15

TWO NATIONALISMS

Quebec separatism meets authority: An RCMP officer is knocked down by a demonstrator in Montreal, 1967.

 

When writing of Canadian nationalism in history, it’s prudent to specify that Canada enjoyed two nationalisms—the English-and French-speaking. Canadiens français carefully distinguished themselves from the English, while English Canadians usually didn’t think of French Canadians at all. French-Canadian nationalism was a force, culturally and socially and sometimes politically. It was undeniable that French Canada and especially French Quebec were politically distinct, even as the French lived beside and often among the English. Montreal was known to be the second largest French-speaking city in the world, but it was also a bilingual city. If the French dominated politics, municipally and provincially, the English ran the economy. Until the 1940s it was a tradition that Quebec’s treasurer, the provincial finance minister, was English, because, after all, English was the language of business.

The French population of Quebec was relatively secure. French, Catholic Quebec had a high birth rate. Everywhere but Montreal and a few scattered pockets in western Quebec, French was not only dominant, but practically universal. Though immigration fed the English-speaking community, the English often moved on to other parts of Canada, or to the United States. True, the French-speaking communities outside Quebec were tending to decline over time, but even in these communities there were advances, like the election of an Acadian premier, Louis Robichaud, in New Brunswick in 1960.1 As well, older animosities and prejudices among the English seemed gradually to be subsiding. Meanwhile, fantasies like “la révanche des berceaux” (the revenge of the cradle)—the notion that French Canadians would outbreed the English, and by force of numbers come to dominate northern Ontario and New Brunswick—also subsided. How could they not, for the birth rate on which they were based was sagging; between the late 1950s and the early 1970s Quebec moved from the highest birth rate in Canada to the lowest.

By the 1970s the birth rate was declining across the country. Technology played a part, but also affluence and urbanization. Contraceptive devices, technically illegal in Canada until 1969, were more likely to be available in urban areas. Richer people had fewer children, on the whole, and Canadians were definitely richer. Educated women had careers, and remained unmarried longer. The appearance of the birth control pill, which became widely available by 1965, had an obvious impact, first in large cities but eventually across the country. Of course, birth rates in cities, including Quebec cities, were always lower than in the countryside, but by the 1970s birth rates in the countryside had declined to the same level.

By the time the anti-contraceptive law was repealed, resistance from traditionalists had crumbled. The Roman Catholic Church, doctrinally opposed to contraceptive devices, conceded that the law as it existed was unenforceable and ought to be removed. Good Catholics should eschew artificial birth control, but as a matter of conscience, not law. Even in Quebec, where the clerically inclined newspaper Le Devoir was one of the last to concede the point, contraception had long outpaced the Church’s teachings. As for the government that finally repealed the law, it was headed by a devoutly Catholic French Canadian, Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

French Quebec, like English Canada, was changing in the 1950s— much more than the English, including those in Quebec, realized. The greatest change was occurring in the most traditional area of society, the Roman Catholic Church. For years it had run welfare and education, which meant that Quebec, unlike most other Canadian provinces, was administered in large part along denominational lines. The Church depended heavily on the support of the faithful, who contributed both human and financial capital to sustain their faith. But the support of the faithful was insufficient as time passed and problems grew. State aid, in the form of grants from the provincial government, became the staff of life for Catholic welfare organizations. There was a price for all this: “The bishops eat out of my hand,” the Union Nationale premier Maurice Duplessis boasted. And Duplessis, in a hundred ingenious ways, reminded the bishops of this fact. Most notably, when the archbishop of Montreal, Joseph Charbonneau, got out of hand politically, he found himself translated forty-eight hundred kilometres to manage the finances of an old-age home in Victoria, British Columbia.

Duplessis’s style of politics eventually became an embarrassment. To English Canadians, it was his pandering to French-Canadian nationalism that marked his regime as obnoxious and obsolete. To the French, however, it was his corrupt, patronage-ridden, and personal style of government, which starved education and other public functions of the money they needed to catch up to the modern world. Duplessis’s death, in 1959, signalled an explosion of public activity. The “Révolution Tranquille” (Quiet Revolution) officially occurred under the succeeding Liberal government under Jean Lesage (1960–66). Lesage, a rather traditional politician from an elite family, sometimes seemed rather surprised at the policies that his government was enacting.

The times also helped define what now happened in Quebec. There were changes in the Catholic Church, coincident with the Second Vatican Council (“Vatican II”) which liberalized the Church after decades of conservatism. There was a wave of secularism, which hit Quebec with particular force. What the government had previously subsidized, through the Church or churches, it now did for itself. For the first time in almost a hundred years Quebec had a department of education headed by a government minister. Eventually, by a constitutional amendment in 1997, the school system was secularized, ironically by a strongly federalist Canadian Parliament at the behest of the very separatist government of Quebec. Though still divided, Quebec education was now bisected officially along English–French lines rather than religious ones.

The 1997 amendment was in a real sense the logical end of the Quiet Revolution. It wasn’t actually quiet at all; like any other part of Canada afflicted by the baby boom and the youth or counterculture, Quebec endured a lot of noise, mostly oratorical, during the 1960s and 1970s; but in Quebec, unlike the rest of Canada, there were also bombs.

The reappearance of discontent was no surprise to those who had cherished the nationalist flame for many years. Quebec history had always attracted those who felt a sense of grievance over the Conquest of 1760 and its consequences. Nationalism was certainly a force to be reckoned with, but as with Premier Duplessis, it had its limits. Nationalists in the 1940s and 1950s confined themselves to defending “provincial rights” against Ottawa’s centralizing tendencies. From time to time separatists appeared who dreamt of an independent “Laurentie” on the banks of the St. Lawrence, but their ideas had no political purchase among mainstream politicians or in the Quebec electorate. Such separatist nationalists inhabited the extreme right wing of politics, and in the liberalizing climate of the times they were easily dismissed as cranks.

Suddenly, in the early 1960s, separatism acquired both force and respectability. In this it was responding to international currents—rather like the nationalism of the 1830s (see above, Chapter 7). Between 1945 and 1975 the European colonial empires collapsed almost completely. The nostrums of empire—which expressed racist ideas of white supremacy— lost their power in the face of colonial populations’ unwillingness to be ruled from abroad and from above any longer. France fought a few fruitless colonial wars, in Indochina and Algeria, only to find that the metropolitan population was disinclined to support them. Great Britain had the same experience on a smaller scale, in Kenya and Cyprus, as did Portugal in Mozambique and Angola. Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and finally Portugal abandoned their overseas possessions, except for a few fragments. (And, of course, except for the Soviet Union, which believed, wrongly, that socialism transcended its imperial history.) Most of Asia and Africa suddenly achieved independence.

The logic of independence and independence struggles attracted attention in Quebec. (Algeria was of particular interest.) Resistance from the colonial establishment was to be expected, but it would be swept away by irresistible revolutionary force. It didn’t matter that Quebec had representative and democratic institutions, the separatists argued: Quebec politicians really served the English establishment ensconced in its mansions in Westmount.2 The Westmount mansions were impressive piles, certainly, though on a scale of international luxury they paled beside the constructions of the British, American, or French elites; and their stone walls and panelled dining rooms frequently hosted obnoxious opinions about the French population who surrounded them.³ That most English-speaking Quebeckers didn’t live that way could be ignored in theory—theory was what counted—if not in fact. And to get things moving, theory prescribed terror.

