ANDREW COHEN
Andrew Cohen is a foreign correspondent for the Globe and Mail, based in Washington, D.C. A native of Montreal, he studied political science at McGill University and earned graduate degrees in journalism and international affairs at Carleton University.
He has worked for the Financial Post, the Ottawa Citizen, and United Press International, where he covered the last government of Pierre Trudeau. In 1990, he wrote A Deal Undone: The Making and Breaking of the Meech Lake Accord, a bestselling study of Canada’s constitutional politics.
As a member of the Editorial Board of the Globe, he won National Newspaper Awards in 1995 and 1996.
ON JANUARY 24, 1998, the Globe and Mail published a withering denunciation of Pierre Elliott Trudeau under the name of its editor-in-chief, William Thorsell. A few days before, the former prime minister had visited Toronto to celebrate the launch of an English-language edition of Cité libre, the audacious journal he had co-founded in 1950. Thorsell, it seemed, would not be taking out a subscription.
Trudeau was “a bust in English-speaking Canada” and “the greatest disappointment since John Diefenbaker.” His return in 1980 was an “accident of history”; almost everything he did subsequently was “decisive, dramatic and disastrous.” His investment and energy policies were repealed; his peace mission was disarmed. Only on the Constitution did Trudeau leave “a permanent mark”—and it was not altogether positive.
To Thorsell, Trudeau had wounded Canada grievously when he patriated the Constitution without the consent of the government of Quebec and later resisted two exhaustive negotiations to redress it. Lucien Bouchard was “Pierre Trudeau’s child and the Bloc Québécois his most enduring legacy outside the Charter of Rights.” So repugnant was his record that even his Liberal Party had made “a desperate effort to escape him.” How to explain, then, the enduring adulation for a leader who had left the country in ruins and showed “barely concealed contempt” for his public? Thorsell offered this elegant interpretation: “The shrinking band of Mr. Trudeau’s acolytes played on in downtown Toronto this week, the thriller and the thrilled entwined in their old neurotic dance, insisting that the mania in Trudeaumania live up to its billing. Never in Canada’s history has psychology dominated policy like this.”
There it was, the legacy of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. A bust, a disappointment, an accident. The tribune of contempt. The father of secession. The man in search of his mania.
Oh, Trudeau. He taunts us still.
Thorsell isn’t alone in rethinking Trudeau these days. In the ivory tower, his record is under relentless attack. Political scientists Guy Laforest (Trudeau and the End of a Canadian Dream) and Kenneth McRoberts (Misconceiving Canada: The Struggle for National Unity) accuse the country’s fifteeth prime minister of destroying the duality that had defined Canada. Their dissatisfaction is shared by many of the twenty-five historians who rated Canada’s prime ministers for Maclean’s magazine in March 1997. Desmond Morton, for example, branded him “the disappointment of the century … who left Canada dramatically more divided and drastically poorer than he found it.” Altogether, they placed Trudeau in the third rank—neither great nor near great, above Lester Pearson but below Louis St. Laurent—and suggested that he was there more by virtue of endurance than achievement.
More telling, Trudeau’s stature is said to be so low in his native Quebec that he had to sit out the referendum in 1995. “His name and legacy may well have become a political liability for federalists in Quebec,” say Richard Nadeau, one of a team of political scientists tracking public opinion over recent decades. “For many Quebeckers … his name mainly represents a certain way of dealing with constitutional issues, a way they no longer find appealing.”
It was that “way”, of course, which brought Trudeau to parliament in 1965 and to the prime ministry in 1968. His ambition wasn’t to tame inflation or thaw the Cold War (though he tried to do both). It wasn’t to lower taxes or reduce the size of government. Rather, politics for Trudeau was about Quebec. His raison d’être was to find the ways and means of making Canada broad enough to accommodate the aspirations of its French-speaking minority. He wanted to keep Canada whole.
A generation later, critics count his failures. They say his economics yielded deficits and bloated government; his liberalism failed to redistribute income or reduce poverty; his internationalism was capricious. To a large degree, they are right. Yet, at the end of the day it is unlikely that Trudeau will be judged on his economic, social, or foreign policies. Important as they are, they pale beside the national question, the central issue of his time. Trudeau will be remembered for the Constitution, not the deficit, just as Ronald Reagan is remembered for the Cold War, not the deficit. Fair or not, history has a way of asking the big questions. It doesn’t raise statues to leaders for balancing the budget. Visionaries know that; certainly Trudeau did. In the next century, the measure of his legacy will be his vision of Canada.
