Several prime ministers before Trudeau had tried to wrest the British North America Act from Britain but had always failed to come up with an amending formula that all ten provinces and the federal government could accept. He first tried to make constitutional change at the federal-provincial conference in Victoria in 1971, with a proposal to patriate the constitution with an amending formula, entrench French and English as official languages, and codify rights such as freedom of expression and religion.
All the provinces agreed, and then Robert Bourassa got chilblains after he returned home and was pilloried by politicial allies and opponents for giving away too much. He called Trudeau, reneged on the verbal agreement, and so the proposal foundered. Trudeau blamed the electoral victory of the Parti Québécois five years later and Brian Mulroney’s Meech Lake Accord in the late 1980s on Bourassa, because the Quebec premier had denied his province an opportunity to sign on to a constitutional accord when he had the chance. “Much of Bourassa’s subsequent career,” Trudeau wrote in his Memoirs, “has been spent trying to regain what he was once so unwise as to refuse.”
After the Liberals were defeated by Joe Clark’s Progressive Conservatives in the May 1979 election, Trudeau announced that he was retiring from politics. Quebec premier René Lévesque, leader of the separatist Parti Québécois, who had campaigned on offering Quebeckers a referendum on separation, thought he would have an easier time winning it with Trudeau out of power and sped up his agenda.
Fate intervened. The minority Clark government was defeated on a budget amendment in December 1979, only seven months after taking office, and Trudeau came roaring out of retirement — a convention had not yet been held to choose his successor — to lead the Liberals into the subsequent election. “Welcome to the 1980s,” Trudeau quipped on election night, February 18, 1980, having trounced Clark’s Progressive Conservatives 147 seats to 103, although his majority mandate was lopsided, with no seats west of Manitoba, in contrast with the distribution in the 1968 election.
An emboldened Trudeau, knowing this mandate would probably be his last, focused on the issues that mattered most to him and that in the end guaranteed his legacy. First among them was the referendum, and that led to ferocious public confrontations between Trudeau and Lévesque over the future of the country.
At a massive rally in the Paul Sauvé Arena in east-end Montreal — the same venue where the Parti Québécois had celebrated its election victory in 1976 — Trudeau, in full gunslinger mode, delivered a devastating speech, only six days before the referendum vote scheduled for May 20, 1980. He promised to reform the Canadian constitution if the Non side won. He was deliberately vague about the terms, allowing many Québécois to assume that he was planning to accede to their aspirations — a conclusion he said later was not “logical,” based on his persistent stand against “special status.” The secessionists were defeated 59.56 percent to 40.44 percent, a decisive 20 percent margin. “À la prochaine fois,” a dispirited Lévesque said to his distraught supporters, from the stage of the very same arena where Trudeau had held his Non rally.
After the defeat of the referendum, Trudeau moved quickly to restart the constitutional talks by meeting with the premiers in Ottawa and giving them a twelve-point agenda. The eleven governments negotiated all summer and assembled at a First Ministers’ Conference in Ottawa in September. Nobody could agree on a deal. Ever the samurai, Trudeau determined to go it alone. In October he unveiled what came to be called the “People’s Package.” After approval by the House and the Senate, the patriation proposal would be sent directly to Westminster. It proposed a modified version of the amending formula that had been accepted in Victoria 1971 and a Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Much had changed on the political landscape in the ensuing decade, however, including the election of a separatist premier of Quebec. Ontario and New Brunswick accepted the resolution, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia reserved judgement, and the remaining six provinces — an unlikely combination that included Alberta and Quebec — resolved to fight it in the courts, in their legislatures, and in London.
By April 1981, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia, the two provinces that had stayed on the sidelines, had aligned themselves with their disaffected counterparts to form a “Gang of Eight” in opposition to the prime minister. Then, in September, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Ottawa’s proposal, while legal, was unconstitutional because it violated traditional conventions. That forced Trudeau back to the negotiating table one more time, setting the scene for a High Noon confrontation with his old foe Lévesque and the Gang of Eight.
