Just Watch Me

by John English

  Trudeau rejected the Reagan-Thatcher argument that government was part of the problem, not part of the solution. He was surrounded by young activists such as Tom Axworthy, who had played a key role in writing the Liberal nationalist and interventionist platform for the 1980 election, and he was deeply influenced by his leading campaign strategist, Keith Davey, who constantly repeated the mantra that Liberals lose when they don’t lean left, and his principal secretary, Jim Coutts, who had become deeply involved in community organization in downtown Toronto as a prelude, he hoped, to running for office soon. Indeed, Towards a Just Society, a 1990 collection of essays written by many of the principal actors in this government and edited by Trudeau and Tom Axworthy, is a detailed defence of how they “fought for a fairer, more humane Canada, in which the power of government was a necessary instrument in the quest for a more just society.”7 In 1980 Trudeau stayed on his course and quickened his step, even as Reagan campaigned for a new “morning in America” where the federal government would withdraw from economic intervention and New Deal welfare policies, transfer many social responsibilities to the states, and reject policies of détente, disarmament, and interventionist international development.

  The “Reagan revolution” gained strength from its internal consistency and the powerful intellectual framework erected to support it by market-oriented economists Milton Friedman and Allan Greenspan, for example, and social analysts James Coleman and Diane Ravitch. But Trudeau’s rejection of Reagan’s declaration that government was the problem also possessed an internal unity, one that linked constitutional reform with the National Energy Program and the commitment to a fairer distribution of the world’s wealth between the rich and the poor. Don Johnston is correct in pointing to Trudeau’s conservative quirks where financial matters were concerned and his acceptance of “a strong and vigorous private sector,” but the intellectual climate of the 1980s and what Stephen Clarkson termed “the Reagan challenge” provoked Trudeau toward a strong response, partly because of his innate contrarianism but mainly because he believed deeply in the importance of medicare, economic equity, and what European socialists earlier and later came to term a “middle way,” somewhere between massive state intervention and unregulated market freedom.* Trudeau did have doubts about the effectiveness of many of the social and educational programs that had been developed in haste in the 1960s. We have seen how, as early as his leadership campaign of 1968, he declared that the days of Santa Claus were over, and how, once in power, he introduced a series of austerity measures. Nevertheless, in the eighties, Trudeau usually stood firm as Thatcher, Reagan, and much of the media pushed the pendulum dramatically to the right. He identified with the moderate German Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt and, in the international arena, with European socialist premiers Olof Palme of Sweden and Andreas Papandreou of Greece, whom he regarded as his personal friends.8

  The American presidential campaign of 1980 coincided with a high-pressure ridge that settled over the centre of the continent that summer, bringing sweltering heat from late spring to early fall. For Jimmy Carter, the summer brought bad times, which Canadians increasingly shared. The so-called Canadian caper, which enabled some American hostages to escape from Iran, earned general applause from America for its northern neighbour. But this did not end the drama in Teheran, where the new Islamic theocracy continued to hold some American diplomats hostage, along with President Carter’s chances for re-election. Détente seemed dead as Soviet tanks and warplanes pounded Afghan cities and villages and the CIA began its fatal attraction to the Islamic fundamentalists who were fighting Soviet aggression.

  The normal summer celebrations that accompanied the Olympics did not occur as Canada, with considerable reluctance on Trudeau’s part, joined the American boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games. Although Trudeau much preferred Carter to Reagan in the presidential race, Carter’s increasingly hard stance against the Soviet Union irritated and disillusioned him, and on some items such as the embargo of wheat sales he refused to join fully in the boycott—to Carter’s surprise and disappointment.9 For their part, the Soviet leaders noticed Trudeau’s dissent. Their ambassador in Ottawa, Alexander Yakovlev, welcomed his friend’s re-election to office in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in May 1980, claiming that Trudeau “returned to his old hunting grounds more enriched in charisma, enjoying the backing of both the whole of his party and the whole of his nation.” To Trudeau’s good fortune at a time when the Cold War was chilling, Yakovlev wrote anonymously.10