Both the vision and the visionary have cast a long, lingering shadow. In the thirty years since he came to office in 1968, there has scarcely been a passage in the relationship between English Canada and French Canada in which he was not influential, if not decisive. From his opening skirmish as justice minister with Daniel Johnson in 1968 to his last volley as private citizen with Lucien Bouchard in 1996, Trudeau has been at the centre of our national conversation.
As biographers Christina McCall and Stephen Clarkson put it, the Constitution was “his magnificent obsession.” He entered politics with a deep-seated view of the country and spent his career giving life to it. When he left office he said that the Constitution was the only issue that could bring him back, and three times it did. This matter of the Constitution was a different calculus for Trudeau. For all his avowed devotion to reason over passion, his sense here was visceral as much as cerebral. As prime minister he could reverse himself on wage and price controls or cruise missile testing, but never on his kind of Canada. Whether it was the role of francophones, the balance between individual rights and provincial rights, or the value of popular sovereignty, Trudeau’s thinking never “evolved” like that of other politicians. As he led an unequivocal life, seeking excellence in all that he did, he followed an unequivocal ideal, which left little room for compromise in its fundamentals.
For a generation, Trudeau was Canada’s constitutional compass. His commitment to a charter of rights, a strong central government, equality of the provinces, and the protection of minority language was the orthodoxy. More than any other figure of his time, his constancy and eloquence gave him a claim of ownership. At the height of his powers, he set the tone and tempo of the debate. He was to politics what Bobby Orr was to hockey—the player who could dominate the play and, on a good day, determine the outcome of the game itself.
Trudeau represented true north. His beliefs were forged in a lifetime of thought and practice and they became the standard of comparison for all others. Two nations, special status, a community of communities, sovereignty-association and distinct society were doctrines judged in relation to his own. Those that deviated a few degrees—say, a modest devolution of power to the regions—were negotiable. Those that deviated substantially—say, the creation of two nations—were untenable. And those that would detach Quebec from Canada—whether by outright independence or asymmetrical federalism—were contemptible.
Trudeau gave no quarter in his defence of Canada. Between 1968 and 1996, in seven tests of will, he declared, enacted, and defended his vision. By any standard, it was an extraordinary act of citizenship. He was at once patriot, philosopher, warrior, polemecist, even tragedian. His adversaries were nationalists, terrorists, separatists and provincialists, Quebeckers or Albertans, Conservatives or Liberals, populists or demagogues—it scarcely mattered. Trudeau engaged everyone, and every time he won.
The first time Trudeau gave full voice to his idea of Canada was as minister of justice in 1968. Since he had arrived in Parliament three years earlier, and particularly since the Liberal Party had reviewed its position in caucus in September, 1967, Trudeau had been pressing for rejection of any form of special status for Quebec. As Donald Peacock remembers in Journey to Power, Trudeau told his colleagues there was a choice: “either one nation with two languages, or, ultimately, two separate nations.” His colleagues worried about the challenge, fearing it would divide Canada. “Trudeau feared Canada would break up by default if the challenge were not made,” Peacock wrote. Against the odds, supported by Jean Marchand and Gérard Pelletier, Trudeau won over caucus and cabinet.
On February 5, 1968, Lester Pearson opened a federal-provincial conference in Ottawa. He said that Canada was at “a fork in the road,” warning that its survival was at stake. Across the table, Trudeau faced Daniel Johnson of Quebec. In papers presented to the conference, Trudeau had set out his view: “Canada’s identity is its diversity and its unity; we lose ourselves if we lose our two linguistic communities, our diverse cultural heritages, or our several regional identities. We lose them all if we lose the Canada in which they have been able to exist and develop.”
The next day, on national television, Johnson attacked Trudeau. He claimed Trudeau was pushing a powerful centrism out of political ambition, trying “to prove to the rest of Canada they won’t be pushed around by Quebec.” He said the willingness of other provinces to accept the Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism was little more than “an aspirin.” Only special powers to Quebec would preserve its distinctiveness, providing equality.
