Pierre Elliott Trudeau (16 page)

Trudeau very briefly played the ruling as a victory, though apparently he had had an agreement all along with B.C. premier Bill Bennett to return to the table in the event of a mixed decision. Political scientist Peter Russell called the judgment “questionable jurisprudence” but “bold statecraft”: by balancing the federal government’s legal rights against the provinces’ political ones, the court was essentially ensuring that the only prudent course for all parties was to return to the negotiating table. Trudeau’s opponents were quick to point out that “convention” was not such a small matter in the Canadian system. The office of prime minister, for instance, was a matter of convention, as was another
major underpinning of Canadian democracy, the five-year limit on a government’s term in office. In any event, by the time of the ruling Margaret Thatcher had already begun to backtrack on the promise of easy patriation, after a slew of provincial delegations had passed through London denouncing Trudeau’s plan.

In November 1981, Trudeau and the ten provincial premiers met at the old Ottawa train station, now converted to the National Conference Centre, to try to hammer out a deal. In the opening parry the Gang of Eight, ostensibly still holding solid, presented their Charterless alternative package as if it were a
fait accompli
. Trudeau would later claim that the package clearly showed Lévesque was negotiating in bad faith, since it contained an amending formula that gave up the veto Quebec had traditionally considered non-negotiable. Abandoning the constitutional veto amounted to accepting the principle of provincial equality that had always been anathema to Quebec nationalists. The compromise, in Trudeau’s view, could only mean Lévesque had no intention of signing a deal and that his sole purpose was “to keep the Gang of Eight intact to thwart me.”

Clarkson and McCall, however, gave a different view in
Trudeau and Our Times.
The new amending formula had been cobbled together by the English members of the Gang
of Eight back while Lévesque had been busy with his election. Rather than a veto, it offered a clause that would allow Quebec—though also every other province—to opt out, with compensation, of national programs that encroached on provincial jurisdictions. According to Clarkson and McCall, Lévesque was pressured into flying to Ottawa for a late-night session with the other premiers just three days after his election victory, where he agreed to the new formula without having thought through its implications. It was not the first time Lévesque had made that sort of impulsive error, sometimes with grave consequences. The previous year, he made what might have been a fatal one with regard to the timing of the referendum. It had always been agreed within the party that a referendum campaign shouldn’t overlap with a federal election, because people’s loyalties would be divided; when Clark’s Tories fell and Trudeau was suddenly crisscrossing the province again on the campaign trail and packing assembly halls, the assumption was that the referendum that had been set for that spring would be postponed. But when Claude Ryan rose up in Quebec’s National Assembly to ask if the referendum would proceed as planned, Lévesque, to his party’s horror, announced that it would. For the Parti Québécois, it was a first strike against their once-steadfast leader. His agreement
to the new amending formula was a second one; the third was shortly to come.

Essentially, then, Trudeau was right in his analysis, even if for the wrong reasons: Lévesque could not sign an agreement that gave him no veto. Quebec thus went into the talks with its hands so severely tied that the talks’ failure would have been practically the only acceptable outcome. For that outcome, however, Quebec was entirely dependent on the solidarity of the Gang of Eight. Lévesque had initially signed on with the group simply as a stratagem, to defeat what he called, using a term he knew would be especially laden for Trudeau, an “authoritarian” view of federalism. But the Supreme Court decision, which had made reference to the convention of “substantial” rather than unanimous provincial agreement, had in fact completely changed the rules of negotiation: no longer could Quebec play the spoiler against the rest, as it had in 1971. Even though the Supreme Court had claimed no jurisdiction in the area of convention, its ruling on the matter would prove crucial. Essentially it had argued that the veto Quebec had traditionally assumed, in fact, by “convention,” didn’t really exist.