During the 1963 election campaign an unexploded bomb was found on the route of Prime Minister Diefenbaker’s campaign train. More bombs followed in the spring, in mailboxes in Westmount, seriously injuring an army explosives expert. Opinion inside the province and out became alarmed. To discover what to do, Lester Pearson promised a royal commission if he were elected prime minister, and he kept his word, appointing the cumbersomely named Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in 1963. (Inevitably it was called the Bi-Bi Commission, or styled after its two chairs as the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission.)

Premier Lesage discovered that members of his cabinet were moving with the times, and that keeping up with them was, as he put it, “a struggle to control a bear.”⁴ Paul Gérin-Lajoie, the minister of the newly created department of education, wanted to expand provincial jurisdiction—legitimately, he believed—into fields hitherto occupied by the federal government. René Lévesque, his minister of natural resources, wanted to nationalize Quebec’s private power companies and annex them to the government’s existing Quebec Hydro system (which dated from 1944). Most provinces had government-owned utilities, so nationalizing Gatineau Power or Shawinigan Power caused little comment outside the province. Inside, however, the move was understood to be a blow to the English exclusivity that had for so long dominated Quebec’s economy. Lesage explained it to his cabinet as “economic liberation.”5

Lesage called an election on the question, in the fall of 1962. Not surprisingly, he won. The private companies were nationalized, and folded into the new, very large, French-speaking Hydro-Québec. Hydro-Québec turned out to be a means to an end, only part of a much larger plan to reform Quebec’s economy and society. It now became clear that Quebec was not to be “a province like the others” but a free-standing entity. It must be an expansionist, activist state—for the state was the only Quebec institution indisputably under the control of French Canadians, and run for their benefit.⁶ And it must have its own industrial policy, financed after 1965, out of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec.

Marc Lalonde, then a young lawyer in Montreal, remembered that René Lévesque “started making speeches in support of a steel industry in Quebec, and advanced the creation of Sidbec [“Sid” stands for sidérurgie, meaning steel industry], which was eventually created on the theory that somehow we had to have it: as he said, ‘We owe it to ourselves to have a steel industry.’”⁷ What Lévesque meant was that the “nation” of Quebec should have an industrial apparatus like other nations. Mentally, the minister had already segregated his province’s destiny from the rest of Canada.

Quebec got a steel industry, like Ontario’s, as it got an automobile plant, like Ontario’s. They were a monument to government mercantilism, and a visible sign of Quebec’s autonomy from the English-run Canadian economy. (One should, however, observe that a fascination with heavy industry was not unique to Quebec, as the simultaneous creation of a federal department of industry indicated.) Their actual history turned out to be not quite as Lévesque and his ideologues expected. Eventually Sidbec was sold—not to the English, but to the Chinese—and the General Motors plant at Ste. Thérèse was closed by its owner in 2001.⁸ It was not the best of times to be putting your money into heavy industry, and it eventually turned out that national standing did not after all depend on having a steel plant or two.

Pearson, an experienced diplomat, applied his talents to the task of appeasing Quebec, leaving international affairs to Paul Martin, a veteran Liberal politician from Ontario. The Liberal party was strong in Quebec, where it was the establishment party, and Pearson was able to draw on an array of talent for his caucus and cabinet. Increasingly, however, Pearson found that he couldn’t count on the support of the provincial Liberal party, which formally separated itself from its federal cousin. Some provincial Liberals supported the federal party, and some ostentatiously kept their distance. If they were too close to Ottawa, how could they safeguard Quebec’s interests?

Indeed, how could Ottawa, an English-speaking government, properly represent Quebec’s interests? To Paul Gérin-Lajoie, and to Quebec’s senior civil servants, it was an impossibility. Gérin-Lajoie spoke as both minister and constitutional expert (which he was) when in April 1965 he told a gathering of the Montreal consular corps that Quebec should represent itself in areas of provincial jurisdiction.9

Gérin-Lajoie’s assertion was promptly rejected by the federal government. Paul Martin, as minister of external affairs, issued a statement arguing that Canada’s sovereignty was indivisible, and that Canada must speak abroad with only one voice, Ottawa’s. That Ottawa must negotiate with the provinces was a fact of life, inside or outside its foreign policy power. The result could be messy and sometimes incoherent, but on the whole it worked, permitting Canada to be represented at UNESCO or to make commitments in regard to human rights.¹⁰

The Pearson government acted to limit the possibility of mischief-making by the government of Quebec. It was important to prevent the province from setting any precedents by getting a foreign government to make an agreement or even a treaty with it, thereby recognizing Gérin-Lajoie’s doctrine of a bifurcated foreign policy jurisdiction. The only foreign government likely to do so was France, and its government was of several minds on the issue. The French president, Charles de Gaulle, was coming to the conclusion that the independence of Quebec was both inevitable and desirable. His diplomats, with a couple of exceptions, disagreed. So apparently did his foreign minister. Accordingly, the governments of Canada and France in 1965 concluded an umbrella agreement (accord cadre) that authorized agreements between Canadian provinces and France on cultural matters, but also recognized Canada’s sovereign unity in foreign affairs.

Being treated as just another province was precisely what the government of Quebec did not want, and increasingly Quebec’s political and intellectual class agreed with it. Quebec could not submit to minority status within Canada; and yet, with only 5.1 million French speakers in a population of eighteen million (in the 1961 census), that was inevitable. It was in a curious way a reprise of the arguments of the 1850s over representation by population (rep by pop). The politicians of the 1860s had devised a ramshackle (and short-lived) solution of a “double majority.” The politicians of the 1960s, in Quebec, now surfaced with its twin— “two nations” (deux nations). Two nations could mean anything and everything. It could mean “special status,” a cloudy phrase of the period. It might mean associate status, another undefined buzzword.11 It could mean that the consent of both nations was necessary—for example, for amending the constitution, perhaps for important questions, perhaps for anything. Relations between English Canada and Quebec would no longer depend on rep by pop, but on mutual consent.

The Progressive Conservative party toyed with the two-nations idea at a conference at Montmorency outside Quebec City in the summer of 1967. It resolved that “Canada is composed of two founding peoples (deux nations), with historic rights, who have been joined by people from many lands; the constitution should be such as to permit and encourage their full and harmonious growth and development in equality throughout Canada.” The doctrine was music to the ears of the Union Nationale premier of Quebec, Daniel Johnson, who had won a surprising election victory and replaced Jean Lesage in 1966. Johnson had written a book, Egalité ou Indépendance, which proposed that Quebec receive equal status with the rest of the country, which would allow it to stay within Canada, or what was left of it. Failing equality, as defined by Johnson, Quebec should choose independence.

Perhaps because English Canadians refused to believe that he could possibly mean that five million or so French-speaking Quebeckers could balance the thirteen or fourteen million non–French speakers in Canada, Johnson functioned more or less as Quebec premiers always had. An opportunist in practice if not by nature, he looked around for a means of bolstering his position vis-à-vis the English; and in Paris he found one.

