My father arrived in town a few days later, and when he and I entered a crowded Whitehorse bar, I heard a familiar booming voice shout from a far corner. “Hey, YOU! We don’t want your kind in this place.” It was Big John bellowing at us from his table in mock anger, and I could see him grinning at his own joke. My father, however, had become stiff as a board, imagining we were about to be verbally assaulted (or worse) by some long-disgruntled voter nursing a decades-old grudge.
I took him over to meet Big John and his buddies, and when he realized they had been shouting at me, my father took the situation in good humour. He could very graciously play the straight man.
When we returned home, Dad told my mother some details about the trip and added, “You know, I never realized it, but Justin is really very good with people.”
During my undergraduate years in English literature, I read hundreds of books, wrote many essays about writers as varied as William Blake, Aldous Huxley, and Wallace Stevens, and generally experienced the broad intellectual horizons that are the goal of a liberal arts education.
It was also a time for me to try on and often discard all manner of political postures and ideologies. This kind of thing happens to men and women in their late teens and early twenties who arrive on campus in an idealistic state of mind. Soon they are seeking answers to big, dramatic questions like, What is the meaning of life? How do we build a better society? What is standing in the way of social justice? Their search steers a lot of campus intellectuals in the direction of totalizing ideologies, such as dogmatic Marxism or Ayn Rand’s theory of objectivism.
I was as curious about these questions as any other college student, but I always was suspicious of cultish, reductionist movements. My father was fond of quoting Thomas Aquinas’s admonition hominem unius libri timeo (I fear the man of a single book). I internalized that: whenever a classmate or friend tried to convince me that the answers to life’s big questions or major political issues could be derived from The Communist Manifesto or Atlas Shrugged or some other single-minded philosophy, I grew wary. One of the lessons of life I learned from my father was that the world is too complicated to be stuffed into a single overarching ideology. I was exposed to all sorts of political influences on campus, but when I graduated I was the same open-minded centrist I had been when I first arrived.
What grew most during my university years was my own understanding of Quebec, federalism, and the nature of Canada generally.
I had heard my father describe the political atmosphere that existed in Quebec during his youth and was struck by the many differences between his time and my own. During the 1940s and ’50s, Quebec nationalism had been a powerful force, tied not to separatism in the way we think of that term today but to something much different. In my father’s youth, Quebec’s political and religious elite were concerned about protecting the province’s French Catholic character within largely Protestant North America. Simply put, the emphasis was therefore on maintaining a society of farmers and lumberjacks, with a small cadre of lawyers, priests, doctors, and politicians to oversee it. Money and business were left to les Anglais.
This situation grew untenable, of course, by the mid-twentieth century, and a number of thinkers, artists, and writers (of whom my father was one) fomented the Quiet Revolution, making education, urbanization, and secularism key pillars of modern Quebec.
Quebec began to assert itself more fully, and the nationalism that gained strength in the 1970s, and which I experienced during my years at Brébeuf in the 1980s, usually expressed itself in demands for more governmental powers and greater recognition of the province’s linguistic and cultural character. The federal government’s patriation of the Canadian Constitution in 1982 without Quebec’s explicit sign-off led to a decade-long mobilization to find some new formula that would reapportion powers and satisfy Quebec’s concerns. Politicians and constitutional lawyers began searching for some kind of grand bargain, and the result was the failed Meech Lake Accord of 1987.
The referendum campaign surrounding the Charlottetown Accord of 1992, which coincided with my second year at McGill, sealed my engagement with Canadian politics.
A handful of Canadian federalists, including my father, opposed the accord largely because it appeared to signal a capitulation to Quebec’s escalating demands on Ottawa. Section 1 of the accord would have amended the Canadian Constitution to stipulate that “Quebec constitutes within Canada a distinct society.” It also would have declared that “the role of the legislature and Government of Quebec to preserve and promote the distinct society of Quebec is affirmed.” Under section 21, Quebec would be guaranteed no fewer than 25 percent of the seats in the House of Commons, no matter how future populations might shift.
I had always defined myself as a Canadian federalist. How could I not? But in the early 1990s that label wasn’t enough, because the various reform proposals being tossed around forced us all to think about what an ideal sort of federalist structure should look like. As the debate about the Charlottetown Accord went on, I began to study the document closely. By the time I finished marking up almost every page with a highlighter, I realized that the problems with the document extended beyond Quebec. The accord contained a long list of concessions to the provinces generally, with very little coming back to the federal government in return. For me, this was the larger issue. I am not, and never have been, one of those federalists who believes Ottawa must involve itself in every area of policy. But the Charlottetown Accord would have tipped the balance too much toward decentralization, locking in federal funding for all sorts of programs while limiting the federal government’s ability to impose national standards. Something was wrong here.