Trudeau, much to Pearson’s alarm, returned barb for barb. When the premier called the minister “the member from Mount Royal,” Trudeau called the premier “the deputy from Bagot.” He accused Johnson of trying to undermine Quebec’s members of parliament. If Quebec had more power in the province than Ottawa, why have a federal government? He mocked Johnson’s request for more powers from the English-speaking provinces: “If we could have our cake and eat it, and the candles and the icing,” he said, “I would be happy.”
Beyond the theatrics, new lines of argument were emerging. Trudeau trumpeted “the Canadian Charter of Human Rights” and mused about a political community in which both French and English Canadians could move freely, live and work in Canada. Trudeau knew that the greatest threat to special status for Quebec was the idea that Quebeckers could be at home everywhere in Canada, not just in la belle province.
Historian Jean-Louis Roy called Trudeau’s exchange with Johnson “one of the most spectacular duels in Canadian politics.” Biographer Richard Gwyn said “he slugged it out, in Single Combat … winning on all cards, in the conference chamber and on the television screens.” The celebrated confrontation did something more than make Trudeau prime minister. It showed why this iconoclast had come to Ottawa and how he would challenge convention there. It showed that in Ottawa, as in Quebec, he was prepared to offer a pan-Canadian vision against those who would retreat into Quebec. In challenging Johnson, he drew his line in the snow.
Thus, at Pearson’s fork in the road, Canada faced a choice between special status or a broader community. Trudeau declared his Canada, and his Canada prevailed.
The next passage in relations between Quebec and Canada came in the October Crisis of 1970. When the Front de libération du Québec kidnapped James Cross, the British trade commissioner and Pierre Laporte, Quebec’s labour minister, Canada sailed into uncharted waters. “Canada enters the Revolutionary Age,” said Time magazine.
Trudeau immediately saw the danger. He knew the demands of the FLQ were inherently undemocratic, a threat to the popular will. No self-respecting leader could release “political prisoners” who were in jail for their crimes, not their beliefs. To free them would legitimize blackmail and invite more.
As clearly as Trudeau recognized the threat, he feared that others did not. What was decisive for him was a declaration signed on October 15 by leading Quebeckers, including René Lévesque, Jacques Parizeau, and Claude Ryan. It encouraged the provincial government to negotiate “an exchange between hostages and political prisoners.” To Trudeau, to use “political prisoners” was to adopt the language of the terrorists. Trudeau worried about a deterioration of public will. The justice minister of Quebec had proposed releasing political prisoners, the police were exhausted, and there was talk of student demonstrations, inviting violence. The prospect of politicians, scholars, and unionists negotiating with terrorists suggested, in Trudeau’s words, “an extremely disordered state.”
At the request of Premier Robert Bourassa, Trudeau had already sent federal troops to Quebec. Now, in imposing the War Measures Act, he chose a blunter instrument. He never denied that there were abuses and as a civil libertarian, he felt them keenly. His government later repealed the act and introduced an entrenched bill of rights.
The purpose of the War Measures Act wasn’t to crush separatism but to restore order. Secessionists argued that the government imposed the act unilaterally, but it did not. Perhaps Trudeau could have refused Bourassa’s appeal, but what would have been the response if Ottawa had done nothing and chaos had followed?
The October Crisis marked the end of terrorism in Quebec. For seven years, the FLQ had been maiming and killing Quebeckers. René Lévesque could sneer that “Trudeau’s stupidity will not have prevented more kidnappings,” but he was wrong. “In my judgement Pierre Trudeau kept Quebec in Canada when no one else in Canada could have done it,” Former senator Eugene Forsey wrote of the crisis. “In my judgement also, he saved us from Baader-Meinhof gangs and Red Brigades.”
Trudeau’s response wasn’t subtle. If the choice, as he saw it, was between democracy and the mob, he would chose democracy. Trudeau defended his Canada, and his Canada prevailed.
The next challenge to national unity came in the referendum in Quebec in 1980. By that winter, when the question was being debated in the National Assembly, almost 60 percent of Quebeckers supported sovereignty-association. With Joe Clark as prime minister and Claude Ryan as leader of the Quebec Liberals, the Parti Québécois was mounting a forceful campaign, and it was winning.