  In his confidential reports to Moscow, Yakovlev noted with some regret that Trudeau had little time for international politics because domestic matters, particularly the Constitution, absorbed nearly all his attention. Separatism had not died with its referendum defeat on May 20. Indeed, Lévesque had exclaimed to his wife in English, when he finally sprang out of bed at eleven o’clock the following morning, “It’s a new ball game.”11 But most of the players were the same as before, and the two stars, Lévesque and Trudeau, still dominated the field. Despite his central role in the “no” campaign, Ryan became increasingly ineffective, and Lévesque more central, as Trudeau advanced his constitutional plans. When the premiers met Trudeau in Ottawa on June 9, Lévesque quickly realized that the prime minister wanted to change the rules of the constitutional game and was delighted when the other premiers baulked at them. Lévesque and his close adviser Claude Morin recognized the value of Quebec forming alliances with the other premiers. He therefore appeared whimsical, detached, and even helpful as others tore into Trudeau’s proposals. The federal government presented a sweeping program for change, which included not only patriation but also a “People’s List” and a “Government’s List” of changes. The People’s List, later to be called the “People’s Package,” consisted of a statement of general principles, a charter of rights, equalization (which would ensure that wealth was shared with the poorer provinces), and lofty sentiments, while the Government’s List included gritty detail about communications, the Senate, broadcasting, fisheries, and other items that had bedevilled courts and constitutional change for generations.12

  When Trudeau and the premiers emerged from 24 Sussex Drive, where steel barriers had physically and symbolically shielded the deliberations from the press and the public, there were a few shreds of optimism. Trudeau told the media that the group had agreed to reconvene after Labour Day to seal the constitutional deal. But when detailed questions came, Trudeau admitted that the premiers had produced their own lists, with such items as the ownership of fisheries or the right to self-determination. When asked whether a new Constitution would be the crowning achievement he had long sought, a tired Trudeau answered: “If we do reach agreement on all these items, I would be very, very anxious to retire. That might be an incentive to a lot of people.” Of the premiers, only Richard Hatfield of New Brunswick (who had presented a baffled Trudeau with a plastic bag full of fiddleheads at the opening of the conference) and William Davis of Ontario shared Trudeau’s enthusiasm for the new constitutional adventure. Davis’s Progressive Conservative colleague, Peter Lougheed of Alberta, described Davis with derision as Trudeau’s “lap dog”—a comment Davis dismissed while faintly praising Lévesque’s willingness to “see” the process through and “participate in it.”13

  Chrétien’s Challenger jet took off once more for provincial capitals, where he found that the federal lists had inspired premiers to extend their own predictable shopping lists. The process unfolded through the Continuing Committee of the Ministers on the Constitution (CCMC), which Chrétien co-chaired with Saskatchewan attorney general Roy Romanow. In Ottawa, Trudeau’s advisers followed the process and consulted constantly but worked on their own plans. Expecting resistance to his constitutional proposals, Trudeau had brought in a new team to deal with the premiers. Gordon Robertson, who had been Trudeau’s superior in the fifties when the young civil servant first encountered the peculiar world of federal-provincial relations and who had supervised the constitutional file since the si
xties, was now shoved aside in favour of Michael Kirby. Recruited by Michael Pitfield, who had returned from Harvard to the Privy Council, the diminutive and boyish Kirby was bright, ingenious, energetic, and a mathematician by training, but largely uninformed about Canadian constitutional history and practice. Called Machiavellian by his enemies, Kirby revelled in the description, quoting his “mentor” in documents he wrote and devilishly adorning his 1981 Christmas card with a paraphrase of a quotation from Machiavelli that he had first noticed in the office of the Saskatchewan deputy minister of intergovernmental affairs: “It should be borne in mind that there is nothing more difficult to arrange, more doubtful of success, and more dangerous to carry through than initiating changes in a state’s Constitution.” His lack of experience was itself a qualification for his work. “I didn’t need advice,” Trudeau later said. “At that point I knew exactly what I wanted”—“a deal-maker and a negotiation-closer, not a thinker and discussant.” Kirby proudly became “Trudeau’s son of a bitch.”14