Charles de Gaulle, the symbol of French resistance during the Second World War, had returned to political life in 1958 and had become French president in 1959. De Gaulle presided over what he saw as the necessary dismantling of the French colonial empire, ending the running sore of the Algerian war in 1962. He battled rebellious generals and disgruntled rivals, and emerged triumphant by 1963. Finally, through clever diplomacy he re-established France’s pre-eminence in Europe. But it was not enough. There were, after all, only about sixty million French speakers around the world, compared with hundreds of millions of English speakers that the British Empire had left behind. Nor was France a first-class economic power, and its military power was strictly limited. Under the circumstances, de Gaulle decided to reclaim the French speakers of America and to recall them to their destiny, whatever that might be.

De Gaulle’s aims were as cloudy as Johnson’s, but for the time being, in 1966–67, they agreed that the status quo was unsatisfactory. De Gaulle, given Johnson’s dichotomy of equality and independence, was definitely for independence. Johnson, on the other hand, would probably have preferred equality. For a while, however, they were travelling in the same direction, on a road that led to Montreal in the summer of 1967.

EXPO 67 AND AFTER

In 1967 Canada would celebrate the centenary of its creation, and to mark the occasion it would host a world’s fair in Montreal that summer. Planning began under the Diefenbaker government and was well advanced by the time Pearson came into office. Pearson and his colleagues organized Canada-wide celebrations, but the centrepiece was to be in Montreal, where several islands in the middle of the St. Lawrence were linked together as the site for Expo 67, “Man and His World.” The best of Canadian design was represented, and governments around the globe were happy to use Expo as their showcase. Canadians awaited the opening rather nervously, but when it did open, Expo proved to be a brilliant success.

Monarchs, presidents, and prime ministers were expected to make ceremonial visits. Even the president of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, who didn’t want to come, came. Johnson had problems of his own, a war in Vietnam and an impending war in the Middle East, and he didn’t like Lester Pearson, but he was willing to do the necessary minimum. Queen Elizabeth II, Canada’s monarch as well as Great Britain’s, came too. Surely Charles de Gaulle would come, as representing Canada’s other mother country.

Very late in the day, for visits had to be carefully scheduled so as not to overlap, de Gaulle consented to visit. In July 1967 he arrived by French warship at Quebec City, straight into the hands of an enthusiastic Daniel Johnson. Over the next few days Johnson learned that he’d got more than he’d bargained for. He had hoped to impress the English; de Gaulle wanted to enrage them. “I am going to strike a strong blow,” he told his son-in-law, General Alain Boissieu. “Things are going to get hot. But it is necessary.”12 The culmination of de Gaulle’s visit was a cavalcade through rural Quebec en route to Montreal city hall, on 24 July. De Gaulle’s language and demeanour were not reassuring to his Quebec hosts. Johnson was heard to mutter that, by the time de Gaulle’s motorcade reached Montreal, “We’ll have separated.”¹³

That evening, from a balcony overlooking a square that featured a statute of the British naval hero Lord Nelson, de Gaulle spoke to an ecstatic crowd in Montreal and on radio and television to all of Canada. The speech was certainly exciting. His Quebec motorcade that day was like the liberation of France in 1944, he told his audience. The crowd cheered. They wanted liberation too. Encouraged, de Gaulle ended with a series of salutations. “Vive Montréal! Vive le Québec!” and, naturally, “Vive le Québec libre!” The crowd broke into the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise.” His work done, de Gaulle went on to dinner and bed.

“Vive le Québec libre” was one of the main slogans of the separatists. Certainly the separatists understood its meaning. So did de Gaulle’s foreign minister, who termed his master’s performance “une connerie.” 14 Perceptive English Canadians also got the message, and were, as expected, enraged. In Ottawa the cabinet met all the next day to decide what to do. Telegrams and telephone calls flooded Ottawa, expressing Canadians’ fury at de Gaulle. Demonstrators paced outside French consulates, which prudently locked their doors.¹⁵ Pearson eventually read a statement terming de Gaulle’s remarks “unacceptable,” which they were, and expressing the forlorn hope that the general would still visit Ottawa. Naturally de Gaulle did not. Whistling up an Air France Caravelle jet, he departed for Paris where his nervous ministers waited on the airport runway, scrutinizing their chief for signs of dementia.

De Gaulle left behind a legacy of discord. René Lévesque left the provincial Liberal party and established his own separatist movement, which eventually turned into the Parti Québécois (PQ). Pearson’s common sense kept Ottawa’s reactions on an even keel. Canada did not break diplomatic relations with France. Johnson too backed off. He wasn’t ready to declare independence, and Pearson gave him no provocation. Quebec business leaders warned Johnson of the dire consequences to the province if independence went ahead. Instead, in a conference with Canada’s other premiers in November, Johnson poured oil on troubled waters. Quebec and Canada would carry on beyond the centennial. Pearson obliged by opening a conference on the Canadian constitution in order to explore provincial grievances and their possible solutions.

The conference convened in February 1968. Proceedings were televised, and proved remarkably popular, if only because they exposed a new personality on the federal scene. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Pearson’s minister of justice, carried the ball for the federal government. Trudeau took pains to demonstrate that Johnson did not alone speak for Quebec, and his performance was so effective that by the end Johnson was barely speaking at all. Wounded and humiliated, and in ill health, Johnson passed from the scene; in September he died prematurely of a heart attack.

By September Pearson was no longer prime minister. He found the job increasingly burdensome, and, at seventy, he judged the time was right to depart. His main political adversary, John Diefenbaker, was retired by his Progressive Conservative party in September 1967 and Pearson would likely not have done as well against Diefenbaker’s successor, the upright and reticent premier of Nova Scotia, Robert Stanfield.

At a Liberal party convention in April 1968 the glamorous Trudeau swept his rivals aside. The evening of Trudeau’s victory, 6 April, the CBC reported events from a Plexiglas bubble high above the convention floor, using its Ottawa bureau chief, Norman DePoe, and the Quebec nationalist journalist, Claude Ryan, as commentators. When Trudeau’s vote total was read out, and it became clear that he had prevailed, Ryan made a gesture of rage. He was convinced that Trudeau was absolutely the wrong man to succeed Pearson. Trudeau, unlike Pearson, was not a man of soft words, but of hard edges.

Few paid attention to Ryan’s misgivings at the time. Trudeau was the man of the hour, as he would be for many hours, not to say months and years thereafter.

THE OCTOBER CRISIS AND AFTER

The rhythms of society rolled on much as before, with no discernible difference. Trudeau might talk of a “Just Society,” but Canadians seemed to have very local, sometimes quite personal, definitions of justice. It was a time of strikes and unrest at home and abroad, as one group after another scrambled to get a larger piece of the national pie. Separatism refused to go away, though fear of separatism helped bring the provincial Liberal party under a new and untried leader, Robert Bourassa, to power in Quebec City in April 1970.16 René Lévesque and his brand-new Parti Québécois managed to win 23 percent of the vote, but only seven seats in the legislature (which had been renamed the National Assembly in a gesture intended to affirm the standing of the Quebec nation). The Union Nationale got more seats than the PQ, but fewer votes; it began its passage to the political dustbin, and the PQ effectively became the alternative to the Liberals.

Quebec’s place in Canada seemed to be secure, but things were not what they seemed. The extreme fringe of the separatist movement hadn’t given up on bombs or other violent acts, and in October 1970 they were successful in kidnapping two victims: the British consul in Montreal, James Cross, and Bourassa’s minister of labour, Pierre Laporte.17 Because Cross had diplomatic status, his fate became the concern of the federal government, which had jurisdiction over foreign affairs.

