Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  In August 1996, the Quebec Superior Court had upheld the claim of former separatist Guy Bertrand that the courts had a say in secession. It had been astonishing that Trudeau and Mulroney, and Chrétien himself until Bertrand was sustained, just meekly accepted that a tiny majority on a vague question could tear the country apart, and not even the creative agitation of the native people had moved Chrétien to do more than give a few punchy speeches about it. In September 1996, the issue was referred to the Supreme Court of Canada, and Stéphane Dion predicted that support for independence would plummet when Quebeckers realized that it was not the day at the beach that Lévesque, Parizeau, and Bouchard had held out, and which Trudeau and Chrétien had not really debunked. Daniel Johnson Jr. and the Quebec Liberals were still in favour of federalism by appeasement, but Chrétien was about to have his epiphany, the change of mind that turned him, along with Paul Martin’s uncommon talents as a deficit-slicing finance minister (the deficit had been cut by two-thirds, with minimal inflation but still 9.5 per cent unemployment), into an important prime minister.

  The country voted in the federal election with a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm, and no possibility of Chrétien’s Liberals being defeated, on June 2, 1997. The results (with 1993 results in brackets) were: Liberals, 155 MPs and 38.5 per cent of the vote (177 MPs and 41.2 per cent); Reform, 60 MPs and 19.3 per cent (52 MPs and 18.7 per cent); Bloc Québécois, 44 MPs and 10.7 per cent (54 MPs and 13.5 per cent); NDP, 21 MPs and 11.1 per cent (9 MPs and 6.9 per cent); Progressive Conservatives, 20 MPs and 18.8 per cent (2 MPs and 16 per cent). Chrétien won his own district in Shawinigan (for the tenth time) only by a little more than a thousand votes, after almost coming to blows with his ancient local foe, former PQ minister Yves Duhaime. The new Bloc leader, Gilles Duceppe, was certainly not the vote-harvester Bouchard was, and Manning now would be the leader of the Opposition (and would occupy the official residence, Stornoway, which Bouchard had eschewed in favour of living in Hull). NDP leader Audrey McLaughlin was not as effective as Ed Broadbent or David Lewis or Tommy Douglas, but she had elbowed her way back as an official party, as had Jean Charest, with a 900 per cent increase on Campbell’s two MPs. Chrétien had barely won a majority in the House (155 of 301) – the first back-to-back majorities for the Liberals since St. Laurent in 1953 – and he had 101 of the 103 Ontario constituencies. The new Parliament continued to be full of anomalies, but Chrétien was safe now into the new millennium. He was handicapped, however, by the widely held view summarized by distinguished editor Robert Fulford that “deep within the Canadian spirit lies the idea that there is something honest about ignorance and something slick about knowledge.”26

  Nothing seemed to happen anymore; all was quiet, and the deficit and unemployment were declining, inflation was low, and the dollar was rising. Jean Charest retired as federal Progressive Conservative leader and succeeded the rather ineffectual Daniel Johnson Jr. as leader of the Quebec Liberals, making them, even more than the federal Liberals, an umbrella party for all federalists opposite Bouchard’s PQ. The 1996 Supreme Court referral on the legality of provincial secession finally came in 1998 in the tradition of the 1981 decision on unilateral patriation: it would not be legal for Quebec to secede unilaterally, but if a substantial majority of Quebeckers voted to secede on a clear question, the rest of the country would be legally obligated to work with the Quebec government toward secession.

  Quebec voted in its general election on November 30, 1998, this time with Lucien Bouchard and Jean Charest, as well as the Action Démocratique’s Mario Dumont, as the party leaders. There was only the subtlest change from the previous election (1994 results in brackets): PQ, 76 MNAs on 42.9 per cent of the vote (77 MNAs and 44.8); Liberals, 48 MNAs with 43.6 per cent (47 MNAs and 44.4 per cent); and the same 1 MNA, Dumont, for the ADQ, but the vote increased from 6.5 to 11.8 per cent. It was no momentum for Bouchard, as he fell slightly and Charest narrowly won the popular vote. There had been Quebec federal prime ministers for all but eight months of the last thirty years, and while Chrétien and Martin had reduced transfer payments, they still flowed to Quebec in heavy amounts and the referendum-question card trick could not be played again. Pulling out of Canada would be an expensive and embittering business. Canada wasn’t making any more concessions and Quebec was too sensible to take the plunge, too frightened by its bourgeois avarice. It was one thing to persecute the English language and ease the non-French out to booming Toronto, but cutting the painter altogether was a worrisome proposition.