  And soon enough, things did indeed become bitchy. As Chrétien reported the premiers’ views and officials recounted the difficulties they were experiencing in negotiations with their counterparts, Kirby, with Pitfield’s encouragement, prepared a strategy that would force the premiers to come to an agreement. If they failed, he directed, the federal government would act unilaterally—it would divide in order to conquer. But the divisions were already deep, even within the Privy Council and the Prime Minister’s Office. Trudeau’s principal speechwriters, Jim Moore and André Burelle, quarrelled in the summer over Trudeau’s public statements to Canadians and, in particular, to franco phones. Sharp differences emerged over the concepts of the “nation” and federalism, with Burelle believing that contemporary Quebec nationalism, being civic in nature, was best embraced in a linguistic and federal system similar to that of Switzerland. With the eyes of a lynx, Trudeau regularly corrected any drafts produced by Burelle that expressed this concept, stroking out every “nation” related to Quebec he could find. Moore, meanwhile, sharply dissented from Burelle’s declaration to the Canadian people for Canada Day 1980, drafted in French:

  Your latest version of the statement of principles is, in my opinion, so profoundly different from the earlier versions as to raise the serious question of whether the new version will be seen in English Canada as a provocation rather than an attempt to bring Canadians closer together.

  The changes which cause concern are:

  1. In the first paragraph, the PM would be seen as abandoning, in the face of nationalist criticism, the idea that Canadians are one people. The retention of “un peuple” on the fourth line would not suffice to overcome that impression.

  2. Anglo editorialists in the Bible Belt of western Canada are going to have a field day when they compare the old and new versions of the statement, and see that the PM is willing to drop God.

  3. By reversing the order of French and English on the fifth line, you have eliminated the equal balance of the earlier version. Now the statement seems to say that, while French and English are equal, the Constitution will consistently place French first.

  As Trudeau and Burelle jousted over the summer months, the francophone speechwriter pondered his future in Ottawa.15

  Gordon Robertson, meanwhile, had suddenly become a man of the past. But he was still an influential presence at the endless “cinq à sept” receptions in the city, the luncheons where retired “eminents” met at the elite Rideau Club, and summer gatherings in the Gatineaus. He was clearly uneasy with the new ways and the confrontations. The long relationship between Robertson and Trudeau began to disintegrate as differences became strong disagreements and, eventually, bitter disillusionment. But Robertson was old school, careful, respectful of Cabinet secrecy, and wary of paper trails or, as Trudeau himself said, “a mandarin, concerned with the common weal, afraid of irreparable damage to the fabric of society.” He was “too much of a gentleman” for the tough times ahead. His brash and brawling successors irritated not only Robertson but others who felt excluded from the inner circle, or who believed that the confrontational style or even the constitutional process itself was wrong. Not surprisingly, leaks soon appeared, first in quiet asides at dinner parties or lunches, but then in the deliberate passing of documents to reporters or, more seriously, to the government of Quebec. Diplomat Robert Fowler, who was seconded to the Privy Council to assist in the constitutional wars, later recalled with some anger how, at a closed meeting, he looked about the table, studied his colleagues’ eyes, and saw some avoid his gaze. Secrets mattered, especially when they were not kept.16

  When the premiers returned to Ottawa on September 7 for another meeting on the constitutional reforms, they got together first in the hotel room of Sterling Lyon, Manitoba’s Conservative premier, to discuss their own strategy. Quebec intergovernmental affairs minister Claude Morin passed around a memorandum on the federal strategy signed by Michael Kirby. This document, reportedly leaked by a separatist mole, argued for an aggressive strategy that contemplated unilateral patriation of the Constitution and suggested that the federal government approach the meeting with the expectation that there would be no agreement. That same evening, Governor General Ed Schreyer, a former premier of Manitoba, invited the premiers and the prime minister to Rideau Hall for an opening dinner, where the atmosphere was immediately electric with suspicion and anger. Formalities melted into biting jabs, caused initially by the request that one of the premiers co-chair the meeting with Trudeau—a proposal that infuriated Trudeau. The food was poor and, by the time a cake for Saskatchewan premier Allan Blakeney’s fifty-fifth birthday appeared, the mood was so foul that Trudeau turned away during the tribute. He urged Schreyer to speed the service so he could leave quickly, allegedly dismissing the RCMP bodyguard with the comment, “Fuck off, and don’t follow me home.”17