The glue that bound the members of the Gang of Eight was their common resistance to Trudeau’s Charter. They objected in general to the limitations a charter would place
on provincial power by giving the courts a much broader say in many areas of provincial jurisdiction, and they objected specifically to some of the clauses that were especially dear to Trudeau, in particular the entrenchment of minority language rights. This was a hot-button issue in the West, where both anti-Trudeau and anti-French sentiment were running high at the time. But for Lévesque, the issue was a deal breaker. In Quebec, minority rights meant English rights. Entrenching minority language rights would have repercussions across a whole range of powers that Quebec saw as central to the defence of its culture, most notably the coveted
loi 101,
which under the Parti Québécois had firmly entrenched French as the province’s sole official language and had ushered in a wide array of language reforms. Quebec nationalists had little faith in Trudeau’s vision of a bilingual country, convinced their French-Canadian brethren outside Quebec were doomed to extinction. They had thus found themselves in the peculiar situation of having common cause with those anglophone provinces where bilingualism had become a symbol of federalist tyranny.

From the outset of the November negotiations, however, rifts began to appear in the coalition. Roy Romanow, the Attorney General of Saskatchewan and a born conciliator,
was seen making asides to federal negotiator Jean Chrétien. An air of mutual distrust began to arise between the anglophone premiers and Lévesque, who felt that there was much more at stake for him than for the others and that issues that were central to Quebec were just a matter of horse-trading for the anglophones. Daniel Latouche, one of Lévesque’s advisers, described the other premiers as “a bunch of Kiwanis presidents,” ready to make a deal for a promise of money or a new factory. For two days the coalition held firm, but on the third day, in the suite at the Château Laurier where the Gang of Eight gathered every morning to discuss strategy, Saskatchewan premier Allan Blakeney presented a new compromise proposal that his people had obviously been working out for some time. It offered no veto for Quebec and no provision for opting out of federal programs. Lévesque was livid. It seemed the anglophones were trying to take away, bit by bit, everything that mattered to Quebec. The coalition was cracking.

Over the previous days, Trudeau had merely listened to the premiers’ proposals and rejected them one by one. He would later say his strategy had been “to make a certain number of concessions” that would split the ranks of the Gang of Eight, but he had yet to offer any. Then on the third day, he declared that the talks were at an impasse. He had a
proposal, however: that they bring the British North America Act home as it was, then put the premiers’ constitutional package next to his own and let the public choose between the two in a referendum vote.

The idea was one he had borrowed from himself. Trudeau had always included a referendum clause of this sort in his own reform packages, as a way of allowing the public to break any future constitutional deadlocks. His strategy in proposing the idea now was spur of the moment, he later implied, yet he knew that the English premiers despised referendums, while the separatists were great promoters of them.

At the table, none of the anglophones took the bait. But then Trudeau, in his version of events, put the question to Lévesque during the coffee break.

“Surely a great democrat like yourself won’t be against a referendum?” he said, no doubt a response to Lévesque’s jibe about his “authoritarian” federalism. In Clarkson and McCall’s account of the exchange, Trudeau went on to taunt Lévesque like a schoolyard bully. “You’re the great believer in referendums.
You
can’t be opposed to one.… Or are you afraid to take me on?”

As he had with Claude Ryan the year before, Lévesque, in Trudeau’s words, “rose to the bait. I think he answered instinctively, without remembering that he was in the Gang
of Eight, and said: ‘Well, I can buy that.’ I think he had in mind that this would be his chance to avenge his loss in the 1980 referendum, because I remember him saying, ‘I would like to fight the charter.’”

It was Lévesque’s third strike. He had broken the common front. Even his own team didn’t realize at first what he had done, making jubilant phone calls back to Quebec City while Trudeau, who had either been lucky, or brilliant, or utterly Machiavellian, deadpanned to reporters: “We have a new alliance, between the Quebec government and the Canadian government.” But then he added with a mischievous smile, “And the cat is among the pigeons.”