No one can say that Trudeau single-handedly reversed opinion and won the referendum. The polls showed a steady erosion of sovereigntist support over the last six weeks of the campaign, but they also showed that the early soundings may have overstated support for separatism. Still, if ever a leader made a difference in his time, the time was that spring and the leader was Trudeau.
The prospects for the No side improved markedly when he returned to power on February 18, 1980 with seventy-four of seventy-five seats from Quebec and a clutch of Quebeckers in senior portfolios. The secessionists would now have to face a federalist from Quebec. His success was the strongest antidote to their argument that Quebeckers could look only to Quebec City to protect their interests.
The referendum of 1980 was Trudeau’s greatest test. Having been defeated for re-election in 1979, when he insisted on making the Constitution the focus of his losing campaign, he felt new life. Now, girding for battle, he marshalled his resources and rationed his appearances. In his first speech on April 15, he declared that sovereignty-association was impossible because the nine other provinces were uninterested in association. As for sovereignty, he couldn’t negotiate it because he had just been re-elected with a mandate to exercise sovereignty over all Canada. In speeches in Quebec on May 2 and May 9, Trudeau mocked Lévesque’s vision and offered his own, challenging Quebeckers to find their identity in a larger entity, not to cower behind the walls of the ghetto.
But it was his speech on May 16, at the Paul Sauvé Arena in Montreal, that was pivotal. Responding to taunts from Lévesque over his middle name, Trudeau invoked “Elliott” to illustrate the intolerance of his adversaries. He promised constitutional change, and he made the referendum not just a No to sovereignty-association but a commitment to constitutional reform. Defeating sovereignty-association could have killed any negotiation; now Trudeau promised to open a new one.
Once the referendum was lost, the threat was blunted. If Trudeau was not solely responsible for the victory, he was certainly responsible for changing the country. As Joe Clark put it: “The kind of Canada that Mr. Lévesque wants to separate from no longer exists.”
It was a choice between a little Quebec and a broad Canada, between division and unity. Here, too, Trudeau preserved his Canada, and his Canada prevailed.
Having won the referendum, Trudeau unveiled his plans to bring home the British North America Act, entrench a Charter of Rights, and establish an amending formula. Everything was negotiable, he said—rights, roles, and responsibilities—and he meant those of the provinces, too.
The debate over the next eighteen months would give shape to Trudeau’s Canada and test his will. It would take place in parliament, the courts, and intergovernmental conferences, generating a cacaphony of threats, cries, and laments. By its end, from its blast furnace, would come the steel of Trudeau’s Canada.
Since 1955, Trudeau had proposed placing a bill of rights in the Constitution. A charter would realize his dream of a society of two peoples, largely but not exclusively French and English, securing their futures in the broad pan-Canadian state. The vehicle would be the patriation of the BNA Act of 1867. Having presided over several unsuccessful rounds of federal-provincial talks since 1968, including the acceptance and rejection of the Victoria Charter in 1971, Trudeau knew the risks. He also knew that he had promised Quebeckers “renewed federalism.”
His predecessors had tried for more than half a century to free the Constitution from British trusteeship. Opposing him were the premiers, each with his own interests, including an avowed separatist who would reject anything that strengthened Confederation. Collectively, the challenge they posed to Trudeau’s Canada was not Johnson’s special status or Lévesque’s sovereignty-association. This time it was provincialism.
From the moment the premiers met Trudeau at 24 Sussex Drive in October 1980, they were intransigent. They would do what the premiers had always done in these negotiations—trade rights for fish. It wasn’t patriation or the Charter that mattered to them, it was the division of powers. It was what they could extract from Ottawa. Without concessions, there would be no consent.
No wonder the meeting began badly. The premiers presented a list of demands that no prime minister, particularly this one, could accept. Forestry, communications, culture, the fishery and other areas of federal jurisdiction were all demanded by the provinces as the price of their agreement. When the flinty Brian Peckford declared that his vision of Canada was closer to Lévesque’s than to the prime minister’s, Trudeau recoiled.
Facing opposition from the premiers, the Conservatives and the government of Great Britain, Trudeau persevered. He would woo the New Democrats in parliament, divide the provinces (by co-opting Ontario and New Brunswick), and go straight to Westminster in London. If necessary, he would call an election, even a referendum. The Constitution would be home by July 1, 1981.