Panic ensued. The Bourassa government had no idea what it was confronting, the police didn’t know whom to arrest, and the media fed the notion of a hydra-headed conspiracy, unknown, unknowable, but of course infinitely dangerous. The terrorists appropriated the name Front de libération du Québec (FLQ). It sounded impressive—the analogy was to the successful Algerian liberation movement, the Front de libération nationale (FLN), and its struggle against colonial domination. In fact, the FLQ was a collection of scattered radical grouplets (“cells” as they called them), who communicated among themselves, in that pre-computer age, with great difficulty and uncertainty.

The FLQ solemnly presented a series of “demands,” including the reading on television of their semi-literate manifesto, but not forgetting gold and transport out of the country, as well as the liberation of various separatist miscreants who had already been locked up for roughly 250 crimes committed between 1963 and 1970.

The Quebec political establishment was shaken. A public meeting— mostly of students—in Montreal culminated in chants of “FLQ, FLQ.” A confrontation between the authorities and FLQ supporters was the formula prescribed by radical theorists for riots and revolution—a familiar scenario on North American campuses in the late 1960s. Some prominent nationalists and separatists demanded that the Bourassa government negotiate with the terrorists. There was loose talk that the government no longer had the capacity or the legitimacy to govern. (It had been elected only six months before.) But Bourassa finally did act decisively, calling on the federal government to put into effect the War Measures Act, which provided extensive emergency powers to the federal cabinet to use more or less as it saw fit.

In addition, Bourassa asked for and got the Canadian army, which was tasked to maintain order in Quebec, protect dignitaries against kidnapping, and generally help with the crisis. Soldiers marched up and down, carrying weapons and looking fierce; the only recorded casualty of military action was a self-inflicted wound. Using powers granted by the War Measures Act, the police rounded up nearly five hundred individuals who might (or might not) have had something to do with separatist agitation. The agitation probably counted for more, in the eyes of the authorities, than the separatism.

Though these actions reinforced the power of the state, they did nothing to save the unfortunate Laporte, who was murdered by his kidnappers, his body dumped in the trunk of a car parked at an air base. The murder had tremendous shock value, but the effect was not what the terrorists imagined. Support for the FLQ drained away—but not support for separatism, which was in any case neither outlawed nor suppressed.

Eventually the police found Cross’s hiding place and negotiated an end to his kidnapping. His captors were flown to exile in Cuba. The remaining terrorists—those who had abducted and killed Laporte—were discovered in a rural cellar, arrested, and put on trial. They received sentences of varying severity, but eventually all would be released, to be occasionally feted by separatist militants.

That was the end of the October Crisis, which had lasted roughly three months. It was the culmination of seven years of sporadic violence, whose object had been to bring Quebec to a revolutionary condition that would shake off the forces of repression and colonialism. The terrorists had never managed to get beyond the fringe; although, since Quebec was a small place and its elite compact, many of the actors on all sides had met. One revolutionary theorist, Pierre Vallières, had even worked with Trudeau in an earlier manifestation. After a spell in jail, Vallières landed a federally funded job, which may have been Trudeau’s way of showing that even revolutionaries have their price.

Trudeau’s management of the crisis drew on the strong streak of theatricality in the prime minister’s character. The press helped. On one occasion, a reporter in Ottawa demanded to know from the prime minister what all the soldiers bearing guns were doing. (The implication, if one can be discerned, was that Trudeau was displaying hitherto hidden militarist and possibly dictatorial tendencies, aimed at creating a police state.) Trudeau’s response was still being replayed thirty years later: “You know, I think it is more important to get rid of those who are committing violence against the total society and those who are trying to run the government through a parallel power by establishing their authority by kidnapping and blackmail. And I think it is our duty as a government to protect government officials and important people in our society against being used as tools in this blackmail.” The prime minister then continued: “There are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don’t like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is, go on and bleed, but it is more important to keep law and order in the society than to be worried about weak-kneed people who don’t like the looks of …”

Q: At any cost? How far would you go with that? How far would you extend that?

A: Well, just watch me.

Canadians watched, and approved: according to polls, support for Trudeau and his actions approached 90 percent, and was higher in Quebec than in the rest of Canada.

Not all the consequences of the October Crisis were positive. The crisis created the impression—not entirely unfounded—that Bourassa and his ministers had fumbled, and had to be rescued by the clear-thinking and decisive Trudeau. The use of police power turned out to be a blunt instrument, and those who were unjustifiably detained cherished an understandable resentment of Trudeau. Because some were journalists or other minor public figures with access to the media, they helped cultivate a legend of a kind of “Black October.”18 There was a predisposition to believe them—Canada was a liberal society, after all, and Trudeau’s actions, not to mention those of the terrorists, were definitely illiberal. Whereas once Trudeau had been the darling of English-Canadian intellectuals, their admiration for him after 1970 fragmented.

The passage of the October Crisis reminded Canadians that Quebec was unfinished business. The Trudeau government was working on a constitutional reform package that it hoped would command Quebec’s adherence while allowing all the provinces and the federal government to tie up loose ends on jurisdiction, create a process for constitutional amendment, and generally adapt the constitution to the needs of the late twentieth century. The federal government recognized what was already true, that the provinces had primacy in such fields as pensions and social policy. The provinces could participate in naming judges to the Supreme Court. There would be a limited charter of rights, applicable to all Canadians. There was an amending formula, which gave Ontario and Quebec, the two largest provinces, a veto over amendments. The use of French in the courts and provincial legislatures would be expanded. Bourassa agreed to all these points, and there was supposed to be a ceremonial agreement to a new Canadian Charter at a federal–provincial conference in Victoria in June 1971.

At the last moment, intimidated by protests at home in Quebec, Bourassa hesitated. He needed more time. With more time, his hesitations increased, and finally he refused to sign. It was not enough. What would have been enough? For the separatists, no agreement was the best agreement. For Quebec nationalists, an important component in Bourassa’s cabinet and in the provincial civil service, there was the fascination of making Canada truly “deux nations,” meaning that Quebec and the rest of Canada would negotiate d’égal à égal, equal to equal. There was also the desire to capture more and larger federal powers. As one separatist-leaning civil servant said to Jean Chrétien, then a junior minister in Trudeau’s cabinet, “We’ll separate from Canada the same way Canada separated from England: we’ll cut the links one at a time, a concession here and a concession there, and eventually there’ll be nothing left.”19 The Victoria Charter didn’t do that, and so was incompatible with their vision of an autonomous and powerful Quebec. Such a Quebec, linked more by treaty than by a democratic constitution, was impossible, as far as English Canada was concerned, and so the Victoria Charter died. The most important factor in the rejection of Victoria wasn’t constitutional at all, but fear—fear that Quebec’s French-speaking identity would be swamped by a wave of English.

Fear of English provided a parallel agenda for Quebec politics for the rest of the 1970s. Quebec governments had traditionally been laissez-faire on language matters: let the English do one thing, French Canadians another. English was the language of roughly 20 percent of the province’s population, or 888,000 people. It was true that, had English Quebeckers actually remained in the province, there would have been 700,000 more; but they did not. Thus the proportion of English speakers was actually maintained by immigrants from abroad. What was of more interest was the fact that the proportion of French speakers in Canada was declining, as well as Quebec’s share of the Canadian population. The internal balance in Quebec was less alarming than the province’s slowly diminishing weight in Canada—and it must not be forgotten that emigration did tend to reflect economic and other opportunities elsewhere.