  Chrétien visited thirty-four national capitals before he got around to Washington, and his aides even asked that the White House not represent the relations as excessively cozy. But he went along with President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair’s attack on Serbia when it appeared to be engaging in genocidal attacks on the Bosnian Muslims in 1998. The months slipped quietly by, the deficit gave way to a surplus – a tremendous achievement for Martin and Chrétien – and the country was prosperous. Quebec and the federalists had taken their stances and there were no substantive efforts to bridge the gap, but the public did not care about the amending formula and the exact demarcation of jurisdiction in every concurrent policy area. There was reasonably benign stasis. Chrétien was a fortunate leader, a lucky one, after all the years of struggle against the Créditistes and separatists in the hinterland of the province. But it was at this point – as a minor scandal burbled away in Shawinigan, indicating Chrétien’s propensity for the traditions of Quebec patronage – that the recently turned sixty-five-year-old prime minister suddenly, and with his usual fixity of purpose, chose to strike a mighty blow for federalism. It had been a year since the Supreme Court of Canada had declared that for a movement to secede by a province to be taken seriously, it must be by a popular vote on a clear question of secession being approved by a clear majority.

  Chrétien had President Clinton to a conference on federalism at Mont-Tremblant, Quebec, in October 1999, and the president closed the conference, where the independentists had had the upper hand. Clinton gave a learned ex tempore assertion of the criteria for a just and successful federation and made the assertion that Canada certainly cleared all the hurdles and that secession from it was not justified. With all the force of his personality and the prestige of his great office, Bill Clinton delivered all he had for Chrétien and for Canada. Lucien Bouchard and his entourage were visibly shaken by the implicit silencing of their unceasing carping and whining.

  Jean Chrétien, after extensive consultation, presented his Clarity Act in December. It did not stipulate a precise majority required for a successful vote for provincial secession, only the requirement for a clear majority on a clear question. Chrétien doubted that Bouchard and his followers would be able to generate much heat on the issue in the last weeks of the old millennium. He was right; Bouchard fumed impotently when Chrétien’s measure was presented in Parliament. But Chrétien did not follow through on the post-1995 referendum threats by the native people and declare that a province was as divisible as the country in the event of a separatist vote, and that anti-separatist counties or regions could, in the event of an adequate province-wide separatist majority, secede from the province and remain in Canada. Charest and the provincial Liberals, as well as the federal Progressive Conservatives – now led again by Joe Clark, who came snorting out of the Albertan sagebrush when Preston Manning started advocating reunification of the parties – opposed Chrétien’s Clarity Act, as did the NDP, ever the appeasers of Quebec nationalism, when not actually participating in it. But the official Opposition under Manning threw in wholeheartedly with the government, and the act cleared Parliament with a heavy majority.

  This time, Jean Chrétien erased the near-fatal disaster of the referendum of 1995; there was no significant outcry, and the Quebec media, having predicted a tumultuous uproar, had to admit that Chrétien had called it right. Even Trudeau had expected a serious controversy, but he wished Chrétien well and urged him to proceed: “Bon courage,” he said
.27 Bouchard replied with his Bill 99, supported by the craven Quebec Liberals, stating that Quebec alone would determine the basis of its achievement of independence, and that a 50-per-cent-plus-one vote on any question that worked for Quebeckers would justify a unilateral declaration of independence.

