight. In Quebec, it was widely felt that the province had made a great many concessions to get a constitutional agreement and had been rebuffed and insulted, and that its language laws were no legitimate concern of any other province. Underlying it was the fear that the ability of Quebec to threaten acute discomfort to the country as a whole was under threat, something that could not be frittered away or allowed to slip from Quebec’s hands without a fight. Chrétien was a much less esteemed figure in Quebec than Trudeau, who was universally respected as a leader and a cultured and forceful personality, or Mulroney, who was admired and popular as an English-speaking Quebecker who was completely bilingual and had, as a federalist, done his best for his native province. Chrétien was respected as a tough and plain and unpretentious man, but not as a cultured francophone or as someone who could command respect by his demeanour and intellectual attainments, as Laurier, Lapointe, St. Laurent, Trudeau, and a number of Quebec’s premiers had. He was a fierce fighter for federalism, but for an educated man he had an unfeasible accent and vocabulary in French, and his English was not really adequate for the head of a mainly English-speaking country though his malapropisms were often endearing. He was, however, very experienced and determined, capable of great political courage, and was a sly operator who knew the middle and working classes. It was easy, but unwise, to underestimate him.