The system worked well enough down to the 1960s—so well that when the political climate changed, many politicians and other public figures were caught by surprise. As late as 1969 the Union Nationale government of Jean-Jacques Bertrand, responding to language disturbances in a Montreal suburb, passed legislation reaffirming parents’ right to freedom of choice in language of education. The Liberal Bourassa, Bertrand’s successor, did not at first propose to change the habitual order of things, but under the pressure of linguistic fears, reinforced by the declining birth rate, the premier decided he must act.

The Liberals were uncomfortable about language. Removing freedom of choice, of use, in language was an illiberal act, and grated on some members of the cabinet. There was danger in irritating the party’s hitherto solid political support in the English-speaking community. Some Liberals may have thought that the fears stoked by Quebec’s linguistic nationalists were irrational if not chimerical. But if the government didn’t act, legally and officially, there might be unofficial action, illegal and violent. Bourassa put forward Bill 22, which stipulated that only children with a sufficient knowledge of English could be admitted to English-language schools.20 It also regulated the language of signs, encouraged the “francisation” of the workplace, and made French the only official language of Quebec. That was arguably its most important accomplishment, for it turned the English-speaking community from partners into a minority, psychologically. For a hundred years and more Quebec had been a bilingual province. Choice of language rested with the individual rather than the collectivity.²¹ That was no longer the case, and English-speaking citizens of the province took note of the fact.²²

Bill 22 was too much for the English, who made their disapproval manifest, and not enough for Quebec nationalists, who believed, as a separatist newspaper put it, that French speakers were being “dispossessed of their collective rights by a massively anglophone immigration.” Trudeau was embarrassed, but could do little to protect the English minority.

Language discontent wasn’t restricted to the provincial scene. Trudeau and his French-speaking colleagues from Quebec intended to demonstrate that the federal government and its institutions belonged to French speakers too. Something had to be done to counter the attraction of Quebec City as the “national” government of French Canadians (or as those inside the province increasingly called themselves, Québécois). Parliament therefore passed, in 1969, an Official Languages Act that greatly enhanced the position of French in government.²³ Many English-speaking civil servants found they must now learn French, both to communicate inside their departments and with the public at large, for the public now had a right to service in the two official languages. The Act also provided encouragement and funding to minority-language communities.²⁴

With Trudeau and a few influential Quebec ministers behind it, the Official Languages Act changed much in Ottawa’s official culture. It encouraged French-speaking civil servants and it had a positive political effect in Quebec during the 1970s. As events showed, language policy had a powerful influence over political attitudes inside Quebec, as federalists scrambled to put together a case for keeping the province inside Canada. They weren’t always successful, as events would show.

BOURASSA AND THE PQ

Politically, the 1970s were a time of missed opportunities. There was the opportunity afforded by the Liberal party holding power simultaneously in Quebec and Ottawa from 1970 to 1976. All federalists together, or so it seemed, it should have been easy for Ottawa and Quebec City, Pierre Trudeau and Robert Bourassa, to work out a deal or at least a strategy that would strengthen Canada and keep the separatists at bay. Instead, the Liberals lost power—or, perhaps better, power slipped from their grasp. Trudeau, as we have seen, gave way to Joe Clark and the Progressive Conservatives in Ottawa, part of the normal alternation of major parties that had characterized Canada since its foundation in 1867. Bourassa, however, lost to René Lévesque and the PQ in 1976, thereby plunging Canada into a prolonged political crisis that, thirty years later, had not ceased.

The times weren’t easy for any government in power. There was the oil crisis and the ramping up of petroleum prices. There was inflation and there was unemployment: the stagflation that plagued the Western world. In Quebec, it was the heyday of radicalism, as the old Roman Catholic Church relaxed its grip and new forms of worship arose. Marxism remained a fringe sect, its power and influence exaggerated by its popularity among university academics. Quebec wasn’t unique in this; what was unusual was the fervour with which Quebeckers embraced unions, radicalism, and labour all at the same time. Gone were the old practices that subordinated the largest union “central,” the Quebec Federation of Labour (QFL), to its parent, the Canadian Labour Congress; gone were some of the old forms, like the Canadian and Catholic Confederation of Labour of the 1950s, replaced by first the Confederation of National Trade Unions (CNTU) or Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux (CSN).

The union movement was inflated, as elsewhere in Canada, by an influx of previously unorganized workers from the public sector; and the public sector was in any case expanding. Given the emphasis placed by the Quiet Revolution on state action and state agencies, it wasn’t unnatural for Quebec labour organizations to favour socialism as the ultimate and most desirable form of government. In the rising climate of Quebec nationalism it seemed to follow automatically that Quebec socialists would also be Quebec separatists, and by the early 1970s the trade union leadership was urging its members to vote for the separatist party, the PQ.

But voting was not Quebec labour’s main concern. Like the radicals of 1919 they preached the gospel of confrontation, and the immediate target was the Quebec government, which was, after all, the employer of first or last resort for so many union members. In 1972 three union centrals, the QFL, the CSN, and the teachers’ corporation, went on strike simultaneously as a “common front,” defying the government to do its worst. For the first time in fifty years the words “general strike” were heard in the land.

The Bourassa government responded as governments usually do when confronted with an assertive parallel power: by demonstrating that legal authority still resided with the people duly elected to exercise it. The National Assembly legislated the workers back to work. When the unions defied the law, their three principal leaders went to jail. Dire consequences were threatened, and continued disruption. Disruption there certainly was: the common fronts reappeared in 1976, 1979, and 1982. Each time the response from government was the same. The difference was that in 1979 and 1982 the government wasn’t the class-enemy Liberals, but the very party the unions had supported in elections good and bad: the PQ.

The PQ had taken advantage of the slipping fortunes of the Bourassa Liberals. At first it seemed they wouldn’t slip very far, if at all. The government wasn’t a bad one, times were good, and the province was benefiting from a mega-project of the most spectacular kind, the Olympics of 1976. It naturally recalled Expo 67, and was meant to be the boost that the city of Montreal hoped for, and needed, for the metropolis’s economy was lagging, both absolutely and by comparison with rival Toronto. Part of the problem, economists told the federal government, was that Montreal didn’t have a big enough hinterland. Also symptomatic was that, even for some of the companies that kept their headquarters in the city, like the Bank of Montreal or the Royal Bank of Canada, many functions had been transferred to Toronto.