Canadian history since then has rested, perhaps, on that single Lévesque gaffe. That afternoon, as the federal team began to suggest the terms of a referendum, which Lévesque said looked like they were “written in Chinese,” it grew clear to the Quebec team that Lévesque had made a fatal misstep. The backroom negotiations started even before the premiers had broken for the day, up in a fifth-floor kitchen of the conference centre, where the
p’tit gars de Shawinigan
and the two Roys, Saskatchewan’s Roy Romanow and Ontario Attorney General Roy McMurtry, were already cobbling together the first draft of what would come to be known as the Kitchen Accord. In fact, Chrétien and the Roys had been
working out a counterdeal ever since the Supreme Court decision had come down, waiting for the moment to try to push it through. They got it when Lévesque unexpectedly broke ranks with the Gang of Eight.

Chrétien and his assistants worked through the night, making calls to the anglophone premiers at their Ottawa hotels and meeting with members of the provincial delegations in the Saskatchewan suite of the Château Laurier. By dint of trade-offs and concessions and tinkering with clauses and codicils, they managed by morning to bring on board all seven of the anglophone members of the Gang of Eight. Lévesque, meanwhile, staying over in Hull, was never called.

OF THE HEADS OF GOVERNMENT
who ended up signing the accord on November 5, 1981, sixteen years to the day since Trudeau was first elected to Parliament, the last holdout was Trudeau himself. He would later do what he claimed never to do: express regret, seeming genuinely disappointed at some of the concessions he was talked into in the final hours of negotiation. It was in these frenzied late-night discussions that the infamous “notwithstanding” clause entered the agreement, as a swap for minority-language education rights. To Trudeau, the clause risked making his Charter into a farce. Meanwhile, the provision for a referendum in the
event of a federal–provincial deadlock had been removed. Trudeau insisted he would rather return to his original plan of unilateral patriation and a referendum, even though one of his only two provincial allies, Richard Hatfield, had made clear he now opposed the idea.

Then late in the night Trudeau got a call from Bill Davis. If Trudeau passed up the deal, Davis said, he would be on his own. It was Davis who tipped the balance. Trudeau knew that with not a single province behind him, his chances at Westminster, in the face of the Supreme Court decision, would be extremely slim.

When news of the accord was made public, the tone in English Canada was one of cautious approval. A CBC report that followed the signing had a celebratory air, with the fact of Lévesque’s exclusion tacked on toward the end, as if it were merely a sad but predictable footnote. “Once again,” Lévesque said, “Quebec is where it always has been, alone,” coming across a bit like Malvolio shaking his fist and vowing revenge amidst the general merriment at the end of
Twelfth Night
. The news report raised no question of Trudeau’s promise at the Paul Sauvé Arena or of how an accord that actually reduced Quebec’s powers could constitute a fulfillment of it. And while Trudeau expressed sadness that Quebec had not signed and he promised to work “in the
coming weeks” to bring Quebec into the final package, he didn’t, on this matter, express regret.

The tone of approval in English Canada had much to do with the fact that Trudeau the Intransigent had finally, like a good Canadian, made some concessions. An editorial in
The Globe and Mail
called the deal “A set of compromises in the true Canadian tradition. Every first minister has given up something dear to him. Mr. Trudeau has given up much.” But then the piece went on, somewhat astoundingly, to praise Trudeau for burying the French question.

Perhaps most important, he has diminished the importance of Mr. Levesque’s [sic] opposition, by being himself a French-Canadian Prime Minister, who had more Quebeckers behind him in his last election than had Mr. Levesque [sic]. This fight was not, though Mr. Levesque [sic] strove to present it as such, a French-English fight.

The comment was typical not only of the flawed understanding of Quebec politics in English Canada—the facts suggested that Quebecers had re-elected Lévesque exactly because they wanted him at the constitutional table—but of the general feeling that Lévesque had merely got what he deserved. Again, Trudeau’s promise of change had been
forgotten. For most English Canadians, in fact, the fine print of the deal was of little interest. What seemed more important at the time was less the substance of the deal than its symbolism: after a hundred and fourteen years, Canada, at last, had brought the constitution home. Back at the failed Victoria Conference of 1971, Trudeau had bemoaned what he said was “the last remnant of a condition that is not worthy of Canada as a free and independent country,” namely that it could not amend its own constitution. He had changed that. He had pulled the sword from the stone. Many Canadians must have wondered why it had taken so long.