Ultimately, Trudeau compromised—even though he said years later that he never wanted to. He referred the matter to the Supreme Court, and when the justices failed to deliver the endorsement he wanted, he reconvened the first ministers. In splitting Lévesque from the premiers of the Gang of Eight, he reached agreement with them on the Charter. He accepted the notwithstanding clause, which he disliked for the opportunity it gave the provinces to opt out; he accepted a modest transfer of power; and he accepted an amending formula without a veto for Quebec. He did what he had to do.
If patriation was the symbol of nationhood, the Charter of Rights was its ark and covenant. Trudeau had succeeded where every prime minister had failed since the first attempt by Mackenzie King. No one else in Canada could have done it, for no one else had the single-mindedness and the bloody-mindedness. Only a leader with a clarity of purpose and a sense of destiny could have carried it off.
A weaker prime minister might have offered more powers to the premiers, bowed to Westminster, diluted the Charter, placated the secessionists. Trudeau stood firm, showing the confidence of a Venetian doge entrusted with the people’s faith. He never shambled or shuffled. Feet apart, thumbs in belt, cheek bones high, Trudeau was a figure of resolve. For him, it was a choice between his political community or their community of communities. Trudeau shaped his Canada, and his Canada prevailed.
Trudeau left office in 1984. Although he took a vow of silence, he broke it three times over the next dozen years. Twice he tried to stop his successors from rewriting the Constitution; the third time he intervened to defend his record after he was attacked by secessionists in the referendum of 1995. In retirement, Trudeau was watchful. Like Cincinnatus, the general who left the plough to take up the sword for Rome, Trudeau returned to defend his Canada.
The first of his interventions as a private citizen came during the Meech Lake Accord in 1987. Trudeau had thought that separatism was dying when he left office three years earlier. His Constitution, he boasted in an infelicitous choice of words, would last “a thousand years.” The Parti Québécois was disintegrating and his successor, Brian Mulroney, presented himself as a federalist of his ilk. Although the framers of the Accord declared it a moderate proposal—in relative terms, it was—and although Trudeau himself had offered some of its elements to the provinces at different times, he called it a repudiation of his Canada. The greatest affront was recognizing Quebec as a “distinct society.” For Trudeau, this was special status, redux.
Trudeau had hoped that someone would question the accord, but no one did. “So I took it upon myself to remind Canadians that there is another view of Canada than the one proposed in the Meech Lake Accord,” he writes in his Memoirs. In an article published on May 27, 1987, he savaged the accord and its authors in searing polemic, informed by logic, inflamed by hyberbole. Over the next three years, until the accord died in 1990, he restated his argument in interviews with the media, in testimony before two parliamentary committees, and in a best-selling collection of essays on his government.
Here was Trudeau as polemecist and pamphleteer. The words were poison darts; the arguments were extreme; the mood black. The accord was an end to bilingualism and a sellout to the provinces. Owing nothing to anyone, Trudeau railed at the vandals desecrating his Canada. Many hoped he would fall silent, muttering that former prime ministers should retire and shut up. Not this former prime minister.
His intervention unsettled the premiers, angered the prime minister, comforted the dissidents and sowed doubt among Canadians. He couldn’t stop the accord, which was signed in June, though two premiers, in tacit response to the reservations he had raised, insisted on imposing conditions on the power of the distinct society. Trudeau acted as he always had in times of crisis: He weighed his options, chose his timing, and exercised his conjurer’s powers.
When the accord collapsed, he could claim some credit. Pollsters said that his intervention moved public opinion from support to opposition. Certainly, as the strongman from Quebec, the winner of the referendum, and the father of the Charter, he had credibility on Quebec, if not in Quebec, where his stature was eroding. He made opposition to Meech Lake respectable.
To Pierre Trudeau, the Meech Lake Accord represented the ruin of Canada, and the repudiation of his vision. Here he restored his Canada, and his Canada prevailed.
In 1992, Trudeau entered the debate again, this time in response to the Charlottetown Accord. As the referendum campaign opened that autumn, there was scarcely a dissenting voice in the land. Beyond the unanimity among the first ministers and the leaders of the opposition, business and the media also supported the agreement.