The Olympics was intended to mask if not reverse these trends, but it did not do so. Instead, the construction of grandiose Olympic facilities (including and especially an Olympic stadium) on a strict timeline became a nightmare for the city and its ambitious mayor Jean Drapeau. Drapeau told the press that the Olympics could no more have a deficit than a man could have a baby. Cartoonists by 1976 were having a field day depicting a visibly pregnant mayor on his way to the Olympics.25 A large part of the problem was the construction unions, which perceived that they could demand and get practically anything they wanted with the merest hint of a strike.²⁶ At one point even the mint making commemorative coins for the Olympics went on strike. Hinting at strikes in Canada in 1976 did not require much imagination;²⁷ the labour situation in Quebec in the mid-1970s was only a more extreme version of a trend across the country. “To hell with the public,” one postal union leader told a reporter.²⁸ The public took note.²⁹

Strikes—at the Olympics, in construction, in the Canadian Post Office—were endemic in the mid-1970s. And then the air traffic controllers struck too. Their issue was language. Until 1976 the language in the skies over Canada was English, as was the common practice internationally. The customary argument was that those using the crowded skies must use a common language, and of all languages English was the most widespread. In Canada, however, the use of language was political as well as practical, and a group of Quebec pilots and air traffic controllers demanded the right to use French at least some of the time over the province. The federal transport minister, Jean Marchand, agreed; the English-language pilots did not. The strike disrupted air traffic for a brief period, but it also quite successfully disrupted linguistic harmony in Canada.

Bourassa chose the moment to call a provincial election. He wasn’t quite three years into his five-year mandate, but he seems to have thought that if he waited he would only do worse. The government was beset by troubles, including charges of scandal, as well as problems of language in the schools and in the air, labour disorder, and an economy that wasn’t doing as well as people thought it should. Bourassa ran an ineffective campaign. As one of his ministers reflected years later, “Innuendoes and half-truths were used very skilfully; they played well in the media and thus created an image problem.”30 The Liberals were defeated in the election, with the lowest vote in their history, and the premier lost his own seat. Most notably, for the first time since 1939, the English-speaking community defected from the Liberals, in response to Bourassa’s language legislation. Bourassa, not for the last time, had seriously underestimated his ability to offend English Canadians. The separatist PQ, headed by René Lévesque, took power.

LE COMBAT DES CHEFS: TRUDEAU AND LÉVESQUE

English Canadians hadn’t been expecting a separatist government in Quebec, although for weeks before the election all reasonable signs had been pointing that way. Pierre Trudeau himself had recently reassured Canadians that separatism was dead, politically speaking. That was obviously not the case.

The immediate effect was to give the Trudeau government a new lease on life. Supporters urged the prime minister to call an election as soon as possible, but Trudeau hung back. He responded, instead, with a task force to investigate constitutional options and soundings of the provinces to see whether, collectively or singly, they would cooperate in a constitutional reform that might look well in Quebec without giving up any essential, as Trudeau saw it, federal power. None of these efforts bore fruit, and in the end Trudeau’s mandate expired before anything could be done. Defeated in the 1979 federal election, he prepared to retire from politics, only to be recalled to win the February 1980 election after Joe Clark’s unexpected defeat in the House of Commons the previous December. Trudeau’s Liberal majority in the House of Commons included, and depended upon, seventy-four out of seventy-five of the seats in Quebec—a fact that was not irrelevant to what would follow.

The separatists hadn’t been idle. Premier René Lévesque appointed a more than competent cabinet, reflecting the fact that many of the intelligentsia or near-intelligentsia in the province had already passed over into the separatist camp. His first order of priority was to pass a Charter of the French Language, Bill 1 of the new legislative session in 1977. (For largely—but not entirely—procedural reasons, it was renamed Bill 101, and it has passed down into history with that title.)31 The principal author of and driving force behind Bill 101 was Camille Laurin, whose sentiments it undoubtedly reflected. In terms of language, Laurin, a psychiatrist by profession, was a hardliner, believing that the province would not become “normal” until the abnormal notice given to English was removed.³²

In a White Paper that preceded the Charter, the public appearance of English in Quebec was called “difficult and embarrassing,” and Bill 101 did its best to expunge the embarrassment. English-language signs, with a few exceptions (for example, on churches), were banned. Bilingual signs, mandated under Bourassa’s barely cold language law, were also banned, though given time to disappear. Attendance at English schools in the province was made, effectively, hereditary to the descendants of people who had already attended such schools—and only to them. English-speaking immigrants from abroad, or from the rest of Canada, would have to take their schooling in French. Language tests were imposed for professional qualification, for example in nursing, which all defined professionals had to take, and pass. A compulsory process of “francisation” was instituted, under a language commission, which was given substantial powers of enforcement.

In the evolution of PQ language policy little regard had to be given to the sentiments of the English, outside or inside Quebec.33 Outside, there was the fact that French minorities had fewer opportunities in the matter of education than would remain to the English in Quebec, even after Bill 101. Inside Quebec, there was no realistic hope that the English would ever form part of the PQ majority.³⁴ (The first draft of the Charter of the French Language in fact defined “the Quebec people” as French-speaking.) It sufficed, in the minds of PQ militants, that the party represent a majority of the French-speaking citizens, and it was to that majority that Lévesque’s government spoke. Laurin even overrode the soft objections of his own premier, Lévesque, who would have preferred a less draconian language code; but Laurin knew his man and understood that Lévesque would not insist.³⁵

Bill 101 therefore went into effect pretty much as intended. The business community in Montreal took it badly, and one of Montreal’s most prominent companies, Sun Life Assurance, whose massive headquarters dominated the downtown, announced that it was moving to Toronto.³⁶ Its most obvious effect was on the school system. English-language schools in Quebec shrank, and shrank drastically: between 1975 and 1983 their enrolment dropped by 53 percent.³⁷ According to Statistics Canada figures, the English-speaking community in Quebec suffered a net loss to interprovincial migration of 50,000 from 1971 to 1976, 106,300 from 1976 to 1981, and 41,600 from 1981 to 1986.³⁸

The natural increase, as we have seen, was falling in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada—as it was across the Western world. Bill 101 solved one problem—it halted the spread of English in the province and answered the worries of Quebec nationalists. The English would adapt or depart. Many adapted—by the twenty-first century about 30 percent of the English-language community would be married to French speakers. The rate of bilingualism among English speakers soared. Only one thing was missing: a steady flow of immigrants to keep French-speaking Quebec topped up.

Demographers could now worry about something different. Quebec grew more slowly after 1970 than other parts of Canada. This did not greatly concern Quebec nationalists, fixated as they were on statistics that applied to the province only. Between 1971 and 2005, Quebec’s population grew from 6.14 million to 7.6 million, according to provincial statistics. More of them spoke French, absolutely and proportionately, than in times past. That was the good news. But if one in forty inhabitants of North America regularly used French in 1977, when the French-language charter was passed, one in fifty used it in 2001. In effect, the Charter guaranteed French-speaking Quebeckers a larger piece of a shrinking pie.

The PQ had got itself elected in 1976 only by denaturing its raison d’être, the quest for sovereignty. Indeed, the sovereignty aspect of its platform had always been heavily qualified, because Lévesque insisted on “sovereignty-association,” political independence combined with an economic union with the rest of Canada. For the 1976 election that was qualified some more: electing a PQ government wouldn’t immediately bring independence, but rather an eventual referendum on whether the province should negotiate sovereignty-association with Canada. Only if the negotiations didn’t happen or proved fruitless would the PQ government ask the ultimate question of whether the province should become independent. In the meantime, the PQ would show that it wasn’t just a bunch of impractical nationalist fanatics, but a sober and responsible government, worthy of being entrusted with independence.

Eventually, of course, the PQ had to keep its promise and hold a referendum; not to have done so would have destroyed its electoral base. The referendum was set for 20 May 1980.