The weary combatants met in Ottawa early in November. After two days of wrangling, a frustrated Trudeau offered to take the amending formula and the Charter in a referendum to the people. Lévesque broke from the Gang of Eight to accept the referendum, a compromise that he later realized was a tactical error. Later that same evening of Wednesday November 5, some provincial premiers and their bureaucrats got together to hammer out a compromise, in which they offered to accept Trudeau’s Charter with the inclusion of a notwithstanding clause in exchange for Ottawa accepting their amending formula. They presented this proposal to all the first ministers the following morning. With some modifications, Trudeau agreed, but Lévesque accused his fellow gang members of betrayal and stomped out. (This quickly gave rise to the myth of “The Night of the Long Knives,” which in turn prompted Brian Mulroney’s subsequent attempts to get Quebec’s signature through the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords.)
Over the next weeks, all but Quebec made modifications to the patriation package, which was then sent to Westminster, where it was duly approved by the British Parliament. Later Trudeau wrote in his Memoirs: “I always said it was thanks to three women that we were eventually able to reform our Constitution. The Queen, who was favourable, Margaret Thatcher, who undertook to do everything that our Parliament asked of her, and Jean Wadds [a former Progressive Conservative MP who had been appointed High Commissioner to the United Kingdom by the government of Joe Clark in 1979], who represented the interests of Canada so well in London.”
The Queen and Prince Philip travelled to Canada to sign the act into law on April 17, 1982. Wearing a teal-blue coat and matching hat with a jaunty tassel, she sat outdoors at a small wooden table on Parliament Hill for all her subjects to observe her signing the final act that would symbolize the independence and maturity of Canada as a sovereign nation. Trudeau, bare-headed and wearing a morning suit, sat at the head of the low table, holding down the parchment in a sudden gust as his sovereign picked up the pen and signed her name.
“What we are celebrating today,” he told the crowd, “is not so much the completion of our task but the renewal of our hope, not so much an ending but a fresh beginning.” Of all the images of Trudeau the statesman, this is the one where he looks most carefree. There was no hint of a mocking pirouette, although he couldn’t resist executing one at the airport after the Queen’s plane rose into the sky for her return flight to London.
The Prime Minister in Retirement
AFTER TRUDEAU STEPPED down as prime minister on June 30, 1984, he returned to Montreal, the law, and private life. He emerged twice as the solitary warrior stalking the battlefield of constitutional wars.
The first time, he sabotaged Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s attempt through the Meech Lake Accord — endorsed by ten provincial premiers on April 30, 1987 — to have Quebec belatedly sign on to the patriated constitution. The Accord offered Quebec status as a “distinct society” and a constitutional veto (a right also demanded by the other provinces), among other accommodations. Trudeau vociferously denounced the Accord in articles in the French and English press and in a lengthy interview with broadcaster Barbara Frum on CBC. Watching that interview now, with Frum at her persistent best, you have to admire (and wonder at) his steely logic, his confidence and ease with being the sole opponent to ten premiers; of course, he had been there before and wo
n the day, albeit with some tough compromises, including the notwithstanding clause.
Later, Ontario premier Bob Rae likened Trudeau to Isaiah Berlin’s concept of the hedgehog, an animal that knows one big thing. Political scientist Wayne Hunt, countered in “The Branding of Trudeau,” that Trudeau was a hedgehog who used the tactics of a fox, a sly animal that knows many things, to achieve his big goal of national unity.
Trudeau’s opposition to Meech was delivered with chilling logic: there could not be “two Canadas” in the same country. Later, before a special joint committee of the Senate and the House, he spoke tenaciously for more than three hours about the Canada he had reinvigorated as “a federation that was set to last a thousand years,” until it fell “into the hands of a weakling [Mulroney]” who had “sold out” to the provinces. Trudeau’s fervent opposition, combined with regime changes in several provincial governments and growing resentment against a “special deal” for Quebec, precipitated the failure of the Accord to be ratified by its three-year deadline in 1990.
Mulroney tried again with the Charlottetown Accord, which, unlike Meech, offered Canadians a referendum in order to express their opinions. Again Trudeau lashed on his battle gear, writing a denunciation in Maclean’s and delivering an impassioned speech at an event in La Maison du Egg Roll restaurant in Montreal, arguing that the new accord would lead to the destruction of the federal government and the disintegration of Canada, and saying that the “big mess deserves a big ‘no.’” And that’s what it got, in simultaneous referenda in Quebec and the rest of the country on October 26, 1992. Charlottetown was defeated by a vote of 54.3 percent to 45.7 percent, a difference of 8.6 percent. The failure of Meech and Charlottetown boosted the pro-sovereignty forces in Quebec.