Then Trudeau reappeared, like Banquo’s Ghost, first with articles in l’Actualité and Maclean’s, then in a speech at a Chinese restaurant in Montreal, which became known, somewhat grandly, as the “Maison Egg Roll” address. In proposing the distinct society (more qualified this time), the hierarchy of citizenship, a transfer of power to the provinces, and the assurance of more constitutional negotiations, the agreement was a junk bond and a promissory note. “They have created this mess, and it deserves a big NO!” he thundered.
The arguments were familar, inviting his critics to argue that he could never move beyond them. He took this as praise, thinking his consistency enlightened rather than foolish. In 1980 he could say that Quebeckers always knew what his promise of “renewed federalism” meant; in 1992 they knew what his rejection meant, even as he momentarily left retirement to reaffirm it. There was no mystery to his position.
Pollsters say that support for Charlottetown in English Canada dropped twenty points after his remarks. Although Trudeau found himself on the same side as Preston Manning and the Reform Party, his voice conferred credibility on the ragtag band of opponents. The referendum lost. Trudeau, ever the patrician populist, cheered the blow to the conventional wisdom of the elites. Once again, he had gone over the heads of the politicians. As he wrote in his Memoirs: “The Canadian people did exactly what I had hoped they would do: they established that the locus of the sovereignty of Canada is the people … What they did really amounted to a revolt of the people against the political class.”
Trudeau had intervened again, perhaps decisively, to thwart the emergence of a Canada built on the distinct society, devolution, and aboriginal self-government. In a choice between his federalism and their provincialism, he had protected his Canada, and, once again, his Canada prevailed.
The last time Trudeau’s Canada was in question was the Quebec referendum in 1995. Trudeau wanted to enter the debate, as he always had, but Ottawa asked him to stay away. He obliged. On the day thousands of Canadians marched in Place du Canada in Montreal, Trudeau watched forlornly from his office high above Boulevard René Lévesque. Then he went for lunch.
That Trudeau was silent did not mean he was absent. More than once Lucien Bouchard invoked the “humiliation” of patriation in 1982, as if it were an ancient stain on the family honour. Reveling in the affront, he held up newspapers from November 5, 1981, the morning after “the Night of the Long Knives,” repeating the charge that Ottawa and the other provinces had met secretly and agreed to patriate the Constitution without consulting Quebec. You see, said Bouchard pointing to a photograph of the prime minister, Trudeau is laughing! He’s laughing at us! He’s mocking us! Trudeau held his tongue, but not for long.
In an open letter to Bouchard on February 3, 1996, Trudeau challenged his version of history. “I accuse Lucien Bouchard of having misled the population of Quebec during last October’s referendum campaign,” he wrote. “By distorting the political history of his province and of his country, by spreading discord among its citizens with his demagogic rhetoric and by preaching contempt for those Canadians who did not share his views, Lucien Bouchard went beyond the limits of honest and democratic debate.”
Point by point, the old logician refuted the “stupid allegations” that Bouchard had made in the campaign—that negotiations between Quebec and Canada had always failed; that Quebec’s negotiators were always sound; that the Night of the Long Knives was a betrayal. He denied Bouchard’s interpretation of events in 1981 and said that the Premier lied in claiming that the Constitution reduced Quebec’s power in language and education. Ironically, he even said that Bouchard had wrongly accused English Canada of killing the Meech Lake Accord; Quebec, by and large, had been responsible. Then came his stinging denunciation: “By calling upon fallacies and untruths to advance the cause of hateful demagoguery, Lucien Bouchard misled the electors … By his actions, he tarnished Quebec’s good reputation as a democratic society and he does not deserve the trust of the people of this province.” Here was a declaration of honour, a man speaking to history. It was characteristically Trudeau.
Bouchard replied. Although he didn’t answer most of Trudeau’s accusations, he revisited the hoary myth of Quebec’s mistreatment within Canada, evoking the October Crisis to question Trudeau’s credentials as a democrat.
Trudeau responded in a letter of February 17, in which he attacked Bouchard’s “historical relativism.” When Bouchard said he was happy to be placed among democrats such as Lévesque and Jean Lesage who had felt Trudeau’s scorn, Trudeau sniffed: “Mr. Bouchard, you misread me—I never accused you of being a democrat.”