By that point the government in Ottawa had once again changed hands. The Conservatives’ Joe Clark was gone, and Trudeau was back, and heading a powerful group of French-speaking ministers, especially Marc Lalonde in energy and Jean Chrétien in justice. Chrétien, with a deserved reputation as both an unqualified federalist and a powerful, folksy orator, became Trudeau’s point man for handling the referendum. There was never any question that Ottawa politicians would participate in the referendum. Trudeau as prime minister could hardly stand aside as the legitimacy of the federal government was brought into question. By the same token, however, the federal government accepted the legitimacy of the referendum; should Lévesque’s question pass, it would demonstrate that Ottawa could not command the allegiance of a majority of Quebeckers.

The nominal head of the federalist or “no” camp was the provincial Liberal leader Claude Ryan. Ryan was a Quebec nationalist as well as a Canadian—he believed he could and should be both. Trudeau, not a Quebec nationalist at all, was hardly Ryan’s soulmate. He believed in a strong central government that would direct the affairs of a country continually beset by centrifugal forces. As he saw it, Canada must be more than the sum of its parts, and the national prime minister more than a headwaiter for the provinces. Ryan had worked through a thoughtful program for a decentralized Canada in which Quebec would play a part; Trudeau thought the balance of powers just as it was had weakened the federal government and could barely hold the country together. Nevertheless, the awkward and angular Ryan came to the painful realization that without the charismatic and confrontational Trudeau he might not be able to carry the day against Lévesque. Yet though Trudeau dominated the campaign, his actual interventions were carefully husbanded.

The two sides in the referendum debate, the Non for the federalists and the Oui for the sovereignists, as the separatists called themselves, struck predictable chords. The separatist camp promised great things for an independent Quebec, free at last from English tutelage, condescension, and assimilation.39 The federalists painted Canada as a country that had stood the test of time, had protected the French language, and had become a secure economic haven. Quebeckers’ political and economic security would be at risk if Canada were disrupted. English Canadians at the time tended to believe that the economic argument would do the trick; certainly the premiers of the other nine provinces talked as if the economy alone—and its attributes, like federal subsidies to Quebec, a have-not province—would be a winning argument. Little did they understand that separatist supporters believed that Quebec would be better off economically if it became independent. Quebec, in their opinion, was the goose that laid the golden eggs for Canadian federalism.40

Trudeau appealed, instead, to a sense of common purpose, to pride in Canada, and to confidence that Canada’s constitution could and would be reformed. (He also appealed to the fact that his prestige in Quebec outweighed Lévesque’s: according to a witticism at the time, Trudeau was what Quebeckers would like to be, while Lévesque was what they actually were.)⁴¹ He promised as much in a speech in Montreal. To separatists and Quebec nationalists generally, constitutional reform should only mean devolution, giving the province more powers if not all powers. Trudeau meant no such thing, but he didn’t clarify his meaning.⁴² As a result, when the Non side won, as it did by a sixty–forty margin (and a majority of French speakers), Trudeau was expected to follow through on reforming the constitution—a promise he hadn’t made. Since he didn’t do so, he was ever after considered—by the nationalists—to be a trickster who had deceived the Quebec people. In his concession speech, Lévesque ungraciously claimed that the Non side hadn’t played fair, which also bolstered the nationalist legend that separatism’s defeat was somehow illegitimate.

Yet there was, for the time being, no question that the outcome was binding. Exhausted, Quebeckers looked to Ottawa for the next round in Canada’s constitutional saga. “Lévesque was a political eunuch,” a Western premier observed. “It was up to the rest of us to take on Trudeau.”⁴³ What would follow was up to Trudeau, the victor.

TRUDEAU’S CONSTITUTION

Had Pierre Trudeau left office for the last time in 1979, he would be remembered as an interesting but unsuccessful prime minister, his time in office a bridge between the liberalism of the 1960s and the neo-conservativism of the 1980s. He would have been a disappointment, rather like John Diefenbaker in his failure to seize the moment and change the country for the better. Yet thanks to a series of political accidents—Joe Clark’s failure to obtain a parliamentary majority in the 1979 election, and his subsequent political misfortunes—Trudeau got that rarest of commodities, a second chance in politics, like Sir John Macdonald in 1878 and Mackenzie King in 1935. Macdonald and King were remembered among Canada’s great prime ministers; would Trudeau be the same?

This time, Trudeau determined, he would not become a prisoner of process. He would not make concessions to local or provincial interests— he’d tried that in the 1970s, and it had only stimulated an appetite for more.44 He would leave his mark on the country by reshaping the constitution, and thereby solve the Quebec problem once and for all. He would also, incidentally, preserve Canada by entrenching the powers of the federal government.

Trudeau’s constitutional ideas were well known. He wanted to bring the power to amend the constitution to Canada from Britain, where it had been becalmed since 1931. (This was called repatriation, which strictly speaking it was not, since the power to amend had never resided in Canada.)⁴⁵ He wanted a charter of rights, rather like the American bill of rights, empowering individuals by defining and defending their freedoms. He would achieve Henri Bourassa’s dream of a new and better Canada by entrenching bilingualism from coast to coast—including Quebec.

Constitutional amendments in Canada involved the provinces, whose consent was traditionally sought for any change that might affect provincial powers. Once a package was agreed to, as with unemployment insurance in 1941, the federal government would forward the agreement to its British counterpart, which would then introduce to the British Parliament an amendment to the British North America Act.

In the summer of 1980 Trudeau followed the customary procedure, sending his justice minister, Chrétien, to the provincial capitals to secure unanimous consent to the repatriation of the constitution, plus a charter of rights. But, just as Trudeau had discovered in the 1970s, Chrétien found that an agreement wasn’t possible without concessions to every province. This became obvious when the premiers gathered in Ottawa in September 1980 and, before the television cameras, made it clear that in no reasonable way could Trudeau get what he wanted.

There was another way, laid down in a federal strategy paper that had been leaked to the press during the summer. Assuming that the provinces were incapable of agreeing to a constitutional deal, it advised Trudeau to manoeuvre the premiers toward a spectacular failure, demonstrating that they were collectively unfit to manage the nation’s business. Trudeau should simply disregard the premiers and proceed with his constitutional amendments, passing them through Parliament and forwarding them to London without provincial consent. It was a daring gamble. It assumed that most Canadians’ primary allegiance was as individuals to Canada, and that their identity was not divided or mediated through the provinces.46 Trudeau would thus directly challenge the notion that the Quebec “nation” found primary expression through the provincial government in Quebec City, but would challenge as well all the other regional and provincial claims to primacy.

Trudeau proceeded to do exactly that. He produced draft amendments for consideration by Parliament, and during committee hearings the legislation was substantially amended to reflect concerns from women’s groups, civil libertarians, and minority groups.⁴⁷ He brought on side two out of the ten premiers, the politically astute Bill Davis of Ontario and the unusually intelligent Richard Hatfield of New Brunswick. Both were Progressive Conservatives, which wasn’t surprising: there were no Liberal governments left in the provinces. The most obdurate in opposition were the governments of Newfoundland, Quebec, Manitoba, and Alberta; with the other four provinces they made up “the Gang of Eight.” They immediately referred the constitutional amendments to three provincial courts of appeal. Eventually, the Supreme Court took up the case, and rendered its decision in September 1981.