  But the crisis was finally passing. Bouchard had lost heart in the great dream, as Lévesque had, and he had no open-minded and original Brian Mulroney with whom to pursue a beau risque. He would be gone, disillusioned, in another year, and the great nationalist fires were now hissing sparks that did not illuminate the way forward. It was a dead end: Canada would not back up any farther, and Quebec could not chin itself on the terrible fiscal and social penalties of trying to make a credible exit from a gentle country that was not the sort of place that provoked the revolt or collective withdrawal of large numbers of its citizens. On disguised payments from English Canada, Quebec was able to operate an overwhelmingly white collar economy and the days of hanging the culture on the barnyard door had been replaced by an era where everyone was an academic, a consultant, or part of Quebec’s narcissistic media or of the immense Quebec fonction publique, the civil service. Quebec and its ruling elites had all the instances of a sovereign state except sovereignty. They attended conferences of La Francophonie and were semi-autonomous in many policy areas, including immigration. They had most of the psychic income of an independent country but almost none of the risk. And they acted on their frustrations at being unable to emancipate themselves completely by periodic impositions of new rules of absurd restrictiveness on the principal language of the world and of all the rest of North America above the Rio Grande. It was a self-administered placebo.

  Jean Chrétien had almost severed the magic thread, by his complacency and then his nervosity in the referendum campaign of 1995, but had wobbled through and then scored an immense victory for Canada when no one was looking: the swift resurrection of public finances and the sudden fitting out of impenetrable protection against Quebec’s constitutional sabre-rattling by legerdemain. It was a brilliant and stealthy coup from a man widely, and often unjustly, thought to be quite limited. It was not exactly a repossession of the double majority, as English Canada could now almost govern without Quebec but could not really impose a hostile majority will on Quebec. The old two Canadas could move forward by mutual consent, or the country as a whole could develop with a substantial ability for a semi-autonomous Quebec to pursue a different policy path within Quebec. But suddenly, so soon after the intense suspense of the 1995 referendum, the long era when Quebec could threaten the viability of the whole country was almost over, as long as Canada would enforce the Clarity Act and the Supreme Court decision that it entrenched.

  The old Canadian technique had worked again: endless good-faith “circonférences” until the parties had enough of what they had to have and all but the fanatics lost interest. Almost unbelievably, Canada was a crisis-free, prosperous, and stable country. In the steaming kitchen of Ottawa-Quebec relations, as all was winding down and the principals had departed, a dogged sous-chef had, with the Clarity Act, produced a miraculous sorbet ready for prolonged national delectation. It wasn’t complete or perfect, but it liberated the country from a spectre of French-English division which had haunted it for forty years and lurked for two centuries before that. Quebec had won three-quarters of a loaf, but Canada had a four-course meal: the Cold War had ended, and the country was threatened by no one, inside or out, respected by all, and unbound before an unlimited horizon. The prospects were unlike anything Canadians had seen before. Canada entered a new epoch, on the calendar and in its national life, blinking disbelievingly at its unprecedented fortune and vigour. Like a patient convalescing from a severe medical emergency that was passing, Canada was coming out of it, groggy and exhausted, relieved but too enervated to rejoice.

  Though the country was solid, its regions were at odds and its political parties fragmented. And as the United States prepared to say farewell to Bill Clinton, a popular (if hyperactively laddish) president, after a decade as the world’s only superpower, Canada’s self-consciousness opposite the United States was still almost as pronounced as it had been in the times of Macdonald and Laurier. Yet Laurier had been right in a sense: it had been Canada’s century after all, not to rise to world leadership, but to master its internal inhibitions and contradictions, and more. For the insecurity generated by its great and dazzling neighbour, even as Canada shed its ancient fears of internal weakness, would also soon be alleviated by events, foreign and domestic, in the opening years of the new millennium.

  Stephen Harper (1959–), leader of the federal opposition 2002–2006 and prime minister of Canada since 2006, and Barack Obama (1961–), U.S. president since 2009. Harper has departed from the international organizations-based foreign policy of Pearson and Chrétien, the anti-Americanism of Trudeau, and the pro-Americanism of Mulroney and taken a strong and independent line against Russian aggression and militant Islam. By being the least assertive American president in foreign policy since before the U.S. Civil War, Obama has enabled Canada to play a larger role in the world than ever before, though Harper has limited his credibility by failure even to maintain Canada’s military capabilities.