Take a couple of examples that bugged me: Section 38 dictated that the Canadian government would agree to all but abandon its power of disallowance, which permits the federal government to overrule a provincial law when it conflicts with national goals. And under section 39, Ottawa would have lost its “declaratory” power to classify certain areas, such as the control of a vital resource, within the federal government’s domain. There was nothing wrong with proposing these concessions, and they were certainly defensible from the point of view of the provinces, certainly since neither had been much used in recent times. But I kept returning to the same question wherever these and similar concessions by the federal government were addressed: What was Ottawa getting back in return? That side of the ledger seemed mostly empty to me.
Just to add frustration to my concerns, I discovered that many of the people who said they supported the accord admitted that they hadn’t actually read the thing, certainly not in the detail that I had and that I believe it demanded. I specifically remember accepting a pro-accord pamphlet from one of McGill’s Young Progressive Conservatives, who were actively seeking its support on campus. After reading the pamphlet over, I asked the YPC activist why he and his friends weren’t also providing students with copies of the actual accord. He brushed me off by claiming that the bullet points in the pamphlet were all that people really needed to know. Why should they read the whole complex document, he suggested, when we’ve gone to the trouble of underlining its key points for them? Because, I replied, people were taking a strong stand on the future of our country without educating themselves about what that future would look like. And it couldn’t be summed up in a dozen or so bullet points.
I made a real pest of myself that year at McGill, going around campus with my dog-eared copy of the Charlottetown Accord, lecturing friends about this or that provision. I wish I could say that I changed a lot of minds, but the truth is that most people took positions according to their existing political affiliation. Supporters of Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives tended to support the accord, while his critics tended toward skepticism. The pro and con sides splintered in various ways. Eastern federalists supported the accord, but followers of Preston Manning and his Reform Party rejected it because of its deferential treatment of Q
uebec. (They weren’t happy with the scope of the accord’s Senate-reform provisions either, proving there’s not much new in our politics.)
The separatists led their own charge against Charlottetown, which caused some people to misinterpret the nature of my position. What did it mean, they wondered, if both the Péquistes and I were opposed to the same concept? Did I have anything else in common with separatists? I remember a call-in radio-show producer hanging up on me because he refused to believe that a self-described federalist who was opposed to the accord could add anything to the debate. In desperation I took to wearing a T-shirt that read My No is a federalist No.
In the end, the Charlottetown Accord was defeated in the October 1992 referendum by 54 percent to 46 percent. In Quebec, it lost 57 to 43. All four Western provinces voted against it. I was pleased with the result. I was also a little intoxicated by the experience of diving into an important political issue, marshalling the best arguments on behalf of my position, and becoming a passionate advocate for it. The episode sharpened my feelings about Canada and about protecting the things that make it strong, distinctive, and politically coherent. The months I spent carrying around that well-worn copy of the Charlottetown Accord, prepared to discuss its defects with anyone who wanted to engage me in a debate, marked an important step in my journey toward political life.
Three years later, I was consumed, as we all were, by another political campaign. This time, the stakes were higher than mere amendments to the Constitution: this time it dealt directly with the possible dissolution of the country.
It was October 1995, and Quebecers were set to vote in the province’s second referendum. If the Yes side succeeded, the province would be primed, backed by a majority of its citizens, to begin negotiations disassociating itself from the rest of the land. When polls taken barely a week before the referendum suggested the separatists could pull it off, many of my Montreal friends and I feared we were living through Canada’s final days in its existing form.
I remember feeling outraged throughout that campaign at how the Yes side used propaganda and demagoguery to try to sell their idea. It seemed to me that they actually didn’t understand the seriousness of what they were proposing. If you’re going to create a new country, you should have clear support and desire from the population to do it. You shouldn’t have to trick them into it, or sugar-coat it, because the inevitable challenges that would arise during the transition stage would require continued public support. Given the certain growing pains of any new country, people would have to feel that it was all worth it. And what a possible Yes victory seemed to look like—a bare majority mandate based on misinformation—struck me as a recipe for upheaval and unrest.
With three days to go, my friend Ian Rae and I joined an estimated hundred thousand people in downtown Montreal for the Unity Rally, an event that remains, to this day, the biggest single political gathering in Canadian history. Giant Maple Leaf flags flew everywhere, and Place du Canada was mobbed with supporters of the No side. Wanting the best possible view, Ian and I headed to the nearby CIBC skyscraper and climbed some scaffolding onto the building’s second-floor lobby terrace. If you look at the famous giant poster print made from an overhead shot of that rally, you can see us near the twin white media tents atop that CIBC terrace. To be surrounded by so many Canadians was a stirring experience, and it helped soothe my jangled federalist nerves.
On referendum night, my brothers and I watched the returns at home with my father. (He had finally relented in his opposition to a television, thank goodness.) The No side won by the narrowest of margins, a mere 50.58 percent to 49.42 percent in favour of the federalist position, a difference of just 54,288 votes. Through it all, my father remained oddly unfazed, and when the official result was announced he nodded, said “Good,” and calmly retired to bed.