  It was a wretched start to a dreadful week. The Kirby memorandum probably made little difference; indeed, an earlier leaked “Pitfield memorandum” had broached the distinct possibility of unilateral patriation, and in late August, at a ministerial meeting, Claude Morin had told the press unequivocally that the federal government intended to act unilaterally. Even Romanow, despite his warm relationship with Chrétien,* openly argued with him over the federal insistence on a charter of rights and its policy on natural resources. Months before, lines had been drawn, alliances forged and tested, and personal grudges created. As soon as the leaders gathered at the conference table the next morning, all these bad memories surfaced.

  Lévesque sat back, cigarette smoke swirling about him, while he responded indifferently with a toss of the head and a flick of the ash as the premiers and Trudeau spoke. Hatfield of New Brunswick tried, a bit too eagerly, to be the jokester, seeking consensus through weak humour. Lyon of Manitoba, sternly conservative and as British as Winnipeg’s Manitoba Club in the days of empire, expressed those values with a blustery defence of parliamentary supremacy over the courts. Much less conservative but equally tied to the British parliamentary tradition, Blakeney combined a Prairie socialist’s suspicion of Liberals with a sharp legal mind that, paradoxically, also trusted politicians more than judges. The law was a distant realm for British Columbia’s Bill Bennett, who lacked his father’s outrageous style but not his strong commitment to his province’s natural resource interests. He shared those interests with other premiers, including Newfoundland’s Brian Peckford, who came to the table with dreams of offshore oil lodes dancing feverishly in his mind. Ontario’s riches, in contrast, no longer resided in the minerals of the Canadian Shield but in its manufacturing plants, whose operators craved cheap energy. This pressing need fuelled the intense clash between bland “Brampton Billy” Davis, Ontario’s deceptively shrewd premier, and Alberta’s Peter Lougheed, whose opposition to such claims was eloquent, adamant, and longstanding.

  In retrospect, it was a strange and inappropriate group that gathered at Ottawa’s conference centre. Only Trudeau and Lévesque were bilingual at
a conference where the entrenchment of language rights in the proposed charter of rights was a fundamental issue. They were also the only Catholics, the faith of 46 percent of the population, and the only participants not of British origin—a trait 56 percent of Canadians shared. All the participants were middle-aged men, again a minority demographic, and, except for Trudeau, none was a Liberal. These characteristics were hardly auspicious for concerted action.

  Yet profound differences also lay beneath the surface similarities among the premiers. Lougheed and Davis had both become premiers in 1971, Davis before the historic Victoria Conference and Lougheed shortly after the conference failed. They were initially friendly, with the articulate and engaging Lougheed presented as a “star” in Davis’s October 21 election campaign.* But their ways began to part when OPEC shattered the energy world, and Lougheed wanted to pick up Alberta’s exploding share. By 1981 they

  Although Lougheed generally agreed with Lévesque, he was oblique in expressing that support. Peckford, in contrast, enraged the federalists when he stated that he was closer to Lévesque’s view of Canada than to Trudeau’s. Lougheed was the big player, however, and Trudeau confronted him continually. When Lougheed said that the federal response to provincial demands was “nominal and relatively insignificant,” Trudeau snapped back that the government should withdraw its offer to negotiate resource ownership in exchange for a Canadian common market. He firmly rejected Lougheed’s complaints about centralization: “We know that, in Canada, we’re living in the most decentralized federation in the world,” he said. “The provinces have enormous power, more power under our Constitution than any component parts of any other government in the world.” But his arguments were all to no avail. The conference confirmed Canada’s many differences, and, in Trudeau’s mind, it demonstrated the futility of the painful search for consensus and the need to push forward firmly toward his goals. Finally, he closed down the conference, slammed his books shut, and warned the “gentlemen” that it was not over. Sterling Lyon proclaimed that Trudeau could not possibly go forward in the face of the provincial dissent, but Romanow, who had worked closely with Chrétien, told the press as he left, “They’re going.”19