Trudeau bore a heavy cost for these constitutional victories. He was so demonized in Quebec, his native province, that he was asked to stay on the sidelines by the Non committee during the second Quebec sovereignty referendum, in 1995. That referendum, issued by Parti Québécois premier Jacques Parizeau, asked for support for sovereignty combined with a new economic and political partnership with the rest of Canada. Three days before the vote, the Non side organized a huge demonstration called the “unity rally” in the streets of Montreal with supporters hitchhiking, busing, and driving from across the country to profess their love of a united country. Nobody asked Trudeau to speak at the 100,000-strong gathering about Canadian unity, his “magnificent obsession,” or even to “join the current leaders on stage,” as John English reports in Just Watch Me. “Alone and rejected, the once fiery orator watched the massive rally in the square below his office window at Heenan Blaikie’s office, perched high above Boulevard René Lévesque . . .” The vote, which occurred on October 30, 1995, was desperately close. The pro-sovereignty side was defeated by 50.58 percent to 49.42 percent, a shadowy margin of just over 1 percent. Afterward, a bitter Parizeau blamed the loss on “money and the ethnic vote.”
The last time Trudeau emerged from private life was heartbreaking. He appeared as a desolate father mourning the death of his youngest son. Michel Trudeau, twenty-three, was killed in an avalanche while on a skiing expedition with friends in Kokanee Glacier Provincial Park, north of Nelson, B.C., on November 13, 1998. His body was never recovered.
There was nothing belligerent about the ashen-faced Trudeau at the memorial service on Friday, November 20, 1998, at Saint-Viateur Church in Outremont, where he himself had worshipped as a young man. During the Mass he read a passage from 1 Corinthians, chapter 15, about life everlasting. Afterwards, the surviving Trudeau family walked out of the church as a foursome, a staggering Margaret held up by her eldest son, Justin, on her left side and her middle son, Sacha, on her right. Trudeau, his face tear-streaked, his eyes bleak and unseeing, walked on the far side of Sacha, upright and solitary in his grief.
The “mask” McLuhan had described, and which had made Trudeau so telegenic thirty years earlier, was now frozen in place by Parkinson’s disease. He looked forlorn, vulnerable, frail, and heartbreakingly human as he endured the unimaginable — the death of a child, especially one more than fifty years his junior. Even from a distance, Canadians embraced him as never before, as the wounded warrior.
For a time Trudeau lost his faith, as biographer John English reports in Just Watch Me, but finally he “believed once more, and ultimately took refuge once again in the consolation of this faith and its Church.” Still, he seemed tired of living and refused treatment for the prostate cancer that was beginning its deadly and inexorable creep through his body.
A Final Surge
THE FIRST OFFICIAL inkling that Trudeau was dying came in a statement from his two surviving sons on September 7, 2000, saying their father was “not well” and asking for privacy. Of course the opposite happened. Reporters and camera crews camped outside Maison Cormier, his art deco house on avenue des Pins in Montreal, and well-wishers left flowers and notes. He appeared to rally but then, having received a few old friends and the last sacrament, died surrounded by his sons and his former wife at his Montreal home on September 28, 2000. He was three weeks shy of his eighty-first birthday.
Watching broadcasts of the Summer Olympics from Sydney was forgotten as thousands, many of them carrying roses, waited for hours to pay their respects when his flag-draped coffin lay in state in the Hall of Honour in the Centre Block of Parliament in Ottawa. Equal numbers lined the tracks as a special train carried his body back home to Montreal, where several thousand more mourners gathered to sign the condolence book and pass by his coffin in City Hall before his state funeral at Notre-Dame Basilica on October 3, 2000.