  * At a brief stop at Louiseville, one of six along the route, a school choir serenaded a bemused de Gaulle with an improvised ditty punctuated by the refrain: “This general, this general, he’s golden.”3

  † The author had a very modest position in the lower entourage of Premier Johnson that summer and observed that many, even higher-ups in the premier’s office, raised the quality of their spoken French to coincide with the arrival of their distinguished visitor.

  * Walter Gordon supported Trudeau but declined to join his cabinet or to seek reelection to Parliament, thus possibly losing an opportunity to end his public career on a note of high achievement. The hour of the moderate nationalist had struck. The author got to know Walter Gordon ten years later and he denied any regret at having retired when he did.

  * The rumour of bisexuality has never entirely perished but is scarcely relevant and was, in the circumstances, extremely provocative.

  * Réal Caouette, one MP short of official party status for the Créditistes, offered Jones membership in his party despite his views, as Jones did not oppose minority language education, but Jones declined to prop up Caouette’s status.

  * The author sensed the unreality of it and wrote Trudeau, quoting Cardinal Villeneuve’s letter to Duplessis after the 1939 Quebec election: “Who is to say that the future does not reserve to you a return to office, and you would come back to it with the strength that adversity alone can give.” He replied at once that “of all the roles I have ever played, none has been more delightful than my Duplessis to your Villeneuve.” (This is cited only to illustrate the suspensive quality of the election result, even to me as no more than a somewhat informed and well-acquainted member of the public.)

  * The author underwrote the journey from northern Quebec of one busload of supporters of a leadership convention.

  * King changed constituencies because he was defeated in his previous constituency. Turner changed constituencies because of redistribution and interim retirement. He was undefeated personally in eight elections.

  * Both told me so.

  CHAPTER 10

  A Force in the World at Last, 2000–2014

  1. Jean Chrétien’s Last Lap, 2000–2003

  Like a long-detained hostage for the first time in many years in broad daylight, Canada, emerging from the pale of the separatist threat and more economically robust than ever in its history, eased hesitantly into the new millennium. Symbolically, the fireworks display on Parliament Hill to mark the turn of the millenium, unlike the magnificent spectacles in many other cities (London, Paris, New York, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro), was a fiasco afflicted by broken sequences and misfirings. Jean Chrétien, characteristically, dismissed these as trivial technical problems. They were, and were nothing to be concerned about, bu
t at his moment of greatest service, in a career that had been dedicated altogether to ploughing the often stony fields of federalism in Quebec for nearly forty years, Chrétien’s time had passed.

  The regime – despite Chrétien’s elaborate and relentless schtick of the honest habitant of working-class background (which was an imposture; his was a numerous but professional family in Shawinigan, and he was a well-trained lawyer, though with the tastes and inflection of a French-Canadian petit bourgeois) – had become tainted by scandal. Chrétien was in fact a traditional Quebec politician, schooled in the less progressive Maurice Duplessis techniques of handing out patronage and vengeance by unabashedly partisan criteria. In 1998, Pierre Corbeil, the chief fundraiser for sixteen federal Quebec constituencies, including Chrétiens, pleaded guilty to four charges of fraud (influence-peddling).

  More serious and closer to Chrétien personally was the Grand-Mère affair, in which an inn and golf club of which Chrétien was a part owner was sold to a controversial local businessman and received a grant of $164,000 from the Transitional Jobs Fund and a loan of $615,000 from the Business Development Bank of Canada, both on questionable criteria, in which the prime minister’s entourage played a role. There was also a very murky sale of Chrétien’s interest in the properties, where he was left with a balance of sale that was apt to be influenced by the sale of a neighbouring property at a generous price to a Chrétien political supporter who almost simultaneously received from the Canadian International Development Agency a generous contract to strengthen the electricity distribution system of Mali. It was complex and never really plumbed to the depths, and if a scandal not an earth-shaking one, but it did open serious questions of probity that should not arise with a prime minister.