But hey, this was something to celebrate. I met my friends at a bar on Rue Metcalfe, where we heard rumours that separatist mobs were planning to invade the downtown from the direction of Parc Maisonneuve to the east. The rumours proved baseless. If any protests had been contemplated by the Péquistes and their supporters, they were probably discouraged by the sight of riot police crowding the downtown area. Their ominous presence reinforced our sense that a disastrous result had been narrowly averted that night.
All these years later, I still think back to that day from time to time and imagine how much our country would have changed if a mere 27,145 No voters had decided to cast their lot with the separatists. Canada would probably no longer exist. And what message would we have offered the world? If even a country as respectful of its diversities as ours had failed to reconcile its differences, what hope would the rest of the world have of getting along?
To this day, that question is one that drives me.
Chapter Three
Travelling East, Going West
My graduation from McGill in 1994 deposited me at a crossroads. I was twenty-two years old, with a freshly minted BA in English literature. My university years had included a few of the same academic problems I had encountered in my years at Brébeuf, but my undergrad marks were good enough for me to have options for my next steps.
I had chosen to do my undergraduate degree in literature not just because of my love of reading but also because it ensured I would continue my studies. While it made for a great first degree, for me it simply couldn’t be a last degree. The challenge was, I didn’t yet know in which direction I wanted to go.
Perhaps foreseeing this challenge, a number of my old Brébeuf friends and I had planned a big trip for the year after graduation. Up until that point, I had travelled to more than fifty countries around the world, mostly with my father, but here was a chance to build on that. I packed a few things into my backpack—it’s remarkable how little you actually need to pack when you realize that it’s impossible to bring all you’d need for four seasons across three continents—and headed across the Atlantic.
I spent the summer in France, mostly on my own, travelling from Provence to Normandy and finally settling in Paris, where I spent most of my days in museums and libraries. Having removed myself from everyone and everything that made up my normal surroundings, and struggling with a shyness that prevented me from making friends easily, I found myself with a lot of time to think about my life and my future.
I thought about my father’s path at my age: fierce academic achievement at Brébeuf, followed by top place at the University of Montreal’s law school, then a master’s at Harvard, followed by more studies, but no degrees, at the London School of Economics and the Sorbonne. He then spent many years in a wide range of pursuits—travelling around the world, working for a short stint as a lawyer, publishing a subversive intellectual magazine that contributed to Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, writing a book or two, teaching constitutional law for a few years—before running for political office in his mid-forties. I had already unhooked from that track, and my self-examination confirmed that a meandering path as a public intellectual was not for me.
My mother had got a sociology degree from the brand-new Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, then moved east to get married and start a family with my father. And although I already knew that I wanted a family, I wanted to be neither as old as my father nor as young as my mother when I began one.
That summer, in a quiet moment of reflection on a hillside, I realized my next step: I would become a schoolteacher. This would be my way of having a positive influence in the world. The job drew together my strengths for learning, for sharing, for understanding people. And importantly for me at the time, it was all mine: it would be my way of freeing myself from my family and our past.
I excitedly called home to share my epiphany. “Justin, that’s wonderful,” my mother said. “You know you come from a long line of schoolteachers back in Scotland.”
Oh well, I thought, at least it would be a break from my family’s recent past. With the plan in place to begin the followin
g fall at McGill’s Faculty of Education, I was ready to focus on the year of travelling ahead of me.
I joined three of my best friends in London in September, and together Mathieu Walker, Allen Steverman, Marc Miller, and I embarked upon a tremendous adventure. We joined a motley group of Brits, with a few Aussies and a lone Finn, bound for Africa on an overland truck expedition. We sped across France and Spain in a few days, camping behind highway rest stops, impatient to get off European soil. We made our last phone calls home from Gibraltar and loaded onto a ferry to Morocco.
Morocco was medinas in Fez and Marrakech, hikes through the Atlas Mountains, and picking mussels for breakfast off the rocks in Western Sahara where the desert meets the Atlantic. We then crossed an empty stretch of the Sahara into Mauritania, where my memories are of having to push the truck over sand dunes, becoming terribly sick after eating leftover tuna salad, delighting in randomly having delicious Korean food at a fisherman’s house in a small village, and unsuccessfully hiding our last cases of beer from customs agents.
The transition from North Africa into West was a welcome one. Mali was mostly friendly and diverse, but with an edge. Matt got mugged and pepper-sprayed in Bamako, losing a few dollars but not much else; Marc beat the village strongman in an arm wrestle after an archaeological trek through the ruins of an ancient civilization; and we visited a near-abandoned community where we were shown a tree under which, we were told, within living memory children had been sacrificed as part of religious ceremonies.
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