In what now seems like a valedictory, Trudeau revisited the vision of Canada he had always embraced. Quebeckers, he said, should not look for their “identity” and “distinctiveness” in the Constitution but “in their confidence in themselves and the full exercise of their rights as citizens equal to all other citizens of Canada.” While he did not doubt that they could create an independent country, he implored them to choose a more enlightened destiny. “I have always believed that they have the stature to face a more difficult and nobler challenge—that of participating in the construction of the Canadian nation founded on democratic pluralism, institutional bilingualism and the sense of sharing.” He said the very notion of sovereignty was obsolete at the end of the century. He continued: “To weaken it [Canada] by dividing it would be a historic blunder of infinite proportion. We must not rend the fabric of this still-young country, we must give it the chance to grow and to prosper.”
Trudeau was writing his epitaph. Age was advancing. In Montreal, where he had retreated to his art deco mansion in 1984, it was whispered that he had Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s Disease. Of the three wise men, Jean Marchand was dead and, within a year, Gérard Pelletier would be too, a loss which would devastate Trudeau. After the referendum, Trudeau seemed dispirited and spent. “I have no new ideas,” he sighed.
As Trudeau withdraws, his vision of Canada seems in eclipse, if not in ruins. In Quebec, a demagogic premier prepares to seek re-election, threatening another referendum. In Ottawa, the Liberals govern by dint of central Canada, led by a discredited Quebecker who sometimes speaks a language of nationalism to Quebec that Trudeau distrusts. The official opposition, rooted in the West, espouses a view of Quebec as a province like the others, a view seemingly close to his own until under scrutiny its coded prejudices emerge. In the academy, scholars pronounce the end of Canada and offer panaceas antithetical to his own.
Is it all over, then? Did Pierre Trudeau fight all those battles only to lose the war? Was it all in vain? Is the vision of the pan-Canadian identity obsolete in the twilight of the century? The answer can only be no.
The fundamental truth is that today’s Canada is still Trudeau’s Canada. Just as he won every battle to defend his vision as prime minister, he defeated every attempt to destroy it as a private citizen. His legacy is all around us: the Charter of Rights, official bilingualism, multiculturalism, the amending formula, equality of the provinces, the prominence of francophones in national life.
The Constitution Act of 1982 remains the law. The House of Commons, the Senate, and the Supreme Court remain unchanged, despite efforts to make them more “representative.” The Charter of Rights remains in place, creating a generation of “Charter Canadians” who see it as the foundation of their citizenship. The distribution of powers between governments remains largely unaltered, despite unrelenting demands from the provinces. True, there has been a shift of powers to the provinces, largely through declining federal spending and intergovernmental administrative agreements, some of them negotiated by Trudeau’s government. True, as well, that federalism is far from perfect—the economic union is still elusive and multiculturalism frustrates a national identity and the Senate is an anachronism.
But the elements of Trudeau’s Canada endure. It isn’t accidental, for example, that the governor general, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the head of the armed forces, the Clerk of the Privy Council and Canada’s ambassador to Washington are francophones. In a sense, they are Trudeau’s children.
For almost thirty years, Trudeau has shown Sisyphean persistence. In 1968 he reversed the drift to two Canadas and defined his own pan-Canadianism. In 1970 he challenged terrorism, ensuring that it would no longer distort the debate. In 1980 he scorned sovereignty-association and promised a new federalism. In 1982 he rejected any trading of rights for powers and cast his Canada in law. In 1987, 1992, and 1996, he fought efforts to undo his work. As Trudeau went from Northern Magus to Cincinnatus, as Canada turned from the philosopher king to Larry King, Trudeau always remained true to himself.
Deux nations, égalité où indépendance, special status. Flexible federalism, profitable federalism, executive federalism. Sovereignty-association and the distinct society. Johnson, Lévesque, Parizeau. Ideas and advocates came and went. Trudeau stayed.
It is fashionable in some quarters to say that Trudeau is passé, and that his final repudiation will come when Quebec declares its independence. (Kenneth McRoberts, for example, says that “the referendum was the ultimate proof that the Trudeau national unity strategy had failed.”) If Quebec goes, critics will blame Trudeau’s opposition to greater powers for Quebec. After all, they conclude, it was he who reversed Canada’s long-standing accommodation of Quebec, polarized the debate, revived separatism, and thwarted efforts to reconcile the two Canadas on any terms but his own.
This criticism gives false comfort to those who could never accept the victory of his vision over theirs. But what if Trudeau had not acted at those critical moments? Would Canada be bounding happily into the sunlit uplands of the new millenium?