At Sacha Trudeau’s request, Jean Chrétien read the same Bible passage about life everlasting that Trudeau had read at his son Michel’s funeral less than two years earlier. “My father had particular fondness for Saint Paul’s letters and this forceful argument for faith and eternal life fit his own deep convictions,” Sacha Trudeau explained in an email. His brother Justin’s emotive eulogy, ending with tears and “Je t’aime, Papa,” caused the mourners to burst into applause in the Basilica, indicating for the first of several times that his mother’s blood coursed more freely in his veins than his father’s.
The spontaneous, naive, expectant thronging of the late 1960s had a final swell of grief and mourning. These two primordial surrenders to emotion, thirty years apart, were attempts to holster and harness the elusive and contrary man we longed to possess, the man who had transformed our country, our concept of ourselves as Canadians, and our place in the world.
Pierre Berton
Mr. Canada
July 12, 1920 – November 30, 2004
FOR MORE THAN half a century, Pierre Berton dominated print and broadcast media in Canada as a popular historian, crusading journalist, scrappy columnist, television personality, and cultural ambassador. He told us our story before we knew we had one.
Many of his fifty books were forgettable, but the best ones — his histories of the North, the building of the transcontinental railway, the War of 1812 — earned him three Governor General’s Awards, fourteen honorary degrees, and the gratitude of ordinary Canadians for making their past come alive.
He wrote history like a journalist: sniffing out good stories, checking his facts, digging up vivid anecdotes, and spinning his yarns into dramatic narratives that aroused a huge popular audience and often got up the noses of professional historians. Jack Granatstein, an early critic who grew into an admirer, admitted he had once chided Berton in print for “consciously” making things “interesting.” “Of course I do,” retorted Berton in a lengthy letter deriding academic arrogance. “I sure as hell don’t consciously make it dull.”
Berton enticed us with his muscular prose into learning the stories of the men and women who had come here as immigrants, fought against invaders, and opened the West and the North. He belonged to the generation born after the First World War, who lived through the Depression,
survived the Second World War, and prospered in the buoyant postwar years of cultural nationalism. A colourful storyteller with a respect for the past and an urge to celebrate it, he excelled in an era when television was coming into its own and before the Internet, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, and other tools — including The Canadian Encyclopedia, Google, and Wikipedia — made the past instantly accessible to readers wanting a sense of our heritage and our place in the world.
A Bunyanesque figure who sported a trademark bow tie and (for a while) a Ronald Colman moustache, Berton had an aggressive style and a piercing stare. He was a tough guy who never backed down from a fight — I once saw him punch an uninvited guest at a publishing party who had insulted his publisher Jack McClelland’s executive assistant.
Underneath the bluster, he was kind. “Whenever there is a disaster, and we all have them, the Bertons are always the first ones on your doorstep,” recalled the journalist June Callwood in 2004. He was also a generous and mostly anonymous benefactor to writers and artists in need. He was a founding member of the Writers’ Trust and the Writers’ Union; in 1989 he bought his childhood home in Dawson City and turned it into a haven for professional writers.
A birdwatcher and yet a lover of cats — one of last books was Cats I Have Known and Loved (2002) — Berton inspired and demonstrated loyalty, especially from women. His wife, Janet, was his first and best proofreader; Janice Tyrwhitt edited all his books, beginning with Drifting Home in 1973; Barbara Sears researched Hollywood’s Canada for him in 1975, the beginning of a working relationship that lasted through nearly twenty books; and Janet Craig was his perennial copy editor. And at the centre of his working life was Elsa Franklin, his producer and agent, who worked with him on television shows and other projects for forty years.
A workaholic and a dynamo — he could type a column while the potatoes boiled for dinner — Berton made newspapers, magazines, books, radio, and television into customized vehicles for his shoot-from-the-hip opinions and his straight-ahead prose. Whether he courted controversy or it dogged him, Berton had opinions on everything from organized religion, teenage sex, abortion, capital punishment, and civil rights to the best way to roast a turkey. A Canadian, he once said, is somebody who knows how to make love in a canoe. He cheerfully admitted to arrogance, saying that it was time Canadians learned to be arrogant. “This statement was considered to be so remarkable,” he wrote in My Times, his 1995 memoir, “it was picked up by Canadian Press . . . An Arrogant Canadian! It was like discovering a new species of marmot.”
Working the Dead Beat Page 8