The decision was confusing. Custom, the justices ruled, supported the provinces’ contention that the constitution could not be amended without their consent. But legally, Trudeau was within his rights. He could proceed to take his amendments to London for final passage—if he dared. That he would dare seemed a safe bet until Bill Davis let Trudeau know that a compromise of some sort was necessary; failing that, Ontario and New Brunswick would withdraw their support for the federal position, and that might well fatally affect the prospects of getting the amendments through the British Parliament. A federal–provincial conference was about to meet in Ottawa, in November 1981. It was time to see what federal–provincial diplomacy could do.

The Gang of Eight was less solid than it appeared. Several governments were wavering, especially Saskatchewan’s, and there was a division between René Lévesque and the others. Lévesque had an interest in seeing negotiations fail; the other premiers, in the final analysis, did not. There was always the possibility that Trudeau was right, and that the citizens of the various provinces would support Ottawa’s cause over that of the provinces. At the very least there would be a bruising fight.

Trudeau led in the formal conference, smoothly outmanoeuvring René Lévesque by openly putting the Quebec premier at odds with his colleagues; Chrétien handled negotiations behind the scenes.48 Working with Roy McMurtry and Roy Romanow, the attorneys general of Ontario and Saskatchewan respectively, he secretly worked out a deal that satisfied seven members of the Gang of Eight. Only one member of the gang didn’t know what was going on: René Lévesque. The next day, Lévesque was the conspicuous exception to the universal chorus of acclaim for the new constitutional package. In Quebec, many saw this fact as yet another betrayal—a “Night of the Long Knives,” to use the common term.

The constitutional compromise of November 1981 gave everybody a bit of what they wanted. Trudeau got the most—there would be a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, largely along lines he had laid down, and the power to amend the constitution would be transferred to Canada. The Charter would allow Canadians everywhere in the country access to education in English or French—though the same stipulation did not apply to immigrants. Bill 101 was thereby modified.

On the one hand, the formula for amending the constitution was the one devised by the dissenting provinces, a complicated and layered series of consents that would make future amendments very difficult to achieve. On the other hand, no province, however large (like Ontario) or however unique (meaning Quebec), had a singular veto over future amendments. Lévesque had actually conceded the point when he signed on to the provincial amending formula. Finally, there was a unique clause designed to appease believers in the old British tradition of parliamentary supremacy, which had hitherto obtained in Canada. (The main advocate of parliamentary supremacy was the very Conservative premier of Manitoba, Sterling Lyon.) Parliaments and legislatures had always been free to legislate on whatever they chose. If in the future Parliament or a provincial legislature wished to pass a law that contradicted the Charter of Rights, they could still do so, using what was called the “notwithstanding” clause. Use of that clause had to be specific, and it had to be renewed every five years. There was some thought that a government wouldn’t wish to suffer the embarrassment of admitting that it was violating a right or freedom ordinarily enjoyed by Canadians.

Agreement by and with the provinces—or nine of them—wasn’t quite the end of the story. Trudeau had to get the constitution past the British Parliament, and in the end the British Parliament did what it was asked to do, and the constitution passed. It was formally signed by Elizabeth II in a ceremony on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on a rainy 17 April 1982, with a very pleased Pierre Trudeau looking on.

WHAT DID TRUDEAU ACCOMPLISH?

The Canadian constitution with a Charter of Rights and an amending formula was Trudeau’s main achievement as prime minister. From his point of view it was probably the Charter of Rights that made the exercise worthwhile. The amending formula was desirable, as signifying the completion of Canada’s sovereignty, but it was hardly crucial. Writing back in the 1960s, Trudeau had argued that the constitution with its existing division of powers between Ottawa and the provinces was satisfactory as it stood. Quebec in particular had all the powers it needed.

Trudeau had no patience with the nostrums and “traditional demands” developed by Quebec governments between the 1960s and the 1980s. Canada was not “deux nations,” Quebec and the rest, with coequal status. He was equally allergic to “special status,” which has also caused some confusion among commentators. It was true that Quebec had legal attributes that were different from other provinces, such as its civil code, or the official use of the French and English languages in its legislature and courts. But “special status,” as it was understood in the 1960s and after, meant that Quebec should receive more powers than other provinces, a halfway house on the road to “deux nations” and Daniel Johnson senior’s notion of “equality or independence.” Trudeau understood the game very well, along with the special interpretation of Canada’s history that went with “special status.” It was a game he was not prepared to play.

Canada was not the sum of its provinces either. The federal government had to have the power and the ability to be a national government, by and for the Canadian nation. To that end, Trudeau tried to hold the line on devolution of power to the provinces; admittedly, as his critics have pointed out, during the 1970s he was prepared to consider concessions to provincial demands.

This doesn’t suggest that Trudeau’s thoughts on the constitution were contradictory or his behaviour necessarily opportunistic and unprincipled; if anything it was a barometer of his commitment to a process of negotiation and compromise. That process ended with the election of 1980. A transfer of significant power to the provinces, Trudeau had learned, only stimulated a provincial appetite for more power and more money, each successive settlement a platform for another, higher set of demands. Convinced that concessions to the provinces were a mug’s game, Trudeau returned to the status quo in terms of the distribution of powers in the final constitutional negotiations of 1980–82.

Trudeau and the Liberals did not prosper after the constitutional triumph of 1982. In 1984 Trudeau retired, and his party was heavily defeated in the subsequent September 1984 election. Of the seventy-four Liberal seats in Quebec in the 1980 election, only seventeen survived. It was a judgment, of a kind, on Trudeau’s performance in office, but in an election no single issue is usually dominant. The Liberals did even worse elsewhere in Canada than in Quebec—especially in Ontario, where their percentage of the popular vote was even lower. There had been inflation, sky-high interest rates, and the worst recession since the Second World War. The government had provoked Alberta, the business community, and the traditional right wing.

Trudeau would be remembered for many things. “He haunts us still,” two of his biographers wrote in 1990.49 Like his fictional hero, Cyrano de Bergerac, Trudeau’s panache, his cold magnetism, defined him in people’s memories. The Charter of Rights became part of Canadians’ self-definition. A poll in 2003, three years after his death, called him “transformational”; in the opaque language of the social sciences, this is a high compliment.⁵⁰ He stuck in people’s memory; his death and funeral stirred emotions, mostly positive.⁵¹

And yet, as James Marsh noted, when Trudeau died the headline in La Presse, Quebec’s largest newspaper, read, “The Hero of English Canada.”⁵² Trudeau’s reputation in his own province had always been fraught with contradiction. The longest-serving French-Canadian prime minister, the man who swept the province in 1980 and defeated its popular premier in a referendum, was at first judged unelectable in any French-Canadian constituency, and was exiled to the riding of Mount Royal, the safest English seat in Quebec, where he remained from 1965 until 1984.

Trudeau consciously—some would say self-consciously—swam against the current, and never more so than in Quebec. An intellectual, Trudeau was usually in the minority among intellectuals—in French as well as English Canada. As French-speaking intellectuals veered toward nationalism and then separatism in the 1960s, Trudeau proceeded in the opposite direction. It may be that fact that explains both the power and the fragility of his achievement. It may explain why the ultimately hapless René Lévesque remained a more popular and evocative figure in Quebec.