Consider, for a moment, the Canada that might have emerged if it had taken Pearson’s other fork in the road. In 1968 a government led by Liberal Robert Winters—or Conservative Robert Stanfield—embraces deux nations, softpedals bilingualism and offers Quebec special status. Quebec becomes more French, Canada becomes more English. Would that accommodation have stopped the rise of René Lévesque and his Parti Québécois, a movement born the year before Trudeau came to power, repudiating Pearson’s flexible federalism and the “duality” of Confederation?
In 1970 the government negotiates with the FLQ. Would that have suffocated terrorism? In 1980, Joe Clark sits out the referendum (or campaigns, with equal ineffectiveness.) Would sovereignty-association have lost decisively? In 1982 the government abandons patriation, or accepts it in exchange for massive decentralization. Would that have ended the debate? Would Quebec have signed, and if it had, would those hard-line separatists have been content to pack up and go home?
In 1987 Meech Lake passes. Perhaps it might have pre-empted Charlottetown and kept Bouchard in Ottawa. But would it have kept the Parti Québécois from returning to power in 1994 in a province that hadn’t elected a government to a third term in forty years? Would it have ended the debate with two constitutional conferences a year, as required by Meech Lake, ad infinitum? Recall Bourassa’s promise to present a new list of demands in a second constitutional round. Consult Bouchard’s pyschologist. Read the history of federal-provincial relations. To think the Meech Lake Accord would have ended the discussion is staggering naïveté.
In this light, Canada would be no better off, and probably far worse. Canada would be a country in name only, its centre weak, its will drained, a sad association of duchies united only by envy and resentment. The BNA Act would reside in Britain. The Charter would remain an idea. The premiers would still be talking. The separatists would still be wailing. Indeed, but for Trudeau’s efforts to shape a broader Canada—a Canada that Quebeckers, whatever their ambivalence, still tell surveys they admire—the seccessionists might have succeeded by now, and Canada would not be here at all.
If Canada does fail in the next century, let the sages of history turn their gaze on Trudeau’s successors, principally Brian Mulroney, who reopened the Constitution and truly created Bouchard, however confidently some ascribe paternity to Trudeau. Of course, these prisoners of the contemporary cant will blame Trudeau for a generation, denying him the statute of limitations that even war criminals enjoy.
To them, it doesn’t matter that Trudeau is almost a decade and a half out of office; that he won majorities in Quebec five times; that twice Quebeckers have defeated secession; that the Charter remains popular in Quebec and in Canada; that he agreed to a notwithstanding clause which gave Quebec the right to preserve its restrictive language law. Nor does it matter that Quebec and the other provinces gained powers under his leadership in a highly decentralized federation or that Trudeau tried to restore the veto which Quebec itself had relinquished. None of these arguments is likely to dislodge the image of the illegitimate, absolutist, uncompromising idealogue, the self-hating Quebecker determined to put Quebec in its place.
No matter. Trudeau can rest now, confident in the honour of his struggle and the consistency of his vision. His was a noble, moral vision, appealing to the human spirit, bidding it to rise above the parochialism of little nationalisms that afflict today’s world. It was vision for the ages, and Canada has become an exemplar to the world. It has lost appeal in Quebec, to be sure, though that may have more to do with the failure of salesmanship (largely because Trudeau failed to recruit a successor) than the absence of substance. Indeed, if Canada flourishes in the next century and Quebec makes its peace with Confederation, Trudeau may well emerge as the Churchillian figure of his time, a voice of reason amid the hysteria, a titan who stood alone at the bridge and ensured that the centre would hold and the people would rule and union would endure.
Today, though, the greatest argument for Trudeau’s vision is the survival and the success of Canada. For all the remaking of institutions and redrawing of powers, for all the threats from separatists and the ambitions of provincialists, the unlikely country remains whole. The fractious, dysfunctional country, the Canada which remains wasted on Canadians, continues to work better in practice than in theory. Loath as we are to self-congratulation, it remains a dominion of security, prosperity and generosity.
When he left office, Pierre Elliott Trudeau was asked to name his greatest accomplishment. He shrugged and said, “I survived.” He was wrong. It wasn’t that Trudeau survived. It was that Trudeau’s Canada survives—and will.